The London Times has this to say:

“Next week the former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami visits the United States. Though he will not meet government officials, the visit is significant and welcome. Khatami is reputedly a reformer. It may be possible, through him, to widen the gulf between Iranian pragmatists and theocratic populists. But there is a risk. The current Iranian regime menaces Israel and has lied to the EU about its nuclear programme. It must not interpret Khatami’s visit as proof of the value of bellicosity. Khatami must get the message that the West will be receptive to concessions, but will face down belligerence. There lies the problem: Khatami’s host in the US is Jimmy Carter.”

Exactly (although I’d be skeptical, to put it mildly, about just how much of a reformer Khatami really is or was). So far as I can see, in the course of his visit Khatami is going to be seeing a rabble of idiot parsons and a former White House stumblebum. I can nothing more guaranteed to send the Iranians a message of American division, confusion and weakness.

The man will be in the US. That might be an opportunity. It might not. A self-confident administration that understood the grubby necessities of power politics would be talking to him. This one isn’t. Draw your own conclusions. Instead the US will be “represented” by Carter, the very symbol of American failure in Iran.

The Times concludes:

“When the Shah’s revolutionary successors held 52 American diplomats hostage for 14 months, Ayatollah Khomeini accurately sneered: “Neither does Carter have the guts for military action, nor would anyone listen to him.” Carter cancelled the B1 bomber in the hope of gaining Soviet goodwill, later acknowledging bemusedly the Kremlin’s persisting “unfriendly rhetoric”. He earned the contempt of friendly European governments by announcing deployment of the neutron bomb and then cancelling it without consulting them. Last weekend he impertinently attacked Tony Blair’s closeness to George Bush. Doubtless he prefers the model of transatlantic relations he pioneered with Chancellor Helmut Schmidt of Germany, who observed in exasperation that Carter was “just not big enough for the game”. Less an elder statesman than a soft cushion who bears the impress of whoever sits on him, the 39th president is the last person Khatami should meet.”

Quite.