| I'm going to add what I have found to answer my own question. I have found that this appears to be so divisive a subject that an internet discussion is impossible without immediate mud-slinging. The articles I have found are overtly biased in one direction or another. So I turned to wikipedia... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohammad_Khatami Read for yourself and decide 1) was Khatami a reformer, helping to make Iran a better place. I mean relatively better of course! If you don't think he was, exit now. Now assuming you think he was, the question is did the war on terror hinder him. I'm not an academic but when the sources are obviously biased it can be instructive to see what one side is prepared to concede about the other. Here is paper written for the US National Intelligence Committee that warns this may be an outcome https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/warterror_2001.pdf "Two tentative, and partly contradictory, projections suggest themselves: (a) the more
intense and widespread our counter-terror campaign within the Middle East, the more
ammunition will the conservatives have to stoke anti-US sentiment within Iran and siphon
support away from the reformist camp; " And here is an article trying to refute that Khatami was hampered by the war on terror, by the Washington Institute for Near East policy which wikipedia says, "is a pro-Israel American think tank" https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/khatami-... Which firmly establishes that American politicians and media people were pushing the line that the Axis of Evil speech had hampered Khatami in reforming Iran. Therefore I deduce that some people were indeed stating this as a truth at the time from within mainstream America, and it is not just an anti-american conspiracy. The article tries to refute it of course, but in doing so acknowledges that it is an opinion held at the time. You read, you decide. |