"This should not be our policy, and I regret the fact that I did not
read this resolution more carefully," House Financial Services Committee
chairman Rep. Barney Frank, a co-sponsor of the resolution, said.
Lobbyists opposing the resolution included pro-Iranian activists who asserted that the resolution could
lead to a U.S. war against Iran.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) strongly supported Resolution 362.
Congressional sources said the defeat of the resolution marked
increasing American reluctance to confront Iran. The sources said opposition
could increase amid the global credit crisis.
"The next president needs to reorient U.S. policy toward Iran as
fundamentally as President Nixon did with China in the 1970s," former
National Security Council official Flynt Leverett said.
Leverett published a study with his wife, Hillary Mann, that argued that
Washington's policy against Iran has ended up hurting U.S. interests. He
called on the next U.S. administration to reach a "grand bargain" with
Teheran.
"Pursuing a U.S.-Iranian grand bargain should start with the definition
of a strategic framework for improving relations between the United States
and the Islamic Republic," the study said. "Iran's security interests,
including extending U.S. security assurances to the Islamic republic,
lifting unilateral U.S. and multilateral sanctions against Iran, and
acknowledging the Islamic Republic's place in the regional and international
order."
The study came amid reports that Iran was accelerating its nuclear
weapons program. The International Atomic Energy Agency has been
investigating reports that a Russian scientist was helping Iran develop
methods of detonating a nuclear warhead.
"The next [U.S.] president will inherit an American policy in profound
disarray," Ilan Berman, a leading U.S. strategist, wrote in the Journal of
International Security Affairs. "For all of its talk to the contrary, the
Bush administration now gives every indication of leaving office without
having taken resolute action to prevent the emergence of an atomic Iran."
