Against the backdrop of the White House’s most explicit threat to date against Iran, the country’s top nuclear negotiator yesterday announced that his country would have limited talks concerning Iraq.

Following a closed session of the Majlis legislature yesterday, the chief of Iran’s powerful national security committee, Ali Larijani, said the new talks would be “to resolve Iraqi issues and help establishment of an independent and free government in Iraq.”

The decision to acknowledge an offer of three months to meet with America’s ambassador in Baghdad came on the same day the White House published a national security strategy that said diplomatic efforts to persuade Iran to verify that it is not building nuclear weapons must succeed “if confrontation is to be avoided.”

That phrase, despite its ambiguity, is more explicit than the president’s usual formulation when queried on the possibility of a military strike to disarm the Islamic Republic. For nearly two years, President Bush has said, “all options are on the table.” However he has not threatened those options if European-led negotiations fail with Iran.

The statement from Mr. Larijani also marks the first time Iran has, at least publicly, acknowledged diplomatic meetings with American officials. The pending talks, however, will not be the first.

The American ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilizad, has met on numerous occasions since 2001 with Iranian envoys in multilateral sessions. For example, he discussed rebuilding Afghanistan with the Iranians at the 2001 Bonn Conference. In 2002 and 2003, Mr. Khalilzad met with Iranian counterparts in Europe to discuss Iraq. Both the Clinton administration and that of the president’s father sent diplomatic messages through third parties to Iran regarding Iran.

Yesterday the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, as well as National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley stressed the new Iran-American talks would be limited to Iraq. But some outside experts see this as thin diplomatic cover.

“It will be quite customary in diplomatic discussion for the nuclear issue to come up as part of the Iraq issue,” the deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Patrick Clawson, said yesterday. “The Iranians are not going to walk into talks about nuclear matters, but they can repackage that as an Iraq matter.”

Earlier this month, efforts to persuade Iran to end its uranium enrichment failed. Even the Russians eventually dropped their last-ditch negotiations after Iran demanded the right to continue to make nuclear fuel on an experimental basis.

Mr. Larijani’s acknowledgement of the American offer is also in contrast to his country’s supreme leader and president, who both have gone so far as to warn Europe not to follow America’s lead diplomatically.

The National Security Strategy released yesterday, a congressionally mandated report drafted by the White House every four years, says that America’s concerns with Iran do not end with the nuclear program it kept hidden from the International Atomic Energy Agency until 2003.

“The Iranian regime sponsors terrorism; threatens Israel; seeks to thwart Middle East peace; disrupts democracy in Iraq; and denies the aspirations of its people for freedom,” it says.

“The nuclear issue and our other concerns can ultimately be resolved only if the Iranian regime makes the strategic decision to change these policies, open up its political system, and afford freedom to its people.”

Today marks the date when Iranian opposition leader Akbar Ganji will have served out his five-year sentence in Evin Prison. As The New York Sun reported yesterday, it appears that he will remain in jail.

A former White House speechwriter and scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, David Frum, asked how important the new strategy was. “One of the things I am left wondering is how much these documents mean anything,” he said yesterday. “The strange thing about this administration is that it seems to proceed on two different tracks, the rhetoric and the policy. It’s not that they have nothing to do with one another, but that the relationship is unpredictable.”

One area where the strategy appears to be out of sync with the policy is in the area of spreading democracy. “To end tyranny we must summon the collective outrage of the free world against the oppression, abuse, and impoverishment that tyrannical regimes inflict on their people, and summon their collective action against the dangers tyrants pose to the security of the world,” it says.

Yet America’s diplomats and State Department have been muted in their criticism of unfree allies, particularly in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Indeed, President Mubarak in Cairo has bragged that Secretary of State Rice has dropped pressure to liberalize his country, and the embassy here has not responded.

While Saudi Arabia last year held very restrictive municipal elections, America has done little to pressure the family-owned state to respect human rights and the rule of law, according to the chief researcher on the country for Human Rights Watch, Christopher Wilcke.

“We don’t know where the human rights agenda is for Saudi Arabia,” Mr. Wilcke said yesterday. “We know there is a reform agenda and it’s pretty useless to go forward with reform without human rights.”