ShareThisBy JOHN HALL
Thursday's appearance here by Mohammad Khatami, the former president of Iran, is being billed as another diversion to allow the Iranians time to build more nukes and missiles. But Khatami is an interesting fellow and maybe he deserves a listen.
He is a cleric who seems to have some pull with the educated Iranians who are trying to keep it together under the iron rule of the mullahs. Khatami built up a following among women and students but could not control their oppressive and sometimes brutal treatment at the direction of the more powerful Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
His successor, the unreformed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has been almost the polar opposite of the reformist Khatami, at least in his rhetoric and philosophy.
Where Ahmadinejad has advocated nothing but confrontation with the West, Khatami rejected a "clash of civilizations" between Islam and the West that had been put forward by historian Samuel Huntington. He offers, as an alternative model, a "dialogue of civilizations."
Khatami's vision won him a citation from the United Nations and a speech invitation from the Washington National Cathedral. This is a contrast to the low state of relations between the United States and Iran and the gathering storm at the U.N. Security Council over Iran's violations of its treaty obligation not to build nuclear weapons.
Complaints poured in about inviting the former head of a government that had persecuted religious minorities and actively bankrolled terrorism.
The atmosphere is particularly charged here in the wake of President Bush's warning Tuesday that a nuclear-armed Iran would raise a mortal threat to the American people.
"I'm not going to allow this to happen," he said, in a terrorism speech in which he also pledged to find a diplomatic solution.
Khatami, in his eight years in office, didn't make a move to challenge the Islamic radicals who held the real reins of power in Iran. In fact, some think he was devoted to preserving the "mullahcracy" there and seemed willing to tolerate the crackdown on student protests to preserve it.
In his first few years Khatami had shown some promise, but no one in the Clinton administration would touch him with a 10-foot pole after he was inaugurated in 1997.
It would probably not have helped Khatami at home if they had. If he had been seen consorting with any American, he might have been whacked along with his political associates. They were harassed, imprisoned and murdered by thugs representing the dreaded Guardian Council.
Khatami had seemed to many in the West to have become an aloof intellectual _ a bit like the piano player in the bawdy house, merrily plunking happy reformist tunes as the harassment of journalists got worse, newspapers were closed by the dozen and the hard line against the United States and the West continued.
The financing of Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations went to a higher level while he was president than it had ever been. The results have just been demonstrated in the rocket attacks on Israel.
Just the same, Khatami was the most promising leader to pass through Iran's parade of dunces since Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, the postwar democrat who was overthrown in a U.S.-engineered coup.
Khatami, in reality, had no chance to save his associates, or even his student followers, from the brutes who enforced the will of the theocracy that now rules Tehran. Even though he is out of power, they're still a little wary of his appeal. When he accepted the invitation to speak over here, a critic suggested that he should be defrocked as a Shiite religious leader for committing "worse than a sin" by visiting the United States.
Ahmadinejad, however, did not try to block him from coming.
The State Department, although it bars official contacts between the two governments, does not discourage unofficial groups from talking.
Khatami's message could be directed at his own country more so than Washington. He has spoken and written lately of the need for intellectuals not to expect "to remain indifferent at the dawn of democracy and allow freedom to be hijacked."
He was the fifth president of Iran and won by promising to improve conditions for women and by liberalizing restrictions on young academics. Those promises were slammed down by someone else's truncheon, remaining a source of bitterness and regret to this man, and many others.
(John Hall is the senior Washington correspondent of Media General News Service. E-mail jhall(at)mediageneral.com.)
