Khatami Arrives As U.S. Weighs Sanctions on Iran

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Former Embassy Hostages Criticize Trip
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.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/04/AR2006090400720.html