WASHINGTON, January 8: After nearly two decades of unbridled hostility, ties between Iran and the United States saw a public thawing following an unprecedented interview in which Iranian President Mohammed Khatami called for exchanges to break down the ``bulky wall of mistrust'' between the two countries.Iran smoked the peace pipe through a widely advertised 45-minute interview on CNN that was touted as a direct appeal to the American people. Large sections of Clinton administration officials and policy wonks saw the interview conducted in Teheran by CNN's international correspondent Christiane Amanpour, recently affianced to US State Department spokesman Jamie Rubin.Khatami held forth with a lengthy preamble of his views on American civilisation before entertaining questions. He said Iranians sensed an ``intellectual affinity with the essence of the American civilization'', praised ``the great American people'' and made it a point to separate them from US foreign policy, which he called a ``flawed policy of domination''.``I feel the American politicians should.adjust themselves to the standards of the American civilization,'' he said, ``and at least apologize to their own people because of the approach they have adopted.'' Among the examples he listed of American foreign policy which caused Iranians to feel ``humiliated and oppressed,'' were the overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953, the shooting down of an Iranian airliner in 1988 with nearly 300 people aboard by a US Navy ship, and the recent allocation of $20 million by Congress to topple the Iranian government.Evidently, Khatami's overtures were measured and far from abject. In fact, he once went as far as saying Iran feels ``no need for ties with the US''. There are many progressive countries that are far more advanced in their foreign policy than the US, he added. He criticized the US government for being ``behind the times'' and having a ``prisoner of a cold-war mentality'' in attempting to portray Islam as the new enemy.Khatamialso said the West was regrettably targeting progressive Islam rather than certain regressive interpretations of Islam, leaving no doubt as to where he stood in the Islamic spectrum. He called for an informal dialogue between the two countries. Careful not to offend the hardliners in Iran, he suggested there could first be an ``exchange of professors, writers, scholars, artistes, journalists and tourists''. The new relations among intellectuals could ``prepare for a change and create an opportunity to study a new situation''.But American analysts and officials were far from sanguine about the Iranian overtures and assurances. They are disappointed that Khatami did not call for a direct dialogue but instead opted for a slow, measured response.
