If Mike McGavick is looking for more daylight between him and the Bush Administration he can look at his call to ban Iran from the World Cup. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says it's the sort of thing that could have strengthened anti-American sentiments in Iran.

In an interview yesterday with the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, Rice was asked, "What do you think about a gasoline embargo on Iran?"

SECRETARY RICE: Well, I just ... I don't think that it was anything that you have to look at it in the near term and I'm not sure that it would have the desired effect. One of the problems that we have is if indeed you would like not to have a situation in which you reinforce the leadership's desire to make their people feel that America is anti-Iranian people, then you want to stay away from things that have a bad effect on the Iranian people to the degree that you can. You know, we've talked ...quot; people have talked for instance about barring Iranian students or barring Iranian ...quot; there was at one point the World Cup, you know, bar them from the World Cup or something like that.

The Iranian regime has been pretty insistent on a line of reasoning that this is not between the United States and the Iranian regime; this is between the United States and Iran, the culture, the people, its great national pride. And that's something we really do have to fight against and some believe a gasoline embargo might play into that.