By Glenn Kessler
During last Thursday's vice presidential debate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin appeared to break with the Bush administration's current policy on Iran: "Now a leader like [Iranian leader Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad who is not sane or stable when he says things like that is not one whom we can allow to acquire nuclear energy, nuclear weapons."
From Palin's statement, it wasn't clear if she meant Iran cannot have nuclear energy and nuclear weapons, or if she was simply correcting herself, replacing "nuclear weapons" after first mistakenly saying "nuclear energy."
But Randy Scheunemann, foreign policy director for the McCain-Palin campaign, said in an e-mail that Palin "stated Sen. McCain's and her position accurately" when she said Iran should also not have access to nuclear energy.
"There is no circumstance under which the international community could be confident that uranium enrichment or plutonium production activities undertaken by the current government of Iran are purely for peaceful purposes," Scheunemann said. "Given the Iranian regime's history of deception with regard to its nuclear program, its continuing lack of cooperation with the IAEA, its still unacknowledged work on weaponization, its defiance of international norms with regard to support for terrorism and threats toward Israel, and the lack of any serious economic justification for the program in the first place, Iran has forfeited any plausible claim to be pursuing a 'peaceful' nuclear energy program."
Scheunemann's comments seem to place McCain and Palin to the right of current Bush policy, suggesting that an incoming Republican administration would revert to the position taken during Bush's first term, when the president and his aides were scornful of Iran's quest for nuclear energy.
In 2005, during Bush's second term, the administration made an important shift in its position, largely at the request of European allies. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced that Iran had a right to nuclear energy -- just not control over the fuel cycle that might allow for the diversion of nuclear material to a weapons program.
"Iran can have civil nuclear energy, if that's what they want," Rice explained in an interview last week. "We have talked with the Europeans about even some of the most advanced civil nuclear technology to Iran if it will forgo enrichment and reprocessing. So this is not an issue of denying Iran certain technologies. There's plenty in this for Iran."
Scheunemann, in his e-mail, did hint at some flexibility on the question of nuclear power for Iran. "The simple fact is that Iran does not need to be able to produce nuclear fuel in Iran; there is no reason it cannot rely on an International Uranium Enrichment Center (IUEC) along the lines that Russia has proposed, or other foreign sources of supply," he wrote.
However, he and McCain spokesman Brian Rogers have not responded to repeated inquiries since Friday to explain whether the door was partially open to nuclear energy for Iran -- or if Palin's categorical statement stood as the campaign's final word on the subject.
.
