Rafsanjani

TEHRAN, Iran -- Iran's morals police have launched a nationwide crackdown on "vice and social corruption" in the capital's streets, but after hundreds of arrests and with public indignation running high, President Hashemi Rafsanjani has declared that the operation has gone wrong, a newspaper reported yesterday.More than 800 women were arrested for dress code violations, with many being detained for wearing sunglasses, witnesses said. Several clashes between the vice squads and the public were reported, and a European diplomat was said to have been beaten Sunday for refusing to allow the authorities to search his car."

BEIRUT, Lebanon -- Iran's judiciary acquitted a moderate former government official of espionage charges yesterday, prompting vehement criticism by supporters of hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and escalating the infighting within Iran's leadership. Authorities had charged Hossein Mousavian, Iran's former nuclear negotiator and confidant of pragmatist cleric Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani, with divulging state secrets to foreign countries this year. But the judiciary announced that the Revolutionary Court was clearing him of a pair of espionage charges, while convicting him of a far lesser charge of propagating against the system, a security charge often handed to journalists.

TEHRAN, Iran -- Iranian moderates swept toward a landslide victory in the parliament, edging out several leading hard-liners and opening a path for President Hashemi Rafsanjani's moves toward better relations with the West, the official Iranian news agency reported yesterday.Several of Mr. Rafsanjani's key allies captured seats in the 270-seat Majlis, while well-known radicals placed well down in the balloting and were likely to be shut out of the seatsthat they have used as a forum for maintaining the combative line set by the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

TEHRAN, Iran - The ultraconservative mayor of Tehran and a more moderate former president launched the official two-day presidential runoff campaign yesterday, plowing ahead in search of votes in spite of fresh charges that the first-round balloting was illegal. Reformers vowed to rescue the country from becoming "fascist" or "Taliban" if Mayor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected, while a spokesman for the conservatives insisted that their candidate was not extremist and was being demonized by reformers.

TEHRAN, Iran -- President Hashemi Rafsanjani is emerging from Iran's parliamentary elections with both a strong mandate to rebuild the country and the toughest challenge of his political career.If the final outcome of the elections in fact refects what appears to be an overwhelming victory for his followers, Mr. Rafsanjani will be hard-pressed to come up with another bogyman to blame for Iran's problems.For the first time in Iran's 13-year-old revolution, there will be no outside force to blame for the absence of prosperity -- not the policies of the shah's regime, not the turmoil of its overthrow, not the war with Iraq, not the obstreperous parliament dominated by revolutionary purists.

TEHRAN, Iran - By Iran's official standards, this was risque television. In a rare on-air conversation last weekend with a panel of young people, 70-year- old cleric and presidential front-runner Hashemi Rafsanjani declared that Iranians should have greater freedom to choose the colors and styles of their clothes. "Design and color depends on people's taste. ... There should at least be clothes - no nudity," the snowy-haired political veteran said to a roar of laughter. The image, part of a half-hour campaign ad, was a very different Rafsanjani from the fiery speaker who warned a Tehran University crowd in December 2001 that an "Islamic bomb" would balance the power of Israel.

BEIRUT, Lebanon -- Iran's judiciary acquitted a moderate former government official of espionage charges yesterday, prompting vehement criticism by supporters of hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and escalating the infighting within Iran's leadership. Authorities had charged Hossein Mousavian, Iran's former nuclear negotiator and confidant of pragmatist cleric Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani, with divulging state secrets to foreign countries this year. But the judiciary announced that the Revolutionary Court was clearing him of a pair of espionage charges, while convicting him of a far lesser charge of propagating against the system, a security charge often handed to journalists.

TEHRAN, Iran - The ultraconservative mayor of Tehran and a more moderate former president launched the official two-day presidential runoff campaign yesterday, plowing ahead in search of votes in spite of fresh charges that the first-round balloting was illegal. Reformers vowed to rescue the country from becoming "fascist" or "Taliban" if Mayor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected, while a spokesman for the conservatives insisted that their candidate was not extremist and was being demonized by reformers.

After years of equivocation, Iran's President Hashemi Rafsanjani has declared his willingness to establish official contacts with the United States. This decision will have a domestic import in Iran at least as stunning as Richard Nixon's historic 1971 opening to China was for U.S. politics. The revolution begun by the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini will never again be the same.All the pieces have not fallen into place, however. Mr. Rafsanjani cautioned that direct talks with the United States would have to be approved by Iran's supreme religious leader and national security council.

Iran is having a good war. If Iran and Iraq were the two losers of their 1980-1988 war, and all their enemies gainers, Iran is the principal winner of the current conflict in the Persian Gulf. To begin with, Iraq settled the 1980 dispute on Iran's terms, to demilitarize their border and free the Iraqi troops there to face the Americans to the south. Then Iran retrieved its prisoners from the hardship of Iraqi camps in their overdue prisoner exchange.More than that, Iran sees its two enemies destroying each other.

TEHRAN, Iran - By Iran's official standards, this was risque television. In a rare on-air conversation last weekend with a panel of young people, 70-year- old cleric and presidential front-runner Hashemi Rafsanjani declared that Iranians should have greater freedom to choose the colors and styles of their clothes. "Design and color depends on people's taste. ... There should at least be clothes - no nudity," the snowy-haired political veteran said to a roar of laughter. The image, part of a half-hour campaign ad, was a very different Rafsanjani from the fiery speaker who warned a Tehran University crowd in December 2001 that an "Islamic bomb" would balance the power of Israel.

JERUSALEM - President Bush's inclusion of Iran with Iraq and North Korea in the "axis of evil" prompted several commentators and academicians to express surprise, but they shouldn't have. Mr. Bush merely called a spade a spade. Some like to call Iran a democracy. It is not. President Mohammad Khatami may have been elected in 1997 from a field of four candidates, but only after 234 others were disqualified for being too liberal or too secular. In other words, the Iranian leadership believes that if the people have true choice, they will choose wrong.

In 1985, the Iran-contra affair began with arms shipments to Iran in exchange for release an American hostage in Lebanon. The Reagan administration's National Security Council convinced itself that surreptitious dealing would strengthen the "moderates" in Tehran against the extremists.Nine years later, Iran stands informally accused by Israeli and American officials of sponsoring new outbreaks of terrorism, notably bombings against Jewish targets in Argentina and Britain. Iranian influence in Hezbollah in Lebanon is still great.

TEHRAN, Iran -- Iran's morals police have launched a nationwide crackdown on "vice and social corruption" in the capital's streets, but after hundreds of arrests and with public indignation running high, President Hashemi Rafsanjani has declared that the operation has gone wrong, a newspaper reported yesterday.More than 800 women were arrested for dress code violations, with many being detained for wearing sunglasses, witnesses said. Several clashes between the vice squads and the public were reported, and a European diplomat was said to have been beaten Sunday for refusing to allow the authorities to search his car."

London. -- We could be in another world. Only 12 years ago this very day, Jimmy Carter engaged in an impossible battle for re-election while consumed with the nightmare of the American hostages held in Iran.Since then, in short succession, we've had the Iraq-Iran war, the Persian Gulf war, the arrival on the scene of both the Jewish and the Islamic nuclear bomb, the emergence of new ex-Soviet Muslim nations and the Middle East peace talks. Yet in this American presidential election none of this gets more than a sniff of attention from the candidates.

TEHRAN, Iran -- President Hashemi Rafsanjani is emerging from Iran's parliamentary elections with both a strong mandate to rebuild the country and the toughest challenge of his political career.If the final outcome of the elections in fact refects what appears to be an overwhelming victory for his followers, Mr. Rafsanjani will be hard-pressed to come up with another bogyman to blame for Iran's problems.For the first time in Iran's 13-year-old revolution, there will be no outside force to blame for the absence of prosperity -- not the policies of the shah's regime, not the turmoil of its overthrow, not the war with Iraq, not the obstreperous parliament dominated by revolutionary purists.

In 1985, the Iran-contra affair began with arms shipments to Iran in exchange for release an American hostage in Lebanon. The Reagan administration's National Security Council convinced itself that surreptitious dealing would strengthen the "moderates" in Tehran against the extremists.Nine years later, Iran stands informally accused by Israeli and American officials of sponsoring new outbreaks of terrorism, notably bombings against Jewish targets in Argentina and Britain. Iranian influence in Hezbollah in Lebanon is still great.

JERUSALEM - President Bush's inclusion of Iran with Iraq and North Korea in the "axis of evil" prompted several commentators and academicians to express surprise, but they shouldn't have. Mr. Bush merely called a spade a spade. Some like to call Iran a democracy. It is not. President Mohammad Khatami may have been elected in 1997 from a field of four candidates, but only after 234 others were disqualified for being too liberal or too secular. In other words, the Iranian leadership believes that if the people have true choice, they will choose wrong.

TEHRAN, Iran -- Iranian moderates swept toward a landslide victory in the parliament, edging out several leading hard-liners and opening a path for President Hashemi Rafsanjani's moves toward better relations with the West, the official Iranian news agency reported yesterday.Several of Mr. Rafsanjani's key allies captured seats in the 270-seat Majlis, while well-known radicals placed well down in the balloting and were likely to be shut out of the seatsthat they have used as a forum for maintaining the combative line set by the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

WHEN Gary Sick was on President Jimmy Carter's National Security Council, I worked closely with him on the negotiations for the return of our hostages in Tehran from late 1980 to January 1981.I admire Sick and agree with him that Congress should fully investigate the alleged efforts of the Reagan-Bush campaign team to delay the hostages' release until after the 1980 presidential election.But on the present evidence, much of it detailed in Sick's recent article (Other Voices, April 17), I am skeptical about whether a deal was made, or, if one was, whether it had any effect on the timing of the hostages' release.