Two weeks after making major concessions for a nuclear accord with North Korea, the Bush administration said on Tuesday it was prepared to sit down with Iran and Syria as part of a regional conference to stabilise Iraq.

In testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, widely considered the leader of the “realist” faction within the administration, announced that Washington will join a “neighbours’ meeting”, convened by Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and scheduled for the first half of March, to be followed by ministerial talks one month later which she would attend.

“We hope that all governments will seize this opportunity to improve (their) relations with Iraq and to work for peace and stability in the region,” she said.

She also described the proposed regional talks that would explicitly embrace Iran and Syria as consistent with a key recommendation last December of the Iraq Study Group (ISG), a bipartisan task force co-chaired by former Secretary of State James Baker and former Democratic Rep. Lee Hamilton. Talks, according to Rice, will also include members of the UN Security Council and possibly the Group of Eight.

The statements came amid growing public and Congressional concern about the administration’s intentions toward Iran, particularly in light of its recent deployment of two aircraft carrier groups to the Gulf and charges by Bush and other senior officials that Tehran is secretly providing deadly explosive devices to its allies in Iraq.

A number of analysts have told reporters they believe the administration may be trying to provoke an incident that would provide a pretext for Washington to launch attacks on Iran’s suspected nuclear sites and other targets as early as next month as a way of both setting back Tehran’s nuclear programme and limiting its ability to retaliate against the US or its regional allies. Such speculation has however been denied by senior officials.

At the same time, Democrats as well as some influential Republicans have been pressing hard on the administration to embrace the ISG recommendation for direct talks with Iran and Syria to help stabilise Iraq and thus permit Washington to begin extracting its troops from what most analysts and a large majority of the public has come to see as a quagmire.

Any diplomatic engagement with Iran, however, has been strongly opposed by administration hawks, as well as their mainly neo-conservative supporters. But the hawks suffered a major defeat over the past month when, at Rice’s behest, Bush authorised direct bilateral talks between the US and North Korea for the first time and then signed off on a multilateral accord whereby Pyongyang agreed to shut down its main nuclear facility and permit the return of inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency in exchange for economic aid and lifting of some sanctions.

The question now is whether Rice’s ostentatious endorsement of the ISG’s call for engaging Iran marks a strategic shift that could reverse the recent trajectory toward confrontation with Tehran, or whether it represents a mere tactical manoeuvre designed to soothe an increasingly anxious Congress and pre-empt any move on its part to rein in the administration. — IPS