WASHINGTON – Pressure is mounting within the Bush administration to begin talks directly with Iran to convince the country to end its enrichment of nuclear fuel.

Facing a deadlock, envoys from America, China, France, Russia, and Britain are scheduled to meet again tomorrow to negotiate a unanimous resolution on Iran at the U.N. Security Council. Nonetheless, American diplomats are not optimistic that the aggressive sanctions contained in a European and American draft resolution will be agreed to by Russia or China – two countries that have enjoyed a robust trade in arms with Iran since the end of the Cold War.

Behind the scenes, two Bush administration officials say British, French, and German diplomats are quietly urging America to pursue direct talks with Iran to avoid a standoff at Turtle Bay. The man carrying this message to the White House and Foggy Bottom is the current no. 3 official at the State Department, Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, whose private assessment of the negotiations among the great powers on Iran is that a unanimous resolution is near impossible.

The potential for the Bush administration to engage Iran now, after the country broke its pledges on uranium enrichment, could dampen enthusiasm among its opposition. In the last eight days, ethnic Azeris, who make up a quarter of Iran’s population, have flooded Tabriz and other cities to protest a cartoon in a state-run newspaper depicting their ethnic group as cockroaches. And Iran’s students have led demonstrations and in some cases clashes at major universities over new policies in the schools on firing professors and expelling students. The protests on campuses are estimated to be the largest since July 2003.

The State Department has begun publicly dialing back expectations for tomorrow’s meeting in Vienna. A State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, said yesterday that the ultimate resolution at the Security Council could entail phases of sanctions against Iran, depending the country’s actions.

Mr. McCormack added, “Separate from that, you know, throughout this process, even if you are proceeding down the Security Council route … you can still keep outside of that particular mechanism, individual states, like-minded states getting together to work on various financial measures that might be taken so that the Iranian regime can’t exploit the international financial system for, you know, funding terrorism or for funding its weapons – illicit weapons of mass destruction programs.”

One State Department official was careful to say Mr. Burns has not formally endorsed direct talks within the administration. But nonetheless, his assessment of the prospect for a resolution with teeth – one that would be supported and enforced by the five veto-wielding members of the Security Council – was pessimistic.

“Nicholas is the primary person looking at this. He is saying, ‘It doesn’t look good in the Security Council,'” the official, who asked not to be identified, said. “His primary message, however, is that we don’t have a good chance for the resolution. He has not survived this long by raising both the problem and the solution, if the solution is not one the principals want to embrace.” However, the official added that Mr. Burns also has conveyed the private message from European foreign ministries that America should at least be open to direct talks on the nuclear issue.

America has held discussions on and off with Iran since the inception of the Islamic Republic. In the 1980s, Reagan administration officials brokered a deal whereby Israel sold missiles to Iran in exchange for the release of American hostages captured by Hezbollah in Lebanon. More recently, Iranian diplomats have met with America’s ambassador to Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad, since 2001, when he first brought Iran into the rebuilding of Afghanistan at a conference in Bonn, Germany. In 2003, Mr. Khalilzad discussed with Iran an exchange of Al Qaeda terrorists for members of the People’s Mujahadin captured by American soldiers in Iraq. That plan went nowhere, though Senator Kerry, a Democrat of Massachusetts, endorsed it when he was running for president in 2004.

Direct talks now with Iran could end up demoralizing Iran’s opposition, which in recent months has begun to organize in various sectors – from a strike of bus drivers in Tehran to more recent campus unrest.

One of the steering committee members of the Tehran Polytechnic University chapter of Iran’s largest student organization, Abbas Hakim Zadeh, said last week that his organization, known as Takhim Vahdat, would endorse direct talks between America and Iran if the topic of negotiation was human rights and political prisoners. “However,” he said, “if the idea is for Iran to get security guarantees embedded in it that the regime can suppress the human rights and the will of the people, that is something the Iranian student movement, the Iranian labor movement, and the Iranian women’s rights groups reject firmly and totally.”