Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Aug 30 2006 (IPS) — Next week’s visit to the United States of former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami has been strongly denounced by hard-line neo-conservatives and other hawks here as “appeasement”.

According to a consensus among nearly a dozen participants in a “Symposium” Wednesday on the website of the right-wing National Review Online, Khatami’s presence here could make it more difficult to rally U.S. public opinion against the Islamic Republic and discourage democratic forces back in Tehran.

“Giving Khatami prestigious platforms all over America is a dumb move, and it will enormously discourage the Iranian people,” according to Michael Ledeen, an influential neo-conservative based at the American Enterprise Institute.

What’s more, he added, “for those who believe (U.S. President George W.) Bush is serious about regime change (in Iran), this is a numbing blow… Alas, this confirms my worst fears about this administration. Talk, talk, talk, but when it is time to act, they are still talking.”

Identified with the reformist wing of Iran’s clerical establishment, Khatami, who served as president from 1997 to 2005, reportedly plans to spend as much as two weeks here under the sponsorship of the U.S. Episcopal Church and the Atlanta-based Carter Centre whose founder, former President Jimmy Carter, has expressed interest in meeting with him.

Khatami’s trip, which kicks off Sep. 5-6 at a U.N. conference on the dialogue of civilisations in New York, will also include appearances at the National Cathedral here next Thursday, speeches to an Islamic group in Chicago, and university audiences in Virginia and elsewhere.

It comes amid rising tensions between Washington and Tehran that many analysts here believe is likely to result in a U.S. military attack on Iran before the end of Bush’s term.

The administration accuses Iran of trying to build nuclear weapons in violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), supplying Lebanon’s Hezbollah with mid- and long-range missiles, and equipping and training Shia militias in Iraq that are hostile to the U.S. occupation there.

Neo-conservatives who see in Iran’s nuclear programme and its theocratic regime an existential threat to Israel, as well as an increasingly powerful rival to U.S. power in the Middle East/Gulf region, have been at the forefront – both within the administration (particularly in the offices of Vice President Dick Cheney and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld) and outside it – of efforts to rally the public behind a policy of confrontation and “regime change” in Tehran.

While they have insisted that such a policy is best pursued through political and other forms of support for non-violent opposition forces in Iran, they have also called on the administration to prepare to carry out a pre-emptive attack against Tehran’s nuclear facilities before Bush leaves office, if not sooner.

They have also strongly opposed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s efforts to work with the so-called EU-3 – Britain, France and Germany – to engage Tehran in negotiations designed to impose safeguards on Iran’s nuclear programme and denounced as “appeasement” the State Department’s offer earlier this year to talk directly with the regime for the first time since 1979 if it froze its uranium-enrichment programme.

Thus, in their view, the decision to grant Khatami a visa to travel beyond the New York area is the latest in a series of State Department actions designed to reduce tensions between the two countries and encourage engagement.

It “is not an isolated event,” wrote Anne Bayefsky, a senior fellow at the neo-conservative Hudson Institute and editor of www.eyeontheUN.org. “As the pattern of all talk and no action takes hold, this move too will undercut any (U.S.) demand to the international community for immediate, serious sanctions on Iran. If we aren’t prepared to isolate Iran, why should anyone else?”

Ledeen, who has long argued that all al Qaeda and other Sunni Islamist terrorist groups are actually controlled by the “terror-masters” in Tehran, called the visa approval “blatant appeasement”, while James Phillips, a Middle East analyst at the right-wing Heritage Foundation, called it “a major error… at a time when Iran is defiantly thumbing its nose at the U.S. and the U.N. Security Council regarding its nuclear weapons programme.”

Neo-conservatives expressed particular concern that Khatami, who first proposed a “dialogue of civilisations” in 2000, will give Iran a major public-relations boost as the “friendly face” of the Islamic Republic in contrast to his successor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose public threats against Israel and questioning of the Nazi Holocaust has fed their efforts to depict the regime as “fascist”.

“By granting a visa to (Khatami), the Bush administration handed the Islamic Republic a propaganda coup,” stressed Michael Rubin, one of Ledeen’s AEI colleagues. “Journalists will fawn and diplomats celebrate Khatami’s talk of tolerance. They will be complicit in projecting a false image of the regime Khatami still represents,” he wrote.

That concern was shared by Sen. Rick Santorum who called the visa issuance “at best foolish and at worst misguided. Mohammed Khatami is one of the chief propagandists for the Islamic Fascist regime.”

“I am opposed to granting a visa to such a man so that he can travel around the United States and mislead the American people,” he added.

For its part, the State Department Wednesday insisted that, as a private citizen invited by the United Nations and private U.S. groups, Khatami was eligible for a visa that permitted him to travel to specific cities.

“I would encourage those organisations and the individuals attending those events to ask him some hard questions, ask him some pointed questions, ask him the kind of questions that if asked in Iran would get the questioner thrown in jail,” said Department spokesman Sean McCormack Wednesday, who denied that administration officials would meet with Khatami during his visit.

Still, for some observers who favour U.S. engagement with Tehran, the fact that Khatami was given permission to travel around the country indicated that, in the words of one, “somewhere in the administration a light is on,” especially in light of other recent efforts by Iran, including Ahmadinejad’s letter to Bush last spring and his challenge to a televised debate this week, to directly engage – however unconventionally – the U.S. president.

Of particular interest was the likelihood that Carter, who originally cut relations with Iran after radical students seized the U.S. embassy and diplomats in Tehran in November 1979, will meet with Khatami.

“The concept of the ‘emotional breakthrough’ is revered in both Persian as well as American informal dispute resolution as being required to move from problem to dialogue to solution,” according to Donald Weadon, a Washington-based international lawyer with much experience on Iran.

“Clearly, with the two elders’ stature and mutual respect, both can at the right moment express personal regret for events of the past, and share their vision for prospects for the future,” he noted. “That the two can later share this with other trusted individuals in each other’s camp can affect the foundation of trust which will support politically-sustainable opening steps to dialogue…”

The fact that Bush is not known to have called on Carter for diplomatic advice, however, should come as some comfort to those opposed to any thought of dialogue with Iran.