Mohammad Khatami today appointed Mohammad Ali Abtahi to head the Presidential Office, according to presidential press and information department….

[Abtahi was a deputy to Khatami in the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance when he was culture minister in the 1980s, before being forced out of his post by staunch supporters of "moderate" Rafsanjani].

Rival Factions Attack Each Other in Their Press, State-Run News Agency, August 10 

The morning Persian daily Jomhuri Eslami today in an article criticized the prevailing theme in some press reports that 'lobby groups' are pressuring the new president to influence the make up of the yet to be announced cabinet.

"The initiators of these allegations ask the president to be open with the public and expose these lobby groups," added the article.

Attributing these allegations to the supporters of Khatami's presidency, the article states that the prevailing impression in the public is that the lobby groups are from the defeated political wing in the may 23 presidential elections….

The paper then pointed to the nomination of a person whom it called "a small duplicate of the current foreign minister" and candidacy of "a personality who has been called naive and intimidated…" for the ministry of culture and Islamic guidance," as further evidences of the opposition wing's neutrality in the cabinet nominations.

The supporters of Khatami's presidency have embarked on this propaganda to obtain more concessions from the new president and also to intimidate the Majlis deputies to forego their lawful rights to oppose any of the nominees, concluded the paper.

After Rushdie's Book, An Art Collection?, Sunday Telegraph, August 10 

Iran's mullahs want to humiliate their oil-rich Arab neighbors by publicly burning a multi-million-dollar collection of paintings commissioned during the Gulf war.

Iran claims that the collection, which includes portraits of all the main Gulf leaders, is an offence to Islam….

Teheran has offered to pay an estimated £5 million for the collection, now stored in the Monte Carlo studios of the Italian painter Andrew Vicari….

Speaking last week at his studio, Vicari said he had never expected his work to cause such a furore. "Burning them, for me, would be the same as someone having an image of me and then sticking pins in it," he said. "And it would be a disaster for the Middle East." Having learnt of the Iranians' real intentions, he says he will not contemplate any offer from Teheran, no matter how generous….

Overview 

[Excerpts from an article by Jack Payton]

Iran got itself s new president this week, and already there's talk that it's time for the United States to ease up on its tough policies toward the Islamic republic.

The reason for this is that Mohammad Khatami, the new political leader in Tehran, is supposed to be a moderate —or at least what some are calling "a relative moderate." And because of this, it's expected that the Europeans will soon be putting pressure on us to lighten up a bit and to work with them on a new, more flexible policy toward Iran….

If all this sounds familiar, it's because the same argument, in one form or another, has been popping up here and there for more than a decade….

…Sometimes the foreign leaders we deal with don't just disagree with this or that U.S. policy but are fundamentally hostile to who we are and what we stand for.

There's probably no better example of this than Iran — not the great majority of Iran's people, mind you, but the clerical extremists who've been governing the country since 1979…..

And…it's hard to ignore that the government in Tehran sends out hit teams to kill Iranian dissidents around the world. Or that it bankrolls some of the planet's most fanatical terrorist organizations. Or that it does everything within its power to prevent Israelis and Arabs from making peace. Or, finally, that it's working full-speed to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

The Europeans tried to deal with these inconvenient facts by pressing ahead with what they called a "critical dialogue" with Iran….

The fact that this approach wasn't working too well became inescapable to the Europeans when a criminal court in Germany concluded last April that Iran's top political and spiritual leadership directly ordered the murder of four dissidents in Berlin. Since then, the "critical dialogue" notion has been largely abandoned….

Add all these factors together and it's easy to see why the Clinton administration is being especially careful about improving relations with Iran or its new president….

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