Iranian Alert -- December 6, 2003 -- IRAN LIVE THREAD

Congress Eyes Funds for Iran Dissidents

December 06, 2003
The Boston Globe
Bryan Bender

WASHINGTON -- For the first time, Congress is set to approve government funds openly earmarked to help undermine the Islamic government of Iran by providing money for dissidents inside the country, according to US officials and specialists.

The program calls for an initial $1.5 million to be spent next year to support the efforts of Iranians and Iranian organizations seeking to replace the government in Tehran with a democracy.

Though a relatively small amount of money, the funding carries great symbolic weight. Past efforts to use US government money to support Iranian dissidents have been sidetracked before reaching a final vote because of concerns that they would violate sanctions prohibiting any money from going to Iran, as well as an agreement in 1981, shortly after the release of US hostages in Tehran, to refrain from actively opposing the Iranian government.

But this time, Senator Sam Brownback, a Kansas Republican with close ties to the Bush administration who has long called for more active US efforts to weaken the Iranian government, has appended the funding provision to the so-called omnibus spending bill. The provision has already gone through negotiations of a House-Senate conference committee and is due to be formally approved early next week.

A spokesman for Brownback said the Bush administration knew the senator was inserting the provision and did not oppose it.

On Nov. 6, Bush announced that US policy would be geared toward supporting democracy for Middle East countries, but his administration's policy on Iran has stopped short of providing direct support for opposition leaders. White House and State Department leaders were unavailable for comment yesterday.

"It is clear from the regime's treatment of its own people that Iran is no democracy," Brownback told a group of Iranian Americans in July, in a speech his office provided to explain his position. "I understand that the State Department's job is diplomacy and the search for common ground. But now is a time for moral clarity, not excuses."

If it is approved by Congress, and then gets President Bush's signature, the provision could spark fierce debate over whether the United States is moving to an official position of supporting the overthrow of the clerics who govern Iran. Recently, the United States has dealt with Iran through a mixture of carrots and sticks, applying diplomatic pressure through European governments to negotiate inspections of Iran's nuclear program.

Under the bill before Congress, the State Department would be granted the approval to use funds for "making grants to educational, humanitarian, and nongovernmental organizations and individuals inside Iran to support the advancement of democracy and human rights in Iran," according to the House-Senate conference committee report.

The US government has approved similar funds, much of it spent by the nonprofit National Endowment for Democracy, to be used in other countries, particularly communist nations during the Cold War and more recently to support democracy movements in China.

Dissident groups have typically used the funds to oppose the regimes in those countries, including beaming unauthorized radio broadcasts calling attention to abuses and seeking a change of government.

But efforts to promote such opposition in Iran -- most recently a Brownback proposal this year to spend $50 million to fund expatriate Iranian radio and television stations broadcasting anti-regime programming -- have failed because of the legal concerns of opening up US coffers to back Iranian opposition groups.

The United States maintains sanctions against Iran that prohibit funds from being spent on Iranian goods and outlaws financial transactions with individuals inside the country. Meanwhile, in an agreement signed in Algiers in 1981, the United States, in naming Switzerland to represent its interests in Iran, pledged not to meddle in the internal affairs of the Iranian regime.

"It would be a significant change," Gary Sick, an Iran specialist at Columbia University and former staff member on the National Security Council in the Carter administration, said of the new program. Past attempts to provide money for Iranian dissidents "never succeeded and for the reason that they were viewed as either illegal or counterproductive," he said.

Other officials and analysts said that while the amount of money in the new bill is relatively small, it would nonetheless signal a more aggressive US stance in relation to Iran, which Bush has called a member of the "axis of evil" for its suspected pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and support of Islamic terrorist groups.

It could also prompt a forceful response from the Iranian government. In 1996, when The New York Times reported that $18 million was slated to be spent on covert activities designed to weaken the regime's grip on power, the Iranian government viewed it as a serious threat and took steps to counter it, according to Sick.

"The Iranians took it very seriously, and they began coming up with countertactics," including fanning anti-American sentiment in the government-controlled media.

It was never revealed whether the covert funds were used.

Brownback and others, however, believe the new money would be well spent. Iranian students launched a series of public protests in recent years, at least in part due to prodemocracy radio broadcasts by Iranians living outside the country.

Still, there remain fissures within the Bush administration on how to proceed with Iran. The State Department, which would receive the money, is believed to be less supportive of taking a more active role to destabilize the regime than the Pentagon, which has held a series of meetings with Iranian dissidents in recent years.

Pentagon officials have met with Reza Pahlavi, the son of the late shah of Iran, and Manucher Ghorbanifar, who came to prominence during the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages affair in the 1980s. Assistant Secretary of Defense Peter W. Rodman met with Hossein Khomeini, Ayatollah Khomeini's grandson who has broken with the ruling clerics, as recently as September.

Due to the State Department's opposition and questions about whether the contacts amount to covert activity that should be the responsibility of the CIA -- if any government agency at all -- the contacts have been curtailed, according to Defense Department officials.

Still, the Bush administration has stepped up its rhetoric against the Iranian regime in recent months, accusing it of seeking to destabilize Iraq and providing safe harbor from high-level members of the Al Qaeda terrorist network.

In his Nov. 6 speech commemorating the 20th anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy, the president called for greater urgency in spreading democracy in the Middle East, saying "We've reached another great turning point -- and the resolve we show will shape the next stage of the world democratic movement."

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2003/12/06/congress_eyes_funds_for_iran_dissidents/

Fighting the Worst Fascists Since Hitler

December 05, 2003
National Review Online
Victor Davis Hanson

Saddam's Baathists recently blew apart Japanese diplomats on their way to a meeting in Tikrit to discuss sending millions of dollars in aid to Iraq's poor. Their ghosts join those of U.N. officials who likewise were slain for their humanitarian efforts.

On the West Bank, three Americans were killed: Their felony was trying to interview young Palestinians for Fulbright fellowships for study in the United States. In turn, their would-be rescuers were stoned by furious crowds — not unlike the throngs that chant for Saddam on al Jazeera as they seek to desecrate or loot the bodies of murdered Spanish and Italian peacekeepers in Iraq while the tape rolls. All this, I suppose, is what bin Laden calls a clash of civilizations.

Jews at places of worship are systematically being blown up from Turkey to Morocco — along with British consular officials murdered in Istanbul, American diplomats murdered in Jordan, and Western tourists, Christians, and local residents murdered by Muslims in Bali, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. The new rule is that the more likely you are to help, give to, or worship in the Middle East, the more likely you are to be shot or blown up.

Most of the recent dead were noncombatants. All were either attempting to feed or aid Muslims, or simply wished to be left alone in peace. Their killers operate through the money and sanctuary of Middle East rogue regimes, the implicit support of thousands in the Muslim street, and the tacit neglect of even "moderate" states in the region — as long as the tally of killing is in the half-dozens or so, and not noticeable enough to threaten foreign investment or American aid, or to earn European disapproval.

But when the carnage is simply too much (too many Muslims killed as collateral damage or too many minutes on CNN), then suspects are miraculously arrested in Turkey or Saudi Arabia, or in transit to Iran or Syria — but more often post facto and never with any exegesis about why killers who once could not be found now suddenly are. No wonder Pakistani intelligence officers, Palestinian security operatives, Syrian diplomats, and Iraqis working for the Coalition are all at times exposed as having abetted the terrorists.

Yet it hasn't been a good six months for the Islamists' public relations. Billions the world over are slowly coming to a consensus that the Islamists' killing has cast as a shadow over the Middle East — a deeply disturbed place, better left to stew in its own juices. Only its exports of oil, religious extremism, and terror — not its manufacturing, science, medicine, banking, tourism, humanitarianism, literature, research, or philanthropy — seem to earn global attention. This is all a great tragedy, but one that, after September 11, gives us no time for tears.

Remember, even apart from all the killing in Israel and Iraq, all of the deadly terrorism since 9/11 — the synagogue in Tunisia, French naval personnel in Pakistan, Americans in Karachi, Yemeni attacks on a French ship, the Bali bombing, the Kenyan attack on Israelis, the several deadly attacks on Russians in both Moscow and Chechnya, the assault on housing compounds in Saudi Arabia, the suicide car bombings in Morocco, the Marriott bombing in Indonesia, the mass murdering in Bombay, and the Turkish killing — has been perpetrated exclusively by Muslim fascists and directed at Westerners, Christians, Hindus, and Jews.

We can diagnose the cause of this new fascism's growth — which has very little to do with the old canard that racism, colonialism, and the CIA are to blame. Instead, corrupt thugs in the Middle East have for years looted state treasuries. They have imposed Soviet-style state autocracy on tribal societies. And they have stripped basic human rights from a skyrocketing population — one that has received just enough Western medicine and technology to ensure an explosive birth rate, but not enough to encourage the commensurate social, economic, and cultural reform that would prevent such growth from making life in a Baghdad or Cairo desolate.

The demise of the Soviet Union left a terrible legacy — one rarely acknowledged by our own Middle East specialists. Its Stalinist machinery was left in place to kill and torture in awful places like Libya, Iraq, and Syria — but without the coercive force of the Soviets to ensure that such deadly antics did not expand across borders to draw the Russians into unwanted confrontations with the United States. In turn, without Communists to worry about, so-called moderates in places like Egypt and Jordan — excepting, of course, the petrol states of the Gulf — had very little in common, or much leverage, with the United States.

So with the demise of the Cold War, these pathologies came to full maturity. Globalization enticed the appetites of the impoverished — as cell phones, the Internet, and videos, along with fast food and cheap imported goods, gave the patina of prosperity. In fact, internationalization only reminded 400 million that they could have the junk of the West, but without its freedom, material security, education, health care, and recreation. It is one thing to call a friend on a cell phone, and quite another to realize that one's society cannot make the phone, cannot fix it, cannot improve upon it, and cannot even use it as desired — and is reminded of these failures by the very fact of the imported device's daily use.

If the onset of democracy in India, Malaysia, and Indonesia suggested that Islam was not incompatible with consensual government, that hopeful message apparently did not catch on in much of the Middle East. Far from attempting to end the endemic problems of sexual apartheid, illiteracy, religious intolerance, polygamy, and everything from "honor" killings to state-sanctioned legal barbarism, most autocracies in the region allowed Islamic extremists and apologists to champion just such "differences" — as if the existence of such Dark Age protocols and endemic anti-Semitism were proof that the Arab world suffered none of the weakness and decadence of a soft West. Enough fools in the West were always around to nod rather than to challenge such Hitleresque romance — and even to invite such fascists from the Middle East to speak in Europe and the United States to the "oohs" and "ahs" of a few stupid and spoiled self-hating elites.

Into this vacuum stepped the Islamists — fed by Saudi money, blackmailing dictators as they saw fit, championing the poor and dispossessed who found their messages of hatred against the United States and Israel a salve for their own wounded pride and misery. It did not hurt that their enmity of the West was about the only topic of free expression allowed in censored state media.

In their defense, the mullahs in the madrassas at least realized that if it were left to corrupt tyrants like Saddam Hussein, Khadafi, and Assad to offer alternatives to the West, the Arab world would soon be caught up in the same liberalization that had swept Asia and parts of South America and Africa — to the chagrin of the patriarch, imam, and warlord, whose currency is deference received rather than freedom granted.

This strange new fascism explains why millions in the Middle East who in theory do not like a Yasser Arafat, Saddam Hussein, or Osama bin laden still find consolation in the unrelenting opposition of these killers to the West. Kids whose parents were butchered by Saddam Hussein and are now fed and protected by American money and manpower nevertheless dance upon a burned out Humvee while shouting for Saddam to return. The same is true of those on the West Bank who have their capital looted by the Palestinian Authority, their relatives jailed or murdered, and their votes and speech curtailed: They will still praise Arafat to the skies — if he at least mutters some banality about hating the West. Because these are irrational responses — people acting from their appetites and impulses rather than their heads — we here in the United States, in our arrogant worship of our god Reason, with no confidence in or appreciation of our singular civilization, have gone about things pretty much all wrong.

Remember the worry about "getting the message out"? We all know the tiresome refrain: If the Arab world just knew about all the billions of dollars we give; all the Muslims we saved from the Balkans to Kuwait; all the censure we incurred to ease Orthodox Russians' treatment of Muslims in Chechnya, to stop Orthodox Serbian massacres of Albanians, or to discourage Chinese attacks on their own Muslim tribes; then surely millions of the ill-informed would reverse their opinion of us.

Sorry, the truth is just the opposite. The Arab street knows full well that we give billions to Jordan, Egypt, and the Palestinians — and are probably baffled that we don't cut it out. They also know we have just as frequently fought Christians on their behalf as Muslims; they know — if their voting feet tell them anything — that no place is more tolerant of their religion or more open to immigration than the United States. Yes, Islamists all know that opening a mosque in Detroit is one thing, and opening a church in Saudi Arabia is quite another. Hitler wasn't interested in Wilson's 14 Points or how nicely Germans lived in the U.S. — he cared only that we "cowboys" would not or could not stop what he was up to.

No, the message, much less getting it out, is not the problem. It is rather the nature of America — our freewheeling, outspoken, prosperous, liberty-loving citizens extend equality to women, homosexuals, minorities, and almost anyone who comes to our shores, and thereby create desire and with it shame for that desire. Indeed, it is worse still than that: Precisely because we worry publicly that we are insensitive, our enemies scoff privately that we in fact are too sensitive — what we think is liberality and magnanimity they see as license and decadence. If we don't have confidence in who we are, why should they?

To arrest this dangerous trend requires a radical reappraisal of our entire relationship with the Middle East. A Radio Free Europe, though valuable, nevertheless did not free Eastern Europe; nor did Voice of America. Containment and deterrence did. As long as governments in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and many Gulf states encourage hatred of the United States, we must quietly consider them de facto little different from a Libya, Syria, or Iran. For all the glitter and imported Western graphics, al Jazeera and its epigones are not that much different from Radio Berlin of the 1930s.

We had also better reexamine entirely the way we use force in the Middle East. We did not drive on to Baghdad in 1991 out of concern for the "coalition" — and got 350,000 sorties in the no-fly zones in return. We chose to worry about rebuilding before the current war ended, and let thousands of Baathist killers fade away, and in the aftermath allowed mass looting and continual killing before our most recent get-tough policy.

In fact, anytime we have showed restraint — using battleship salvos and cruise missiles when our Marines were killed, our embassies blown up, and our diplomats murdered; allowing the killers on the Highway of Death to reach Basra in 1991; letting Saddam use his helicopters to gun down innocents — we have earned disdain, not admiration. In contrast, the hijackers chose not to take the top off the World Trade Center, but to incinerate the entire building — proof that they wished not to send us a message but to kill us all, and to kill us to the applause of millions, if the recent popularity of Osama bin Laden and his henchmen in the Arab street is any indication.

We had better rethink the entire notion of dealing with the mythical moderates within regimes like Iran and Syria. I am sure that they exist, as they existed in Saddam's Iraq. But we see the moderates now in Iraq and — with all due respect — they are not exactly the stuff of Ethan Allan, Paul Revere, or the Swamp Fox. In fact, in the Middle East, tens of thousands of democrats are more passive in their desire for freedom than are a few hundred fascists in their zeal for tyranny. We should accept that dissidents would never have toppled Saddam on their own — and are not quite sure what to do even in his absence. Victory alone, not stalemate or a bellum interruptum, will free the Arab people and extend to them the same opportunities now found in Eastern Europe.

In short, there is no reason for any American diplomat to have much to do in Teheran or Damascus — the haven of choice for many of the killers who bomb in Turkey, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. "Getting the message out" to a Syria is like traveling to Warsaw in 1950 to convince the government there how nicely Poles are treated in Chicago; sending peace feelers to Teheran is analogous to doing the same to Cuba in about 1962; discussing policy with Saudi Arabia is like talking to Gen. Franco about the perils of Mussolini or Hitler; incorporating Jordan in our resistance is like counting on a France circa 1940.

Peace and harmony will come, but only when the Middle East, not us, changes-which, tragically, will be brought along more quickly by deterrence and defiance than appeasement and dialogue. President Bush was terribly criticized for his exasperated "bring them on," but that was one of his most honest, heartfelt — and needed — ex tempore remarks of this entire conflict.

We are not in a war with a crook in Haiti. This is no Grenada or Panama — or even a Kosovo or Bosnia. No, we are in a worldwide struggle the likes of which we have not seen since World War II. The quicker we understand that awful truth, and take measures to defeat rather than ignore or appease our enemies, the quicker we will win. In a war such as this, the alternative to victory is not a brokered peace, but abject Western suicide and all that it entails — a revelation of which we saw on September 11.

Despite some disappointments about the postbellum reconstruction and the hysteria of our critics, our military is doing a wonderful job. We should understand that they have the capability to win this struggle in Iraq and elsewhere — but only if we at home accept that we have been all along in a terrible war against terrible enemies.

http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson200312050838.asp

How a Shady Iranian Kept the Pentagon's Ear

December 07, 2003
The New York Times
James Risen

WASHINGTON -- When clandestine meetings between Pentagon officials and Iranian dissidents were first revealed last summer, the Bush administration played down the importance of the contacts, particularly with one participant — a discredited Iranian deal maker who had played a role in the Iran-contra affair in the late 1980's.

But now officials say the initial meeting with the Iranians was organized with the knowledge of a top national security adviser to President Bush, who also informed George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, and Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is examining the December 2001 and June 2002 meetings, which were initiated by Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian who acted as a middleman in the Iran-contra affair during the Reagan administration and was long ago labeled a fabricator by American intelligence officials. One important question is whether any senior administration officials were aware of his involvement before the meetings.

Stephen J. Hadley, Mr. Bush's deputy national security adviser, raised no objection when Pentagon officials told him of plans to meet with the Iranians in late 2001, several officials said. A senior administration official familiar with Mr. Hadley's version of events said Mr. Hadley did not remember being told that Mr. Ghorbanifar would be at the meeting.

When the contacts with Mr. Ghorbanifar and other Iranians were first reported in the press last summer, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said that nothing came of the meetings and that beforehand, "Everyone in the interagency process, I'm told, was apprised of it." But the high-level attention the meetings received at the White House and other agencies was not disclosed then.

The fresh details about the contacts also illuminate a schism between American intelligence agencies and more hawkish officials at the Pentagon and in the White House who pursued the contacts.

As part of its review of intelligence agencies' work before the war in Iraq, the Senate Intelligence Committee is also examining the influence of a small group of analysts working for Douglas J. Feith, under secretary of defense for policy and planning. The Pentagon officials who met with Mr. Ghorbanifar worked in Mr. Feith's policy office.

Mr. Ghorbanifar's involvement caused concern within the Bush administration because it evoked memories of Iran-contra and questions about whether the Pentagon was engaging in rogue covert operations. The Pentagon has conducted its own internal review of the Ghorbanifar matter, officials said.

In the 1980's, Mr. Ghorbanifar repeatedly sought contacts with the C.I.A. and other agencies in order to act as a go-between with Iranian officials in what became known as Iran-contra affair. The arms-for-hostage scandal was a series of secret maneuvers to sell arms to Iran in exchange for the release of American hostages in Lebanon and financing for contra fighters opposing the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. It led to lengthy Congressional and criminal investigations.

One result of the Iran-contra scandal was a decision by the C.I.A. that it could not trust Mr. Ghorbanifar. A 1987 Congressional report on Iran-contra said that after Mr. Ghorbanifar failed C.I.A.-administered polygraph examinations, the agency issued a rare "Fabricator Notice," warning that he "should be regarded as an intelligence fabricator and a nuisance." He has been considered a con artist by the C.I.A. ever since.

But he has been persistent. Two years ago he found a way to act as an intermediary again — this time with the Pentagon. The secret meetings were first held in Rome in December 2001, and were brokered by Michael Ledeen, a conservative analyst at the American Enterprise Institute who has an interest in Iranian affairs and close ties to many hard-line conservatives in the administration.

At first, Mr. Ledeen was skeptical of Mr. Ghorbanifar's offer. "Ghorbanifar called me, and at first I said, `Are you insane?' " he said. "But he said he could arrange meetings with Iranians with current information about what Iran was doing. It wasn't information coming from him. He was just arranging the meetings."

Mr. Ledeen's role in the meetings also raised concerns in the administration, since he too had played a role in Iran-contra. At that time, he was a consultant to the National Security Council and sought to act as a go-between with Israeli officials to explore potential Israeli-American cooperation on Iran. Since then, Mr. Ledeen has gained a reputation in Washington as a prominent advocate for changing the leadership in Iran.

Mr. Ledeen said in an interview that Mr. Ghorbanifar contacted him in late 2001 and said that several Iranians with knowledge of Iran's activities in Afghanistan were willing to talk with American officials. Mr. Ledeen told Pentagon officials that the Iranians had information about Iran's involvement with terrorists in Afghanistan, where American forces were battling Al Qaeda. Several administration officials said Mr. Ledeen then approached the Pentagon to set up the meetings.

Administration officials said a senior Pentagon official then contacted Mr. Hadley at the National Security Council. After hearing about the overture, he expressed no reservations about the meeting and informed Mr. Tenet and Mr. Armitage of the plans, officials said.

But the Pentagon officials did not notify the United States Embassy in Rome of their plans to meet with the Iranians in Italy, thus violating interagency procedures, officials said.

When they found out about the meetings — apparently from Italian officials — the embassy officials, including the C.I.A.'s station chief in Rome, sent cables to Washington alerting their superiors about the meetings with Mr. Ledeen, Mr. Ghorbanifar and the Pentagon officials.

The C.I.A. and the State Department raised objections, both to the way the meetings had been conducted and to the involvement of both Mr. Ledeen and Mr. Ghorbanifar, administration officials said. Mr. Hadley, who received a trip report after the Rome meeting from Mr. Ledeen, agreed to make sure that the meetings were ended, the officials added.

Yet after that decision, Pentagon officials met again with Mr. Ghorbanifar and the Iranians in Paris in 2002, without White House clearance, administration officials said. Senior administration officials said the White House was still uncertain how that meeting came about.

Mr. Ledeen blamed the C.I.A. and the State Department for the administration decision to abandon the contacts. He said he was later told by officials that the information provided by the Iranians had "saved American lives" in Afghanistan. He said he believed that it was a mistake to abandon the contacts.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/07/politics/07INTE.html?pagewanted=1

As Iranian Elections Approach, Voters Lose Faith in the Reformers

By NAZILA FATHI
Published: December 7, 2003

TEHRAN, Dec. 6 — In 1997 Lida Salehi enthusiastically worked on the presidential campaign of Mohammad Khatami, the reformist candidate. She even talked her parents, who had not cast a ballot since the referendum in 1979 that turned Iran into an Islamic Republic, into voting for him.

"I believed that he was the man who would bring change, especially because of what he said about freedom and democracy," said Ms. Salehi, a 25-year-old painter. She has voted for reformist politicians in three more elections since then.

Now, with parliamentary elections scheduled for February, she and many others who supported the reformists are changing their minds, saying their support has merely resulted in a continuation of the current system.

The most evident sign of disillusionment with President Khatami's reform movement appeared in the local town council elections a year ago. Unlike those in national elections, the candidates in the local elections had not been vetted by the hard-line Guardian Council, which has been a powerful deterrent in keeping voters at bay.

The turnout in large cities, however, was as low as 10 to 15 percent — sharply lower than the 52 percent turnout that was recorded in 1980.

A low voter turnout on Feb. 20 is likely to help hard-line politicians galvanize their support and win control of Parliament, which is now in the hands of reformists. Tehran's municipal council was easily conquered last year by hard-liners, who have reversed liberal plans for modernizing the city.

The new mayor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, turned several art galleries into prayer centers during the Islamic religious month of Ramadan, canceled concerts and suspended many events at the city's cultural centers. He plans to build women-only parks.

"People's behavior last year showed that people do not want just to vote for candidates," Ali Akbar Mousavi Khoini, a reformist member of Parliament, said in a recent speech at Amir Kabir University, referring to the low voter turnout.

"They want their vote to have an impact on the layers of power structure and affect their rights in society," he said.

People discouraged about the power of the vote here point to the power exerted by appointed bodies, like the hard-line judiciary, which has jailed advocates for political change and shut down liberal newspapers, or the watchdog Guardian Council, which has blocked reform bills. Parliament, they say, has been paralyzed in trying to pass a reform agenda.

Two-thirds of the population is under 30, and young voters are seeking more social and political freedoms. Even though President Khatami supported increasing social freedoms, many young people accuse his movement of lacking a clear strategy.

The reform movement has been widely accused of not using its popular support and of not taking risks to achieve change.

"We simply see no logical reason for voting in the elections," said Mehdi Habibi, a leader of the student movement called the Office for Fostering Unity, which has urged a boycott of the elections.

"People vote so that their demands are met in the forms of laws, but we know that this is not possible in the current system anymore," he said.

"If hard-liners want to win the Parliament with a 15 percent turnout, let them do it, but then they cannot claim that they represent the majority of people," he added.

Reformists, worried about the turnout, have stepped up a campaign to draw people to the polls.

One member of the movement, Alireza Alavitabar, a professor at Tehran University, said in an interview with the Iranian Student News Agency that he favored a government free of the power of the supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who currently has unlimited power to determine policy.

Mostafa Tajzadeh, a former interior minister, said reformers should encourage the next Parliament to put issues before the people in the form of referendums.

"Then no one can oppose holding referendums if people support the idea overwhelmingly," he said.

"We know that the mood is not promising, and people do not see the prospect for change to participate in the elections," he said. "But we will do our best to encourage free and fair elections."

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/07/international/middleeast/07TEHR.html?ex=1071378000&en=f127b0ff266bc1e8&ei=5040&partner=MOREOVER

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