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What Scares Iran's Mullahs?

[New York Times] Abbas Milani - After a meeting with the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the leader's chief foreign policy adviser, Ali Akbar Velayati, indicated last week that the mullahs might be ready to agree to some kind of a suspension of uranium enrichment. Velayati also announced that the Holocaust is a fact of history and chastised those who question its reality. The strengthened American armada in the Persian Gulf has helped encourage the mullahs to negotiate, but their attitude change began in late December when the UN Security Council finally passed a resolution against the Tehran regime. Top leaders of the Islamic Republic have made it clear that they consider sanctions a serious threat. The resolution succeeded because few things frighten the mullahs more than the prospect of confronting a united front made up of the EU, Russia, China and the U.S. The writer is director of Iranian studies at Stanford and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.
2007-02-23 01:00:00
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