Tehran

The Soviet Union acknowledged yesterday that it had supplied Iraq with short-range missiles, but said the weapons could not reach Iran's capital, Tehran, unless unauthorized modifications were carried out. Iran has charged that Iraq has been using Soviet-supplied ground-to-ground missiles in its latest barrage of Iranian population centers. But a senior Soviet official, in calling again for an end to the "war of the cities," said the Kremlin was not to blame for the new escalation in the 7 1/2-year-old war. "The efforts to present the whole affair as if the Soviet Union has anything to do with it are absolutely unfounded," said Vsevolod L. Oleandrov, head of the Foreign Ministry's Directorate for International Organizations.

Before Iran Air Flight 655 was shot down, a debate was heating up over whether the United States should make new overtures to Tehran. This debate has actually intensified after the air tragedy, which has underlined the need to find a formula to end the Iran-Iraq war. Secretary of State George P. Shultz confirmed that before the accident, Iranian officials had sent messages through intermediaries that they were interested in a dialogue. Since these messages presumably reflect basic changes in Iran's geopolitical situation, it is likely that they will continue, despite the current ill feelings over the air tragedy.

Iraq fired a barrage of long-range missiles into Tehran today in attacks apparently aimed at ending the Persian Gulf war stalemate. The official Iraqi News Agency, monitored in Nicosia, said its gunners fired five surface-to-surface missiles into Tehran after two similar projectiles had exploded in Baghdad, killing and wounding "many civilians. " Iran's Islamic Republic News Agency IRNA, monitored earlier in Nicosia, said in urgent dispatches that "two loud explosions" were heard after nightfall yesterday in Tehran and "there may have been casualties and damage.

After nearly 20 years of hostility, small steps toward opening a dialogue between the people of Iran and the United States occurred this week at the University of Pennsylvania, as a professor from Tehran lectured on Iran's recent political changes. The visit of political scientist Moustafa Torkzahrani marked the first contact between American and Iranian academics since Iranian President Mohammad Khatami said in an appearance on U.S. television in January that he wanted to make a "crack in the wall of mistrust" between the two countries.

I must confess I do not understand Iranians. I know that sounds racist, treating Iranians as though all of them are alike, but as nearly as I can tell, they are. At least when you get them together in a group, they act the same: as though somewhere deep inside their psyche, there is a screw loose. That has been my experience. I recall the actions of Iranian students in Washington shortly after their brethren in Tehran had taken our embassy staff hostage. They responded to our outrage by putting bags on their heads and staging a protest against our government, which had let the deposed shah of Iran into the country for treatment of his cancer.

VIENNA - The U.N. nuclear agency chief will fly to Tehran over the weekend to sign a deal meant to allow his organization to resume a long-stalled search for evidence that Iran worked on developing nuclear arms, the agency and diplomats said Friday. The trip Sunday by International Atomic Energy Agency chief Yukiya Amano comes just four days ahead of a key meeting between six world powers and Iran where the six hope to wrest concessions from Tehran meant to reduce concerns that it wants such arms.

A vacation on the salt marshes of Cape Cod creates the delusion that all's right with the world. The neat patterns of nature on Blackfish Creek, where every plant and creature has its proper role, provide a calming sense of global order (especially after a trip to Baghdad). Cardinals whistle in the pines, the tall grasses disappear and return with the tides, an owl plaintively hoots each afternoon, and fiddler crabs send out bubbles from their sandy holes. However chaotic the planet (and the weather to the south)

WASHINGTON - The possibility of a confrontation between the United States and Iran appeared to grow Tuesday after the Obama administration dismissed an Iranian warning against moving a U.S. aircraft carrier into the Persian Gulf, saying the deployment was crucial to "the security and stability of the region. " Fears that a crisis could disrupt gulf tanker traffic carrying 40 percent of the world's seaborne oil drove international petroleum prices up by more than $4 a barrel, a potential threat to U.S. and global economies.

WASHINGTON - President Obama delivered his most explicit threat yet that the United States would attack Iran if that's what it takes to prevent the country from developing a nuclear bomb. At the same time, he warned Israelis they would only make a bad situation worse if they moved preemptively against Iranian nuclear facilities. The double-barreled warning, in an interview published Friday, came before Obama's high-stakes meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday and a speech Sunday to the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, a powerful pro-Israeli lobby.

Leaders of an Iranian exile army that operated in Iraq for more than two decades surrendered to U.S. forces yesterday and agreed to place their troops and equipment in camps under coalition control. The well-armed People's Mujaheddin, with about 6,000 members, was the last organized armed force in Iraq and a potential challenge to the authority of the U.S.-led coalition. Members of the group had spent more than two decades fighting against Iran's Islamic government with support from Saddam Hussein.

BAGHDAD - Iran and six world powers exchanged dueling proposals Wednesday in a tug-of-war over Tehran's nuclear program that pits international concerns about the Islamic Republic's potential to build atomic weapons against enforcing crippling sanctions on its people. The daylong back-and-forth in Baghdad focused largely on whether the current enrichment level of Iran's uranium production represents a line the United States and other powers will not permit Iran to cross for fear the uranium could become warhead-grade material.

VIENNA - The U.N. nuclear agency chief will fly to Tehran over the weekend to sign a deal meant to allow his organization to resume a long-stalled search for evidence that Iran worked on developing nuclear arms, the agency and diplomats said Friday. The trip Sunday by International Atomic Energy Agency chief Yukiya Amano comes just four days ahead of a key meeting between six world powers and Iran where the six hope to wrest concessions from Tehran meant to reduce concerns that it wants such arms.

VIENNA, Austria - The United States and Europe urged Iran on Monday to use coming talks with world powers to ease international worry that it may be aiming to develop nuclear arms, but Tehran said such concerns were based on "fake evidence" concocted to cause it political and economic harm. The statements at a 189-nation meeting looking for ways to strengthen the Nonproliferation Treaty reflected the divide over Iran's nuclear activities. The divisions threaten the success of the talks with six world powers and a separate meeting between Iran and the U.N. nuclear agency.

ISTANBUL - U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Sunday urged Iran to back up its declaration that Islam bars weapons of mass destruction by agreeing to a plan that would prove it does not intend to develop nuclear arms. Ahead of international talks April 13 in Istanbul on Iran's uranium-enrichment program, Clinton talked strategy with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who visited Tehran last week with other government officials. "They were told that the supreme leader [Ayatollah Ali Khamenei]

In the midst of the media frenzy about a possible Iran war, the renewal of nuclear diplomacy is getting scant attention. So here's a news bulletin: Squeezed by unprecedented sanctions, and isolated by international pressure, Iran has agreed to new talks to address its suspect nuclear program. They will probably begin next month in Istanbul, Turkey. "We do believe there is still a window that allows for a diplomatic resolution of this issue," President Obama said, while sitting next to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this month at the White House.

TEHRAN, Iran - It was literally a command performance in Iranian political theater: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was dragged Wednesday before parliament to face unprecedented questioning over his policies, suffering another blow from hard-line opponents who now have the upper hand. The full hour of posturing, potshots, and probing - broadcast live on Iranian radio - was a lesson in the unforgiving realities of Iran's two-tier political system and how it shapes all critical decisions, such as Iran's nuclear program and its standoff with the West.

TEHRAN, Iran - Iran on Tuesday rejected allegations that it attempted to clean up radioactive traces possibly left by secret nuclear work at a key military site before granting U.N. inspectors permission to visit the facility. Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast told reporters in Tehran that the allegations were misleading and false, and insisted that such traces could not be cleaned up. Satellite images of Iran's Parchin military facility that circulated last week appeared to show trucks and earthmoving vehicles at the location.

KARACHI, Pakistan - Iran and Pakistan are negotiating a barter deal in which Pakistan would supply up to 22 million tons of wheat in return for discounted electricity and petroleum products, Pakistani business leaders involved in the talks said. The proposal is part of a broader trade package being pursued by the neighboring states as Iran scrambles to find new suppliers to replace trading partners scared away by U.S. sanctions. While Iran and Pakistan have not been major trading partners historically, economic ties between the two nations are growing stronger - particularly with the construction of a pipeline to carry Iranian natural gas to energy-starved Pakistan, a project scheduled to be completed by the end of 2014.

Flawed arguments on Iran James Jay Carafano advances several flawed and distorted arguments in "Obama risking war in Mideast" (Sunday). First, he asserts that Iran is proceeding "apace to build a nuclear bomb. " This empty assertion is contrary to the official assessment of the U.S. intelligence community that Iran has not made a decision to develop a nuclear bomb. Moreover, he fails to note that Iran's senior cleric and other foreign-policy officials have consistently denounced nuclear weapons as a sin against Islam.

Daily life in Tehran, Iran - where I was born and spent the first 13 years of my life - is frequently an elaborate cat-and-mouse game between citizens constantly pushing the cultural envelope and a repressive state bent on suffocating individuality. The stakes in this game can be very high. Take the underground masquerade balls that members of Tehran's educated middle class are fond of throwing. By any standard, these are decadent affairs. Fueled by a benzene-like moonshine, Iranians dance the night away while donning provocative costumes - sometimes even dressing up as the ruling clerics right under their noses.