Khatami Visiting USA

[Tiki Tam Tam]

Khatami Arrives As U.S. Weighs Sanctions on Iran

Former Embassy Hostages Criticize Trip

By Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 5, 2006; Page A16

The stormy saga between the United States and Iran takes one of its most unusual turns since the 1979 revolution as former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami arrives in Washington to give a major address on Thursday, the same day that the Bush administration holds talks in Europe on new U.N. sanctions on Tehran.

Khatami's five-city U.S. tour this week has ignited both controversy and curiosity -- infuriating former hostages from the 1979-1981 U.S. Embassy seizure and alarming some in Congress but winning praise from foreign policy experts. The former president's speech at Washington National Cathedral is a hot ticket, with attendance now by invitation only.

Khatami's visit has also been controversial in Tehran, where a newspaper called the U.S. visa "suspicious" and a critic suggested the Shiite cleric should be defrocked for committing "worse than a sin" in his trip to the United States. Many Iranian exiles in this country are also enraged, with some threatening protests. Yet Iran's supreme leader and its hard-line current president did not try to block the visit, Iranian sources said.

Khatami's tour comes as the State Department presses for punitive action for Iran's failure to meet a U.N. deadline to suspend uranium enrichment, a process for nuclear energy that can be converted to develop a nuclear weapon. As an incentive, Washington held out the prospect of joining European talks with Iran and ending 27 years of hostility. But Iran spurned the European-designed package.

"We've been trying hard to show there are two paths here," Undersecretary of State R. Nicholas Burns said. "That's why we made the offer to negotiate. They clearly have not accepted that path, so now we have to begin the sanctions process."

Burns will meet in Berlin on Thursday with diplomats from Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia to discuss which sanctions to impose on Iran, the first leg of what may be a heated debate. The administration hopes Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will be able to wrap up the resolution when she attends the General Assembly opening later this month.

But the administration is not cutting off all forms of dialogue. "We're going to maintain a policy of no contact between the two governments, but at the same time, that doesn't mean that Americans outside government shouldn't be talking to Iranians. Americans should take every opportunity to address the concerns we have over terrorism and nuclear issues with Iranians who visit our country," Burns said.

Khatami, who was president for the two-term limit from 1997 to 2005, is the highest-ranking Iranian to visit Washington since the Carter administration severed ties in 1980. He is also speaking in Boston, Charlottesville, Chicago and New York on the role of the three Abrahamic faiths in the peace process. He turned down an invitation to meet with former president Jimmy Carter, partly because of scheduling conflicts, according to Iranian sources.

Foreign policy analysts say the administration is signaling that it will not close the door on reformers such as Khatami who favor a freer press, political openings and dialogue with the world, while it will isolate hard-liners such as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for violating U.N. resolutions and talking about wiping Israel off the map.

But human rights groups say Khatami's government also violated human rights and supported extremist groups. He was president when President Bush labeled Iran, along with Iraq and North Korea, the "axis of evil" in 2002.

"He never wanted to create instability or a situation that would lead to violent confrontation," said Hadi Ghaemi of Human Rights Watch, an international monitoring group. "He was devoted to preserving the Islamic regime . . . so he never challenged those who had real power."

Many problems -- the crackdown on student protests, banning of new independent newspapers, and arrests and deaths of critics -- were linked to hard-liners in the separate judiciary or vigilantes sanctioned by Iranian intelligence. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, also has veto power over all government actions.

Former hostages are outspoken about Khatami's visit. "Can an ex-U.S. president do the same in Iran?" asked John W. Limbert Jr., former embassy political officer. Kevin J. Hermening, an embassy Marine guard and the youngest hostage, said U.S. officials have "completely lost their minds" in dealing with Iran. "Every time we agree to 'talks' it is seen as another indication of weakness and capitulation," he said.

Giving Khatami a visa was a "despicable" decision by the State Department, said former embassy press attaché Barry M. Rosen. "His dialogue of civilizations is nothing more than a public relations stunt by the oppressive regime."

L. Bruce Laingen, who was the ranking U.S. hostage, said he will attend the speech because he believes in talks, despite serious problems with the regime and doubts that Khatami has any power since Ahmadinejad replaced him.

In a 1998 interview with CNN, Khatami said he regretted that American feelings were "hurt" by the embassy seizure -- adding that U.S. policies had also seriously hurt Iranians. "In the heat of the revolutionary fervor, things happen which cannot be fully contained or judged according to usual norms," he said.

Like other hostages, Laingen said those words were not enough. "The question I would put to him would be: What do you think your government owes the hostages -- and I don't mean money, but something more than what he said to CNN."

Foreign policy experts largely approve of the Khatami visit. Geoffrey Kemp, a Reagan administration national security official now at the Nixon Center, called the decision "quite smart" and added: "We have nothing to lose by listening to Mr. Khatami . . . since he is highly influential behind the scenes."

Ray Takeyh, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said Washington had missed a "huge opportunity" to engage with an "imminently engageable leader" when Khatami was president, all the more striking just a year later under Ahmadinejad's rule.

Senior Clinton State Department official Wendy Sherman said the United States might not be in confrontation with Iran if Khatami's visit had happened six years ago.

But Danielle Pletka, a vice president at the American Enterprise Institute, called the Khatami visit "surreal" and disputed descriptions of him as a "pragmatic mullah."

"If someone at the State Department can prove that the nuclear program didn't improve under Khatami, that terrorists weren't sponsored under Khatami and that arms were not shipped to Hezbollah under Khatami, then by all means let's label him a pragmatist and embrace him," she said.

Congressional leaders also criticized the trip. In a letter to Rice, Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Calif.) appealed for the visa to be denied because the State Department had ranked Iran the No. 1 sponsor of terrorism every year Khatami was president.

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom wrote the Washington National Cathedral to complain about the "troubling irony" of inviting Khatami to speak on interfaith cooperation when he presided over a government that imprisoned, harassed, tortured and even executed religious minorities.

Commission Chairman Felice Gaer called on the cathedral to appeal to the former Iranian leader to "denounce and express regret" for past violations of religious freedom.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...90400720_2.html

It is an interesting development.

There is good reasons for the hostages to feel infuriated, but then maybe some good may be a fallout of this trip.