WASHINGTON (New York Times) — White House officials expressed anger on Tuesday about an appearance in which the United States ambassador to the United Nations, Zalmay Khalilzad, sat beside the Iranian foreign minister at a panel of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Saturday.

The United States does not have diplomatic relations with Iran, and the Bush administration has limited its official high-level dealings with Iran to discussions about Iraq, primarily in Baghdad. Administration officials said that Khalilzad’s appearance beside Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki in Davos at a panel on Iranian foreign policy surprised senior Bush administration officials, who became aware that Khalilzad had appeared with Mottaki only when a video of the discussion appeared on YouTube on Tuesday.
Khalilzad was still in Europe and could not be reached for comment. His spokesman, Richard A. Grenell, characterized Khalilzad’s appearance beside Mottaki as “just a multilateral conversation with the moderator.”
“There was no separate meeting or separate conversation or handshake with the Iranian foreign minister,” Grenell said. But administration officials said that White House officials, in particular, were angry about the episode. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about internal administration affairs.
The in-fighting reflects continuing disagreements within the Bush administration about how to deal with Iran, and just where to draw the line on engaging its nemesis, particularly when the administration’s Iran policy appears to be in disarray. Many State Department officials say privately that they think the administration should directly engage Iran, and without preconditions, a view that is not shared by the White House.
In his State of the Union address on Monday night, President Bush repeated his customary tough rhetoric against Iran.
But European diplomats and even a handful of people in the administration say a lack of progress in American-led efforts to intensify sanctions against Iran suggests that Bush is unlikely to achieve his goal of getting Iran to abandon its nuclear programs before he leaves office.
Bush’s top envoy to the sanctions talks, R. Nicholas Burns, the under secretary of state for political affairs, announced last week that he was resigning. Burns has maintained that his departure has nothing to do with dwindling hope that the administration will get much traction in its diplomatic efforts to press Iran to halt its uranium enrichment program.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice quickly moved to replace Burns with an equally respected career foreign service official, William J. Burns, the United States ambassador to Russia. (The two men are not related.)
But “it’s hard to see Nick Burns jumping ship if they thought they were going to get somewhere on the diplomatic track,” one European diplomat said.
Last week, American and European diplomats circulated draft copies of a third United Nations Security Council sanctions resolution against Tehran, which is meant to increase pressure on Iran by making it harder for anyone involved in Iran’s nuclear program to do business around the world.
But the resolution is far weaker than what the United States, Britain, and France were seeking, and officials say their efforts to win support from Russia and China have been undercut by the release in Washington in December of a National Intelligence Estimate that said Iran had no nuclear arms program.
At the forum in Davos on Saturday, Khalilzad, seated next to Mottaki, defended the American stance that pressure should be maintained against Iran until Tehran agrees to suspend its uranium enrichment.
“It hasn’t been a brilliantly successful strategy so far,” said Gareth Evans of the International Crisis Group, the panel’s moderator, expressing support for an idea increasingly winning favor in Europe, one that would allow Iran to enrich uranium but only with stronger international monitoring and safeguards.
Khalilzad stuck to the administration playbook. “Imagine if you acquiesce to that, why would others not seek similar capabilities?” he said. “You’d have a world where a number of countries are within so many hours, so many weeks, of nuclear capability.”