Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (54 page)

Sabet wanted to attract what he called “high-class Iranians.” “High-class tourists” from the Gulf countries would come next, then Europeans, and finally, Americans. “I have left behind the Canary Islands to build my own country!” he said with glee. “This is going to be the first step toward opening up the country.”

Sabet was not the first to see bizarre potential in this ninety-square-mile island. It had been inhabited mainly by fishermen and pearl divers when the Shah decided to turn it into an exclusive paradise retreat for himself and his privileged guests in the 1970s. Thousands of villas were built; branches of Europe’s fanciest shops followed. A government advertising campaign for the Gulf Arabs touted it as a suitable vacation spot closer to home than the French Riviera.

Then, after the revolutionaries swept in, they established Kish as one of three duty-free islands. Today the clerics see it as an ideal place for foreign investors, and in 1999, Iran’s Parliament passed laws allowing banks and insurance companies to open there. Money is exchanged openly at the black market rate. The tough mainland labor laws do not apply, and foreigners can be hired easily. In fact, foreigners—even Americans—do not need visas to visit.

Kish is also a tourist spot; if one believes the official Iranian estimates, the island receives between 500,000 and 800,000 visitors a year. The Shah’s palace has become a shopping mall. There is a stadium for horse racing and a sports complex where women can play tennis on segregated courts. Kish is just far enough from the mainland to be out of the stern gaze of the conservative ayatollahs, and there are no morality police. Men and women ride bicycles side by side.

I stayed at the Shayan Hotel, which had been built by the Shah. Its cosmopolitan self-image was reflected in the clocks behind the reception desk: they told the time in London, Washington, D.C., the United Arab Emirates, Canberra, Beijing, Moscow, Tokyo, and Tehran. But this was still the Islamic Republic. The swimming pool was empty; the beer in the minibar, nonalcoholic.

Apparently there are ways around some of the strictures, but not for an American journalist who might expose them. When my businessman friend Abdol-Karim checked into a Kish hotel, he was offered a clandestine bottle of Red Label scotch for $50; he settled for a $32 bottle of Russian vodka, which was quietly delivered to his room. He discovered his television was linked to an officially banned satellite. Three porn channels were blocked, but for a generous tip the concierge unblocked them. The concierge also asked him if he wanted female company for the night. Being a good family man, he politely declined.

I walked into what had once been the Shah’s casino and I couldn’t believe that I was still in Iran. It looked like the lounges from my childhood on the West Side of Buffalo—a red-lacquered bar, velvet-covered couches, tiny white lights hanging from the ceiling, and odd-shaped tables. The bar was closed, but in an adjoining room men were playing pool at a half dozen tables. Gambling is forbidden in Iran. And here in a public lounge men were actually betting good money on the game.

Then I heard a clanging noise: three old slot machines from the time of the Shah. The stakes were not high—the machine took fifty-rial coins. At the time of the Shah the coin had been worth about seventy cents. Now it was worth less than a penny. But there was a man with a roll of them, feeding the machine, over and over, watching the little oranges and lemons and cherries roll before him. He didn’t stop until he won. And then a huge smile filled his face.

At dinner at a local seafood restaurant, I was surprised again. A trio sang Old Regime songs banned by the revolution. “I’m proud of your beautiful body,” went one lyric. “You beautiful flower, you with the golden hair, you force the world to fall in love with you. Why don’t you dance?”

I visited duty-free shops in Kish but didn’t do much shopping. The marble-halled malls with overhead fluorescent lighting just don’t have the magic of the covered bazaars. People come for the cheap goods, things like a Chinese-made Minnie Mouse playing an accordion, televisions, vacuum cleaners, three-inch-soled Sketcher shoes imported from Egypt, eye creams from Paris, pirated American videos like
Flubber
and
Space Jam.

Hosein Sabet acknowledged that his investment in Kish was a huge risk. “The worst thing that happens is that no one comes to my hotel and I sleep in a different room every night,” he told me. “If no one comes to see my dolphins, I get to play with them all by myself. I have buried my heart in my country. I have to be in love to do this.”

With this kind of sentimentality, I thought, how can any businessman ever make money? And what American tourist is going to pay top dollar to go to a difficult-to-reach beach resort where women have to cover their heads and bodies, where there is no alcohol, where there is nothing to see of historic interest, and little to do at night?

But then I thought about just how daring—and how important—Sabet’s gamble is. He understands that the era of blaming outsiders for one’s misfortunes is over and that only if people like him take risks will the economy recover. It is one thing to express love for one’s country, as so many Iranians do, but quite another to pour a lifetime of savings into it. The problem is that Iran has very few Sabets.

C H A P T E R   S E V E N T E E N

The Center of the Universe

I am a man who has come from the East. . . . I represent a great and renowned nation whose civilization began tens of centuries ago.

— PRESIDENT MOHAMMAD KHATAMI AT THE UNITED NATIONS ON SEPTEMBER 21, 1998

Iran is an international outlaw.

— SECRETARY OF STATE WARREN CHRISTOPHER AT A CONGRESSIONAL HEARING ON JULY 29, 1994

One of the most wonderful places in all of human history, one of the most important places culturally in all of human history.

— PRESIDENT CLINTON DESCRIBING IRAN AT A FUND-RAISER HOSTED BY IRANIAN-AMERICANS ON MARCH 4, 2000

A
MERICANS, IT IS OFTEN SAID
, have too little sense of history, and the people of the Middle East too much. Where people in the Middle East carry around every past misfortune as a burden to be redeemed or avenged, Americans are constantly shucking off the past in favor of the present. This difference in outlook is one reason Americans and Iranians have arrived at the beginning of the twenty-first century so profoundly suspicious of each other.

I wonder how many Americans know that the first real confrontation between Harry Truman and Joseph Stalin after World War II was not over Korea or Czechoslovakia or Berlin. It was over the Iranian province of Azerbaijan. The year was 1946. Stalin was determined to keep his troops in that corner of northwestern Iran, where they had been posted during World War II to ensure the Red Army’s lifeline to Allied supplies. Truman demanded their withdrawal. Iran, meanwhile, relied on the skilled diplomatic maneuvering of its Prime Minister, Ahmad Qavam, to resolve the crisis. That combination of American and Iranian diplomacy persuaded Stalin to back down.

The incident was a coming of age for the United States, which previously had left the matter of Iran to its ally Great Britain. But Britain was now too weak to engage in the kind of game required to block the ambitions of the Soviet Union. The power play in Azerbaijan became an early and important chapter in American efforts to contain Moscow and block its path to the oil and trade routes of the Persian Gulf. Ever after, the Iranian-Soviet border at Azerbaijan was a red line in American eyes, beyond which Soviet influence could not be allowed to extend.

And that, in turn, put the United States foursquare behind the rule of the Shah, who would in time come to be perceived in Iran as an American puppet. So when a popular Iranian nationalist named Mohammad Mossadegh became Prime Minister and nationalized Iran’s oil industry in the early 1950s and the United States began to worry that he might open Iran to Soviet influence, the United States—together with Britain—decreed that he would have to go. The Shah was restored to full power, and for the next quarter century the people of Iran were left with an autocratic ruler, who was intent on Westernizing the country even at the expense of its Shiite traditions, and on maintaining close political and military ties to successive American administrations.

None of this history is lost on Iranians. And of course the official post-revolutionary rhetoric has guaranteed that this history remains alive to this day as a source of political mobilization. But little of it has ever resonated for the American people. For that reason, Americans have been puzzled, even shocked, by the depth of official Iranian hostility toward the United States over the last twenty years, and Iranians have been incredulous that Americans don’t understand it.

This chasm of misunderstanding with the United States is without doubt the most important feature on the landscape of Iran’s relationship with the rest of the world in the past two decades, if only because the United States is such a powerful figure in the globe’s politics and economy. The troubled relationship with Washington has isolated Iran diplomatically and culturally, kept it from developing economically, shaped its efforts to make alliances, even dictated how it ended the most disastrous of its wars.

And that is ironic, because for many centuries Iranians have thought of themselves, not the Americans, as the ones whose travails and accomplishments provide a lesson for the world. The country at “the center of the universe” is how Graham Fuller of the Rand Corporation described Iran’s view of itself in a 1991 book of the same name. The term is taken from one of the many titles the nineteenth-century Shahs gave themselves. It also reflects the Iranian sense of superiority, based on an ancient and glorious history.

But Fuller made another observation about Iranians’ self-image, and it too is critical for Americans who want to understand Iran today. Memories of conquest and cultural grandeur coexist with the memory of sub-jugation by Greeks, Arabs, Turks, Afghans, Russians, and others, and this has produced a “nagging sense of inferiority,” in Fuller’s words. The result, he pointed out, is a world view and an interpretation of power he described as “a subtle labyrinthine approach to politics” that is consistent with the Shiite sense that history is a tale of suffering and injustice. In this view, Fuller explained, “Events never have simple explanations, but rather reflect the existence of unseen political forces at work behind the scenes manipulating reality.”

The combination of Iranian pride and sense of grievance was certainly evident among the leaders of the revolution, who sought to spread the word throughout the Muslim world that Iran’s model of politicized Islam, with Khomeini as its standard-bearer, was the wave of the future. The model adopted in Iran, they felt, could light the way for all of Islam in overcoming the shame of Western exploitation and disrespect. So intent were they to avenge past wrongs that they overlooked the crucial fact that the eighty-five percent of the world’s Muslims who are Sunnis would never be likely to follow the lead of a group of Shiite ayatollahs with their own peculiar version of Islamic rule. It has taken twenty years, and plenty of bitter experience, for reality to intrude on that notion.

Even today, Iranians in all walks of life express contradictory feelings about their country’s place in the world. Over the centuries, revolutions, popular revolts, and nationalizations have been made in the name of throwing off the yoke of foreign powers, with the predictable result of dictatorship at home followed by renewed accommodation with those same powers. Many Iranians have come to believe that a cycle of dictatorship and chaos, subjugation and revolt, is inevitable and that democratic rule is impossible.

But today, another interpretation may be in the making: Iran, especially since the election of Mohammad Khatami in 1997, may be finding a way to break the cycle of dictatorship and chaos. Many Iranians hope that their country may one day be able to build a place for itself in the world based not on a remembered great past or an imagined great future, but on a realistic understanding of global politics and of how countries balance their national interests. “Our goal in the twenty-first century is not to find new enemies, but to turn enemies into neutrals and neutrals into friends,” Deputy Foreign Minister Mohammad-Javad Zarif told me during a visit to New York in March 2000. An American-educated political scientist who lived in the United States for fifteen years, Zarif has always taken the long view. “We don’t expect enemies to become friends overnight. After all, as a country with a very old civilization, we tend to look at diplomacy in terms of decades, not days.”

Iran has been both blessed and cursed with a strong national identity, bountiful natural resources, a strategic location, and an ancient intellectual and cultural tradition. It lies between the oil fields of the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea, with the power of Russia to the north and the riches of India to the east. If after World War II the Americans saw Iran as the first place where Russian power had to be stopped, the British before them had seen it as a way station on the path to India. For most of the century, Iran also served as a balance against Arab power in the Middle East. Its theological institutions have played an important role in maintaining the influence of Shiism in parts of the Islamic world. Since 1979 it has been the most dramatic illustration of the Islamic political revival that has aroused Muslims from Algeria to the corners of Indonesia.

I am often asked why the United States should care about Iran. After all, for a generation, the United States has gotten along just fine in the region—it has even fought and won a war—without relations with Iran. My first response is: Look at a map. Iran shares borders with Iraq, against which it fought an eight-year war; with Pakistan, which exploded a nuclear device close to Iran’s border in May 1998; with Afghanistan, which rules through terror with a strict fundamentalist version of Islam; with Turkey, whose secular government disapproves of Iran’s theocratic state and has problems with its own Islamic opposition; and with three former Soviet republics: Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Turkmenistan. This is not a stable neighborhood and any outbreak of hostilities would threaten important U.S. interests.