Iran today is like the Soviet Union in the era of Leonid Brezhnev, who died in 1982, less than 10 years before the Communist superpower ceased to exist, a professor at the National University of Iran told a New York audience yesterday.

Iraq’s current leadership “requires low-grade conflict with the West” as a justification for maintaining the security and military apparatus that keeps it in power, the Iranian professor, Mahmood Sariolghalam, told the Council on Foreign Relations.

Mr. Sariolghalam appeared as part of a five-hour-long conference on Iran’s nuclear program and how America should deal with it. His comments suggested that for the Iranian leadership, the main issue isn’t attaining nuclear weapons but keeping a hold on power. The Iranian leadership, he said, wants to postpone and delay regime change by negotiating with America about Iraq and about the nuclear bomb.

“Any negotiation would only involve delaying,” or “appeasement,” Mr. Sariolghalam said. “Their agenda is not conflict resolution with the United States.”

The Iranian professor said that while the “Iranian government is still a revolutionary government, the Iranian people is not.”

“When Iranians go to Dubai or Istanbul, they see how the country has fallen behind,” he said. “Economic development is not a priority for the current political leadership.”

The professor noted that Iran’s top leaders are in their 60s and 70s.

Those who openly advocate democracy in Iran are often killed, beaten, or imprisoned by the Iranian regime. Mr. Sariolghalam yesterday said that the prospects of democracy in Iran would be dimmed by the fact that “80 to 90% of those who receive an income receive it from the state.” He suggested that America could “shift to a Nixon approach” – the way the 37th president dealt with Communist China – recognizing the current Iranian political system in exchange for changes in Iranian policy on Iraq, Israel, and the Palestinian Arabs, nuclear weapons, and “extremist” groups. “And let history do its work,” the professor said.

The comments came as technical experts agreed it was difficult to assess Iran’s progress toward a nuclear bomb. “There’s a lot of uncertainty, and we really don’t know,” said Charles Ferguson II, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Any program of inspections is “not going to be foolproof,” he said.

Even the most intrusive inspection program wouldn’t provide 100% assurance that Iran was not building a nuclear bomb, said Mark Fitzpatrick, who was deputy assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation. “Iran’s a big country,” Mr. Fitzpatrick said.

The president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haass, said America had four options – diplomacy, a military attack on nuclear sites, regime change, and “live with it.”

A fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Reuel Marc Gerecht, said that an American attack on Iran’s nuclear sites could trigger Iranian terrorist attacks on America, which could in turn prompt American strikes on Iran’s intelligence headquarters and revolutionary guard units, escalating into a war.