There are hearings in which the sounds of mutual respect and camaraderie between Congress members and witnesses echo mellifluously throughout the chamber, and then are hearings like the one Thursday before members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, which was to mellifluous echoes what a chainsaw is to Lincoln Center.

Not that the hearing wasn’t well-conducted. The chairmen of the Middle East and terrorism subcommittees held the joint hearing — though perhaps “joint scolding” would be a better phrase — to discuss Iran’s nuclear ambitions with the U.S. agencies most responsible for ending them: the departments of Treasury and State.

There has been no agreement between the United States and Iran nor the subcommittee chairmen and the Bush administration, and what emerged from the hearing was probably not unlike the tenor of the international negotiations themselves, with two sides talking seriously about an issue of overriding international concern but neither side budging.

Members badgered and begged the two witnesses — Jeffrey Feltman, principal deputy assistant secretary of the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs for the State Department, and Daniel Glaser, deputy assistant secretary for terrorist financing and financial crimes at the Treasury Department — to offer the slightest evidence that administration efforts to stop Iran’s nuclear-enrichment program had showed any signs of progress. With each increasingly agitated question, the witnesses’ positions only grew more entrenched.

Democratic New York Rep. Gary L. Ackerman, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia, likened the situation to what his superhumanly patient mother would do when he misbehaved as a child: count to five with an increasing reliance on fractions before giving up and telling him to “wait until your father gets home.”

“We seem to be single-parenting the situation,” Ackerman said. “What is the ‘or else’ — we’ll tell the U.N.?”

Could the witnesses name one company that has been sanctioned for dealing with Iran? he asked.

“Mr. Chairman, in my remarks, I mentioned . . . the dual strategy approach of working multilaterally both to offer incentives and to increase the pressure in order to try to persuade Iran to change its calculus,” Feltman said. “And one reason why the administration has moved in this direction is — after consultations with many members of Congress, after seeing study after study that says in order to get at the Iranian problem effectively we need to work multilaterally — the GAO report talked about the importance of multilateral sanctions and things like that. So one reason why there’s been such emphasis on the multilateral approach is because there seems to be broad recognition that working together will have a greater impact.”

Feltman went on to say the emphasis on collaboration was why negotiations with the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany, dubbed the “P5+1” process, has been so important. Since 2006, the witnesses said, Iran has resulted in four Security Council resolutions: 1696, which called on Iran to suspend its “proliferation sensitive” nuclear activities or risk sanctions, and 1737, 1747, and 1803, which imposed those sanctions. These include prohibiting the transfer or export of dual-use technology to or from Iran, freezing the assets of as many as 40 individuals and 35 entities associated with Iranian proliferation, calling on states not to export heavy arms or make new commitments to doing business in Iran, and calling for vigilance regarding the activities of all the banks in Iran.

“The point is the P5 process is still working,” Feltman said. “We have Russia, China, the other Security Council permanent members and Germany inside this process; that is, looking at multilateral sanctions, timeless sanctions within the EU, within the United States — ”

“How does looking at sanctions change Iranian behavior?” Ackerman asked.

“Our hope is that Iran will change its calculus,” Feltman said.

“I would respectfully suggest that we should give up on hope — not give up on it in the abstract, but give up on it as a policy,” Ackerman said. “Having a policy of hope is horse dung. You know, ‘praise the Lord, but pass the ammunition.’

“Hope and prayer and having a faith-based administration and a faith-based foreign policy, and a hopeful attitude – but after seven and half years of this president, after eight years of the previous president, after four years of the prior president, after four years of the president before that, going back to the Eisenhower administration that introduced nuclear to the Shah of Iran, hope is not a plan, and prayer is not a blueprint,” Ackerman continued. “I don’t dislike either hope or prayer, but I want to know what we do while we’re praying because praying doesn’t always give you the answer that you want, because there’s a billion other people who have prayers as well, but in addition to their prayers, they have a plan, and their plan is to have a nuclear bomb, and with that nuclear bomb have an influence and an effect that we don’t necessarily ascribe to.”

California Democrat Brad Sherman, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade, pointed out before asking his questions of the witnesses that Iran was unable to export its natural gas reserves and resorted to “flaring,” or burning off, the excess natural gas produced during oil drilling.

The amount of gas burned in this manner, Sherman said, was enough to generate 10 times the amount of electricity that would be produced at Iran’s Bushehr reactor, discounting the claim Iran needed to build an expensive nuclear reactor in order to generate the energy it needs.

In addition, the last two presidential administrations had violated federal law, he said, by refusing to “name and shame” companies that had invested more than $20 million in Iran’s oil sector. “That is to say, they’re violating U.S. law to protect Tehran’s business partners,” Sherman said.

Meanwhile, the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network issued an advisory opinion to U.S. banks specifically warning that the Central Bank of Iran was using an array of deceptive practices to hide its involvement in nuclear proliferation and terrorism — a situation verified by the governor of the bank himself, who said Feb. 5 that he was “proud” his bank had assisted private Iranian and state-owned banks to make their financial commitments, “regardless of the pressures on them.”

“In effect, he’s announced that his Central Bank is helping other banks evade the various sanctions that you’ve applied,” Sherman told Glaser, then asking why the Treasury Department would have FinCEN issue a warning about the Central Bank of Iran and not designate that bank as assisting in proliferation and terrorism activities according to executive orders 13224 or 13382.

“The simple answer is the administration is in the middle of a campaign to apply pressure to Iran,” Glaser said, adding that though the administration knows about the activities of the Central Bank, taking action against it would be “an extraordinary step.”

“It is certainly something within our toolbox,” Glaser said. “But I think it’s important that we work with our [allies] around the world to make sure that we do take steps — ”

At which point Sherman cut him off to address Feltman. It was clear, Sherman said, that current U.S. policies are not working to contain Iran. “It is working to get the press and public off the backs of the administration, and to fool them, and to even fool them to the point where we get answers like those from your colleague,” Sherman said. As he saw it, the United States would “dribble out these tiny sanctions” each time it was politically necessary to prevent any significant action against the country.

Why? Sherman asked. Because the administration was hiding behind a supposed Hobson’s choice between bombing Iran or “screaming” at them.

In his opening statement, Sherman said the administration had chosen to ignore economic measures such as sanctions on multinational corporations because it had been “captured by extremists — extremists in defense of corporate liberty.”

As a result the administration had undermined a number of legislative measures to punish Iran — including HR 957, HR 1357, HR 1400 and HR 2880, to name a few — that would impose further sanctions and require divestiture, financial disclosure and the forfeit of profits for companies doing business in Iran.

When Sherman asked whether the State Department policy was “support or [a] neutral position” on these bills, Feltman said he wasn’t aware of the legislative details. “Our policy is trying to use flexibility and firmness together to try to change Iran’s calculus on its nuclear program,” he said.

Rep. Ed Royce of California, ranking Republican on the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation and Trade, said Iran’s lack of refining capability was a weak spot in its economy that, according to reports, has resulted in Iranians setting fire to gas stations in protest over government rationing. Inflation and unemployment also are major problems, he said, with the latter rising above 20 percent.

“What is the picture of the Iranian economy, where are the vulnerabilities, how do we produce the kind of change that eventually came to Eastern Europe?” Royce asked.

Glaser said Iran’s economy presented a “fairly bleak picture” that included a banking system increasingly isolated from the international community, as evidenced by the recent dismissals of several key economic ministers. But the cause of these woes was “difficult to dis-aggregate between the utter mismanagement of the Iranian economy by the Ahmadinejad regime and the financial pressure that we in the international community are placing on them.”

There was still a lot the United States could do, Glaser said, including additional actions against Iranian banks. “And we’re certainly looking at those.”

“We really encourage you to move on that front, and any banking system that is involved in any way . . . with supporting terrorism,” Royce said. “And to the extent that the international community can move on that front, it would be very, very helpful.”

Matthew Korade can be reached at mkorade@cq.com.