WASHINGTON – The State Department is looking at ways to reach out to Iranian democrats inside the country to see who would be willing to accept outside support in their efforts to reform and change the Islamic republic.

“We are exploring ways to begin working with groups inside the country,” the chief of the State Department’s Middle East Partnership Initiative, Scott Carpenter, told The New York Sun yesterday.

While the president’s nominee for secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, has yet to sign off on a new Iran policy, the recent interest in reaching out to Iranian democrats in itself represents a change for Foggy Bottom, which until now has shied away from any open contact with or support for Persian activists inside the country.

Mr. Carpenter stressed that his outreach to Iranian democrats was preliminary, adding that he was considering inviting dissidents and activists to regional conferences to explore the prospect of America working with their organizations on the ground as the National Endowment for Democracy already does in countries all over the world. “I’m talking with people who have contacts in the country. I’ve asked them to spread the word,’ Are you interested? Would there be some ideas we should look at?'” Mr. Carpenter said.

The new chief of the Middle East Partnership Initiative, or MEPI, used to be a senior adviser to the Iraqi Governing Council and came into his job at the State Department this fall. While MEPI is based in the State Department, it has been a high priority for the White House. President Bush himself has touted it as an initiative he hopes to spur liberal reforms in the Middle East. The first director of MEPI was the daughter of the vice president, Elizabeth Cheney.

Iran has quickly catapulted to the top of the next Bush administration’s foreign policy to-do list, with the president this week publicly voicing worries that Tehran is building nuclear weapons. Tomorrow, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohammed El Baradei, will report to his organization’s board of governors on whether Iran has indeed stopped the enrichment of uranium it promised on Sunday. Also tomorrow, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom are also expected to roll out a new agreement with Iran that would stave off enrichment and guarantee more access to nuclear facilities. The outgoing secretary of state, Colin Powell, said on CNN yesterday that he has been personally briefed on the European negotiations and that the administration supports them.

Rarely discussed, however, in the context of America’s Iran policy are the organic social pressures to oust the ruling mullahs, who in the last year have purged nearly all the politicians in their elected Parliament who favored a referendum on the powers of the supreme leader. Last month, a noted Iranian journalist and human rights activist, Emadeddin Baghi, wrote in the Washington Post of 8,000 nongovernmental organizations that have emerged in recent years replacing the traditional functions of the state. He ended his piece saying, “I remain hopeful and active in the Iranian movement to establish a democratic civil society.”

In 2002 and 2003 especially, Mr. Bush publicly cheered on that movement. His secretary of state, however, did little to match a policy to those words. In 2002, the State Department opposed a Pentagon policy to provide non-lethal assistance to organizations in Iran and funding for satellite television stations run by Iranian exiles. Eventually, this national security policy directive was vetoed by Ms. Rice when she was the national security adviser.

Senator Brownback, a Republican from Kansas, who has pushed the president to provide more funding for the Iranian democrats, said he pressed the case for funding inside the country to Ms. Rice last week as she was making her rounds in the Senate in anticipation of her nomination hearings.

“I had a good conversation with Condoleezza Rice. She was not revealing her position, though,” the senator said. “There are only so many options available. They are fed up with Iran pestering us in Iraq. I got the impression that they were appraising their options. They have been sequential in the war on terrorism so far.” Mr. Brownback also said that he did not think America should be in the position of choosing an exile leader for Iranians. “I am concerned because of our experience with the Iraqi National Congress, in hindsight looking back at that, Hamid Karzai was picked by a group in Bonn. In Iraq, we should have followed that model.”

But Mr. Brownback also stressed that “no one is talking about a military invasion for Iran right now. We need to send the message to the Iranian dissidents that we are not planning an invasion.”

Mr. Brownback has been effective in promoting his plan for funding democracy and human rights in Iran. His amendment authorizing the State Department to spend $3 million on democracy promotion inside the country or for an international conference for the Iranian exile community found its way into the 2005 budget bill. It is similar to a provision he stuck inside the budget bill for 2004,which authorized the State Department to spend $1 million for organizations inside the country working for human rights and political change.

He told the Sun yesterday that he was disappointed the money for the grant was not used for a project inside Iran.

“I also recognized that the Bush administration was in election mode. The war in Iraq was a central part of the election. We don’t want another piece of fat in the fire and they backed away from anything that was seen aggressive by the regime in Iran,” he said.

Instead of going to an organization inside Iran, Mr. Brownback’s grant was made last month to a human rights documentation project affiliated with the Griffin Center for Health and Human Rights at Yale University. The summary of the grant says that eventually the Iranian Human Rights Documentation Center will create a “formidable but diffuse human rights fact-finding network” will develop inside Iran. But, for now, the project is focused on establishing an online clearinghouse of information.

The former assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor, Lorne Craner, told the Sun that he and his staff considered a number of options for how to meet the requirements of the Brownback provision for the Iran grant, including giving the funds to exile radio stations in Los Angeles broadcasting into the country and even funding reformist political parties inside the country.

“I am not sure America would be helping the political parties if we gave them money,” Mr. Craner, who is now president of the International Republican Institute, said in an interview. “We had people operating outside of Iran who talked to people inside the country who told us ‘no I don’t want your money.'”

The Iranian human rights lawyer who won the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize, Shirin Ebadi, has encouraged outside assistance for democratic institutions in Iran. In a June 17, 2004, interview with Opendemocracy.net she said, “What’s important is to give aid to democratic institutions inside despotic countries. But when the United States undertakes a military invasion of another country, the situation for human rights activists can deteriorate.”

She also warned that support from foreign governments may undermine the cause of the people they purport to represent. A former Iran analyst for the Pentagon and former adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, Michael Rubin, told the Sun yesterday that he understood the issues associated with American aid to groups in Iran.

“We don’t want to smother Iran’s democrats,” he said. “We don’t want to be an elephant sitting on the face of a baby. We need to provide resources that can be provided through foundations and expatriate media. U.S. support is like chemotherapy, it can be painful but it is also necessary.”