September 27, 2007
Senate Urges Bush to Declare Iran Guard a Terrorist Group
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

WASHINGTON, Sept. 26 — The Senate approved a resolution on Wednesday urging the Bush administration to designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a foreign terrorist organization, and lawmakers briefly set aside partisan differences to approve a measure calling for stepped-up diplomacy to forge a political solution in Iraq.
Since last month, the White House has been weighing whether to declare the Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist group or to take a narrower step focusing on only the Guard’s elite Quds Force. Either approach would signal a more confrontational posture by declaring a part of the Iranian military a terrorist operation.
Appearances by the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on Monday at Columbia University and on Tuesday at the United Nations, where he said Iran would ignore Security Council resolutions about its nuclear program, seemed to toughen the resolve of Senate Democrats, who had been hesitant to take an overly aggressive stance.
The Senate resolution, which is not binding, also calls on the administration to impose economic sanctions on Iran.
Even if the White House took that step, policy experts said, it was unclear that it would be anything more than a symbolic gesture without the cooperation of nations that, unlike the United States, still had substantial business dealings with Iran.
The measure, proposed by Senator Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona, and Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut who usually votes with Republicans on war issues, relied heavily on testimony earlier this month by Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commander in Iraq, and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, the top American political official in Baghdad.
In negotiations, two crucial paragraphs were deleted from the measure in an attempt to reassure critics who had said the proposal seemed to urge the Bush administration to deal with Iran on a war footing.
Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, a Democrat and the majority leader, voted for the proposal after initially urging caution. “We certainly don’t want to be led down the path, slowly but surely, until we wind up with the situation like we have in Iraq today,” he said Tuesday. “So I am going to be very, very cautious.”
Senator Jim Webb, Democrat of Virginia, warned Tuesday that an early draft of the proposal “could be read as tantamount to a declaration of war.”
“What do we do with terrorist organizations if they are involved against us?” Mr. Webb asked in a speech on Tuesday. “We attack them.”
Even with the two paragraphs deleted, Mr. Webb voted against the resolution. So did a number of other Democrats who are among the harshest critics of the Bush administration’s handling of the war. The measure passed by a vote of 76 to 22.
Among those voting against it was Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware, and chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, who said he feared that the administration could use the measure to justify military action against Iran.
In a separate vote, by 75 to 23, the Senate approved a resolution by Mr. Biden calling for greater diplomatic efforts with Iraq, and in particular, a focus on partitioning Iraq into federal regions in hopes of reaching a political solution and more swiftly ending the war.
While Democrats sought to portray the vote on the Biden proposal as a potential breakthrough in reaching other legislative compromises that might force President Bush to shift his war strategy, Republicans quickly made clear that this was not so.
Senator John W. Warner, Republican of Virginia, praised Mr. Biden’s measure but also predicted that any effort by Senate Democrats to dictate war strategy to the president would fail. “We will not see a measure reach 60 votes,” he said, the number needed to overcome a filibuster.
Mr. Biden’s resolution called on the United States “to actively support a political settlement in Iraq based on the final provisions of the Constitution of Iraq,” which would essentially divide the country into loosely allied, semi-autonomous regions.
And it said the United States should call on the international community to help and on Iraq’s neighbors not to “intervene in or destabilize” Iraq.
In an interview, Mr. Biden said such an approach would be a striking shift from the Bush administration’s insistence on a strong and unified Iraqi federal government and would permit a quicker withdrawal of American troops. “This is a fundamentally different goal, and it requires fundamentally fewer American forces,” he said.