Obama Reluctant to Toughen Stance on Iran

WASHINGTON — With Iran on a razor’s edge after a week of swelling protests, the Obama administration has fended off pressure from both parties to respond more forcefully to the disputed election there. But if Iranian authorities carry out their latest threat of a more sweeping crackdown, the White House would reconsider its carefully calibrated tone, officials said Friday.
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Administration officials said events this weekend in Tehran — when demonstrators plan to rally in defiance of the authorities — would be a telling indicator of whether President Obama would join European leaders and lawmakers on Capitol Hill in more harshly condemning the tactics of the Iranian government.

Congressional Republicans and conservative foreign-policy experts stepped up their pressure on the White House to take a firmer stand in support of the demonstrators, even as Mr. Obama worked to keep Democrats from breaking openly with him on Iran.

For now, administration officials said they had not been swayed by criticism that Mr. Obama’s refusal to speak out more had broken faith with democracy advocates in Tehran, or by the fact that European leaders and even members of his own party in Congress had responded more assertively than he had.

In an interview with CBS News on Friday, Mr. Obama spoke cautiously about warnings by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, of bloodshed if the protests go on. “I’m very concerned, based on some of the tenor and tone of the statements that have been made, that the government of Iran recognize that the world is watching,” Mr. Obama said.

Mr. Obama, officials said, was determined to react to events as they unfold, rather than make statements that might play well politically but hinder his longer-term foreign-policy goals. The administration still hopes to pursue diplomatic engagement with Iran on its nuclear program.

Still, one senior official acknowledged that a bloody crackdown would scramble the administration’s calculations. The shadow of Tiananmen Square — in which Chinese tanks and troops crushed a flowering democracy movement in Beijing — has hung over the White House this week.

Mr. Obama continued to face pressure at home not to miss an opportunity to align the United States with a potentially historic shift in Iran. On Friday, both houses of Congress threw full support behind the rights of protesters to challenge the election results. In the House, lawmakers voted 405 to 1 to adopt a nonbinding resolution condemning the violence against demonstrators. The Senate passed a similar resolution later in the day.

“This resolution is not about American interests,” said Representative Howard L. Berman, a California Democrat who is the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “It’s about American values, which I believe are universal values: the values of the rule of law; of participatory democracy; about individual liberty and about justice.”

The resolution, though firm, was softened after negotiations between Mr. Berman and the chairman of the House Republican Conference, Representative Mike Pence of Indiana, who was pushing for a tougher rebuke of the Iranian government. Democrats were aware of White House concerns about statements that could open the United States to charges of interference, and administration officials said the resolution largely echoed Mr. Obama’s public comments. “My guiding principle on this resolution was, Do no harm,” Mr. Berman said in a telephone interview.

While he said the United States was not taking sides, other lawmakers were. Representative Bob Inglis, Republican of South Carolina, said the election had clearly been fraudulent. “Rigged elections don’t produce outcomes that people can believe in,” he said. “We the people of the United States should stand boldly with the people in Tehran and elsewhere in Iran who are saying, ‘We yearn to breathe free,’ who want to govern themselves; this is their moment.”

The European Union also took a markedly tougher line than Mr. Obama, issuing a statement condemning the violence that resulted in loss of life. The union’s 27 national leaders also “condemned the crackdown against journalists, media outlets, communications and protesters,” which they said were “in contrast to the relatively open and encouraging period in the run-up to the election.”

Speaking afterward, Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain said: “It is for Iran now to show the world that the elections are fair. It is also the wish of the world that the repression and the brutality that we have seen in the last few days is not something that is going to be repeated.”

The Obama administration has resisted such language, worrying that full-throated American backing for the protesters would harm their cause by making them more susceptible to being labeled by Iranian officials as tools of Washington. Administration officials note that their muted response has not prevented the turnout at protests from growing by the day.

Mr. Obama has won support from across party lines. Henry A. Kissinger, the former secretary of state, said on Fox News: “I think the president has handled this well. Anything that the United States says that puts us totally behind one of the contenders, behind Moussavi, would be a handicap for that person,” he said. Mir Hussein Moussavi is the main challenger to the declared victor, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Some experts on Iran say a stronger United States response could provoke a violent backlash.

“If we overtly take sides, the regime could well react with a massive and bloody crackdown on the demonstrators using the pretext that they are acting against an American-led coup,” said Karim Sadgadpour, an Iranian expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

The United States, he said, should quietly lobby other countries, from Turkey and India to France and Japan, to press Tehran about human rights abuses and the fairness of the election. It is not clear if the United States has done that, but a senior official said the White House understood if “our allies choose to lean in a different direction.”

Mr. Obama’s cautious approach, officials said, was also driven by a belief that Iran is unlikely to loosen its commitment to its nuclear program, regardless of who ends up in the president’s office. The ultimate authority over that, they note, resides with Ayatollah Khamenei.

Yet some Iran experts argue that the administration may soon have to re-evaluate its view of the supreme leader, who they say has been tarnished by his erratic response to the tumult in Tehran.

“If Ahmadinejad survives, it will be on the back of a Tiananmen-style crackdown,” said Abbas Milani, the director of Iranian studies at Stanford University. “If Moussavi prevails, it will be on a wave of reformist sentiment.”

David M. Herszenhorn contributed reporting from Washington, and Stephen Castle from Brussels.