Renewed speculation that Mohammad Khatami may oppose Ahmedinijad in the Iranian Presidential election on June 10, and that he could have support from Rafsanjani’s camp, increases the chance that the Obama team will delay their outreach to Iran until late 2009, enabling Iran to “run out the clock.”. Khatami is certainly a more likelable figure, but his past history gives little reason to believe he will slow the nuclear program...
For example, In March 2002, at the height of the Khatami presidency, Iran began work to improve the P-2 centrifuge to enrich uranium more rapidly than the P-1. In August 2002, the Iranian opposition exposed a secret enrichment plant at Natanz that Iran had concealed from the IAEA. The IAEA found traces of highly enriched uranium in February through April, 2003 inspections at Natanz. In April, 2003, the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization said that Iran had started an ambitious nuclear energy program and was poised to begin processing uranium.
As soon as the U.S. began the invasion of Iraq to overthrow Iran’s mortal enemy Saddam Hussein, beginning on March 20, 2003, Khatami’s Iran began infiltrating agents and weapons into Iraq to take the lives of American soldiers and support insurgents undermining U.S. efforts at stabilization. By August 6, 2005, when Khatami stepped down, the aggressive Iranian nuclear program and the Iranian subversion in Iraq were in high gear.
