warming of relations. On March 25, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,
gave a speech in Mashhad, in northeast Iran, directly replying to—and rejecting—
Albright’s initiative. Kenneth M. Pollack, in The Persian Puzzle,quotes Khamenei as
saying, “What good does this admission—that you acted in that way then—do us now?”
he asked. “Any admission years after the crime was committed, while they might be
committing similar crimes now, will not do the Iranian nation any good.”
In subsequent months, the judiciary and elements of the Iranian security services
under Khamenei’s control stepped up their repression of students and others who had
been pushing for more reform, signaling that President Khatami had lost much of his
last remaining political clout. Khatami won a second term as president in 2001, but
by this time much of Iran’s youth, who had hoped he would ease religious restrictions
on all aspects of daily life, had become disillusioned and stayed away from the polls.
In 2004 the Council of Guardians blocked key reformers aligned with Khatami from
running in parliamentary elections, and most other reformers withdrew in protest; this
resulted in the election of a parliament consisting almost entirely of hard-liners. When
it became clear that the parliament would fall under the control of hard-liners, Khatami
withdrew his two main legislative proposals that sought to curb the power of institu-
tions that carried out Ayatollah Khamenei’s wishes. “I withdraw the bills and declare
that I have met with defeat,” he said in March 2004 to reporters.
The final blow to Khatami’s reform movement came in 2005 when Tehran’s con-
servative mayor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, won a close election as president.
Ahmadinejad quickly made clear that he had no intention of pursuing the liberalized
political and social policies that had been at the heart of Khatami’s stalled initiatives.
Moreover, Ahmadinejad reverted to the tough anti-U.S. rhetoric of Iran’s conservative
religious leaders. That rhetoric was mirrored by U.S. president George W. Bush and
his aides, who accused Iran of attempting to develop nuclear weapons and of sup-
porting Islamist groups in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East labeled as ter-
rorist by the United States. Bush had signaled a confrontational approach in his Jan-
uary 2002 State of the Union speech, when he referred to Iran, Iraq, and North Korea
as an “axis of evil” that cooperated with terrorists and sought to build weapons of mass
destruction to threaten the rest of the world.
A few months earlier, after the al-Qaida attacks of September 11, 2001, the Ira-
nians had cooperated extensively with Washington in its pursuit of al-Qaida, allowing
the United States use of its territory and airspace, and in forming a post-Taliban gov-
ernment in Afghanistan. The tone of the relationship changed in January 2002 after
Israel intercepted a shipment of arms from Iran bound for the Palestinian territories.
What some observers view as a missed opportunity by the Bush administration to
improve relations occurred in May 2003, shortly after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq,
when Iran apparently passed a two-page message to the United States through the
Swiss embassy in which the Iranians expressed a desire to enter into bilateral talks.
Controversy surrounded the document and the Bush administration’s handling of the
overture, with some high-ranking official claiming never to have seen the document
and others acknowledging its existence.
Ahmadinejad reached out to the United States in 2006 with two letters, one
addressed to Bush and the other to the American people. Each letter appeared,
however, to be more of an affirmation of Ahmadinejad’s positions on international
affairs than a genuine call for dialogue. The Bush administration rebuffed both letters,
IRAN 397