[Excerpts from an article by Arnold Beichman, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, and a columnist for the Washington Times.]

So long as Iran remains as Islamist terrorist theocracy, President Clinton's efforts to conciliate Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the real ruler of this country, are doomed to failure. Remember how the ludicrous Iran-Contra-hostages deal by the Reagan administration with the ruling revolutionaries flopped and made this country look ridiculous… And here we are two administrations and 12 years later still trying to do the impossible…

…In a real sense Iran's primary targets, as it is that of any dictatorship, the country's people, large sectors of whom are alienated from the regime. Somehow this widespread alienation among Iran's almost 65 million inhabitants seems to have escaped notice by the Clinton administration which persists in pursuing a policy of futile appeasement of Iran's rejectionist theocrats.

For example, the State Department recently placed the National Council of Resistance, an Iranian exile body which has been fighting ayatollism and which has received strong congressional support, on list of terrorist organizations. In so doing, Assistant Secretary of State Martin Indyk said that the department had acted on the recommendation of the Iranian government, one which the department has called a state sponsor of "terrorism".

Would you like me to go over that again? A government called Iran, which supports and finances terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah, tells the State Department that an anti-Iranian exile organization is a terrorist group and the State Department agrees. Wait a minute… And today there is FBI evidence linking Iran to the June 25, 1996 truck bombing of the Khobar Towers...

The American record of relations with Iran is discouraging. During the Carter presidency, the Shah of Iran was a White House hero where he was wined and dined. In 1978, the CIA reported that Iran was "not in revolutionary or even in a pre-revolutionary stage". Two months later, the Shah was in exile and the ayatollahs had begun their tyrannical reign.

Today we see the State Department once more dreaming about the impossible - reconciliation with ayatollism, this time via Mohammed Khatami...

Former Ambassador James E. Akins wrote in the Los Angeles Times in June 19, 1998: "My enduring nightmare is that one of our major foreign policy blunders in the Middle East is about to be repeated in the same country. The United States supported the Shah long after it was clear to every objective observer that almost all Iranians had turned against him. It would open relations with the Iranian theocracy just as the Iranian people have concluded that it must go."

At a time when Iran is bursting with discontent about ayatollism, when repression of the Iranian people is worse than ever, when the regime has become, military, the most powerful country in the Persian Gulf, Mr. Akin's words of warning are surely more urgent today than they were 19 months ago.
 

Dozens of Clerical Regime's Forces Killed or Wounded, Iran Zamin News Agency, January 13

The Mojahedin Command inside Iran reported today that in extensive clashes between Mojahedin combatants and the mullahs' suppressive forces north of the town of Saleh-Abad in Ilam province (western Iran) on Tuesday and Wednesday, dozens of officers and agents of the regime's military and security forces were killed or wounded.

Altogether 24 strike units of the Intelligence Ministry and the Revolutionary Guards, the special unit of the State Security Forces in Ilam using helicopters, the 176th battalion of the army's 16th armored division, and army counter-intelligence officers took part in the clashes. Three Mojahedin combatants were killed in the fighting.
 

Tehran Upgrades Chinese Missile, The Times of London, January 11

Iran and North Korea are working together to improve the accuracy of a naval cruise missile which Tehran bought from the Chinese in the mid-1990s. The joint program is intended to provide the Iranian Navy with an advanced weapon capable of being used in a coastal defense or anti-ship role.

The new weapon is an improved version of the Chinese C802 cruise missile…
 

"Velayat-e Faqih," the "Backbone" of Mullahs' Regime - Clerical Body, Agence France Presse, January 13

TEHRAN - Iran's powerful Assembly of Experts warned members of the parliament to be elected next month not to "create crises," the official news agency IRNA reported.

The Assembly added that the principle of "velayat-e faqih" -- rule by a religious leader -- is the "backbone of the Islamic republic."

The assembly met on Wednesday and issued a statement stressing the need to forestall "troubles" in the country, and called on the government of Khatami to "pay more attention to economic problems, control inflation and create jobs."
 

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