Iran has raised the volume of its anti-American rhetoric, proclaiming that the United States is still "The Great Satan" and the Islamic republic's number one enemy.
The build-up of vitriol against Washington will peak Saturday, the 10th anniversary of the seizure of the American embassy in Tehran by radical students which led to 52 American diplomats and servicemen being held hostage for 444 days.Hopes that the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and the elevation three months ago of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani as president would lead to a thaw in Tehran-Washington relations remain unfulfilled.
Washington has been billed as a terrorist state, a thug and a ruffian that lives by the law of the jungle in a concerted campaign by Iran to whip up renewed anti-American fervor.
Radicals plan to march on the U.S. Embassy building on Saturday, named "The Day of Struggle Against Global Arrogance," to stage an anti-American rally.
Organizers say 160 American flags will be burned, 10 for each Kuwaiti Shiite Moslem beheaded by Saudi Arabia after bomb incidents in Islam's holy city of Mecca. Iran has accused the United States and Saudi Arabia of being behind the bombings.
Iran said it was opening the embassy for five days to display an exhibition on U.S. espionage and parade people accused of spying for Washington.
As Khomeini lay dying, commentators seized on any hint of a softening towards the West by Rafsanjani as he steered a delicate political path through militant Islamic factions to win leadership.
But when Rafsanjani summoned the world press to Tehran last week for a news conference there was cold comfort for the West.
All he could do was repeat that the United States should make the first gesture by releasing frozen Iranian assets Tehran estimates are worth about 12 billion dollars.
President Jimmy Carter froze them in 1979 shortly after the Tehran embassy occupation. President Ronald Reagan renewed the executive seizure order annually for the next eight years. Next week President Bush will probably do so again.
Iran's Islamic leaders still publicly gloat at the seizure of the U.S. Embassy.
They see it as just humiliation of a superpower for backing the late Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi who they hold guilty of plundering Iran's wealth and leading the country away from Islam towards the perceived decadence of the Western camp.
But the wisdom of the move - which isolated Iran from the West and led to the freezing of badly needed capital - has been increasingly questioned in Iran.
Without a tangible concession from the United States, however, no Iranian leader can risk a bold move to repair ties which might be branded a betrayal of Khomeini's legacy and the "Death to America" trademark of Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution.