Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (55 page)

My second response is that Iran is an intellectual giant of the Middle East and of the Muslim world. Its struggle to reconcile Islamic principles with its people’s yearning for freedom reverberates far beyond its borders. Its experimentation with elements of democracy makes it a potential model for those Muslim nations that have more authoritarian governments. Strange as it sounds, the country that Americans have feared so much is potentially a strong partner in ways that are not yet fully appreciated—including the adaptation of representative government to the Islamic world.

Too often the United States government has treated Iran simplistically—either like an unruly child to be ignored, or an international criminal to be punished. Perhaps a more appropriate and more profitable approach would begin with a recognition of how strongly Iranians feel about their nation. In a sense they are like New Yorkers—or, for that matter, Americans in general. They bicker and fight with each other, but when an outsider dares to attack them, they close ranks and proclaim their superiority. Despite the conflicts and fault lines, an Iranian would rather be Iranian than anything else. If there is any doubt of this simple fact, just ask any Iranian what he or she thinks of the suggestion of calling the Persian Gulf the “Arabian Gulf” or simply the “Gulf.”

I heard this from the two sisters who could have emigrated to the United States but decided to run an aerobics studio in Tehran instead. I heard this from the feminist lawyer, Mehrangiz Kar, who was both frustrated and energized by her battles for women in court. I heard this from the Bahai engineer whose family had suffered so much persecution at the hands of the Islamic Republic. I heard this from my political scientist friend Farideh Farhi, who lived in the United States but longed for summer, when she could take her children back home. I even heard it from Nazila. “I could never imagine making my life outside Iran,” she told me once when I asked her why she did not move away for good. “My parents are there. My husband’s parents are there. I can’t even pass an Iranian restaurant or hear Iranian music when I’m on vacation and not get nostalgic for home.”

Sometimes that love of country came across as self-centeredness. I saw that in January 1998, when President Khatami gave an interview to CNN in which he suggested that cultural exchanges were a way to break down the mistrust between the United States and Iran. His aides expected a high-level response, nothing less than a nationally televised speech by President Clinton from the Oval Office. But that was the same week Americans first heard about the President’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, and I tried to explain that Iran was not high on the President’s agenda just then. Iranian officials were flabbergasted. How, they wondered, could President Clinton’s personal life be more important than a gesture of friendship from the President of Iran?

I saw it again later that month when Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told an interviewer from
USA Today
that she did not envision going to Iran “in the near future or medium or distant future.” I was in Iran at the time, and I don’t think I have ever seen so many Iranians— officials, intellectuals, taxi drivers—so united in their dismay. They could understand when an American Secretary of State called Iran a rogue state or a supporter of terrorism. Name-calling, after all, was part of politics. But how could she not want to visit Iran, the land of the ancient ruins of Persepolis and the mystical poetry of Hafiz?

Mr. Salimi, my driver, wanted me to bring Albright a volume of Hafiz poetry and some pistachio nuts and dried fruits as a peace offering. Taghi Aghaie, the war-hero-turned-travel-agent, offered to prepare a package of travel materials, including a copy of his forty-two-minute promotional videocassette. “I’ll show her the country myself, and I’ll do it for free,” he said. “It’s my duty. She has to see it for herself.”

This sense of Iranianness has withstood even the test of revolution. At first, the prospect of Islamic rule sparked ethnic rebellions across the country. Overnight, the new regime was confronted with unrest among the Turks in Azerbaijan, the Baluchis in Baluchistan, the Arabs in Khuzestan, and the Kurds in Kurdistan. Ayatollah Khomeini suppressed the rebellions one by one through political guile and military force, and then used the war with Iraq to solidify a sense of nationalism and loyalty to the Iranian state. Once Iran and Iraq were at war, ethnic and religious minorities including Kurds, Arabs, Armenians, Jews, and even Bahais were fighting and dying for their country, Iran. When I traveled through Iranian Kurdistan in 1979, I often came upon Kurds determined to unite with their ethnic brethren from Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and parts of the former Soviet Union to create a new nation called Kurdistan. Twenty years later, the Iranian Kurds I met had a different agenda—to pressure the Iranian government to reward them with factories and other economic projects and to allow them to expand their national culture within the boundaries of Iran.

But if pride runs strong, so does a highly developed sense of victimhood. The revolution made the Iranian people masters of their destiny, but it did not eradicate that feeling of victimization. The United States, above all, is still seen as a self-interested manipulator, the hidden hand responsible for Iran’s problems or capable of solving them. When misfortunes have no logical explanation, they can always be blamed on the CIA. (This is a role previously ascribed to British intelligence, and in some quarters the British are still considered to be behind every disaster, problem, plot, and powerful institution, including the CIA itself.)

The conservative clerics drummed this anti-American view into the populace from the pulpit at the University of Tehran every Friday. America was to blame for Iran’s crippled economy, the fall of Iran’s currency, the moral corruption of the youth, the promotion of Zionism, the bolstering of Israel’s status around the world.

In the eyes of Iranian officials, the ultimate proof of America’s evil intentions was an effort by the U.S. Congress in 1995 to give the CIA $20 million to carry out a covert program to undermine the Iranian government. Though the funding effort was reported in the American press, the money was never appropriated or spent, because President Clinton never authorized the program and Congress never passed it into law. Even so, many Iranians continue to believe that the CIA is carrying it out. American officials have not publicly denied the existence of the program since they are not permitted to talk about “covert” operations. And even if American officials issued a denial, would the Iranians believe it?

Even the Shah in his final days in power showed signs of suspicion and distrust. In May 1978, he asked former Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, who was visiting Iran, whether “the Americans and the Russians have divided the world between them.” Riots that would culminate in the Shah’s overthrow had begun a few months before; a coup in Afghanistan had just put a communist faction in power. The Shah couldn’t believe that events like these were not orchestrated. And sometimes I still hear from Iranian friends the question, “Why did the United States put Khomeini in power?”

I have seen this sentiment over and over in my travels to Iran. At a women-only dinner party at the home of my close friend Nargess in the summer of 1999, when talk turned to the impeachment trial of Bill Clinton, the group had a lot of sympathy for the President and none for Monica Lewinsky. But not for the reasons I would have thought.

“She was a Zionist spy sent by Israel to discredit Clinton,” said Nargess’s sister Monir, a forty-year-old hairdresser who had once lived in the United States. “It was a conspiracy by Mossad [the Israeli intelligence agency] to ruin Clinton because he was too pro-Palestinian.”

“Don’t you think she loved him?” I asked.

All the women laughed, and Nargess, who had also lived in the United States, jumped into the conversation. “I suppose you think that the death of Princess Diana was accidental too!” she exclaimed.

When I said that I thought it was, she replied, “Ha! I knew it. Don’t you know that Diana was planning to convert to Islam and marry an Arab? They wouldn’t stand for it.”

“Who’s they?” I asked.

“The British,” said Nargess. “The British decide everything—even which governments rise and fall.”

“I suppose you think the crash of John Kennedy Jr.’s plane was not an accident either,” I said.

That statement really set the group to laughing. “The Kennedys are Democrats,” said Nargess. “Even though they’re rich, they’re loved by ordinary people. They all have to be exterminated. JFK Jr. was the last one. He was about ready to announce he wanted to run for President. They had to stop him.”

“Who’s they?” I asked again.

“The ones who control everything, the ones behind the curtain,” said Nargess. “The ones who run the world economy and world politics.”

“But who are they?”

“We don’t know who they are,” Nargess replied. “How could we? They’re behind the curtain.”

Iran’s place in the world, of course, involves more than simply its relationship with the United States, but the Iranians themselves have not figured out what their role should be. The era of “Death to America” may be over, but what comes in its place is a matter of intense debate. Iran has built a web of political and commercial relationships with other countries and regions to serve its interests, and these relationships reveal a more pragmatic and less ideologically driven nation than was the case early in the revolution.

Perhaps the most dramatic example of Iranian realpolitik involves its old enemy, Iraq. Iran and Iraq remain the two strongest and most battle-tested powers in the Persian Gulf, and they still engage in border skirmishes and name-calling. But ever since the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq, Iran’s overriding policy has been one of restraint. It did not rush to the aid of Iraq’s Kurdish and Shiite rebels in the aftermath of the war. Instead, it remained quiescent as the United States retained forces in the region and enforced no-fly zones over much of Iraq’s airspace.

More recently, Iran has supported Security Council resolutions requiring Iraq to comply with inspections of its military installations, and it watched from the sidelines in the late 1990s as U.S. bombs damaged Iraq’s remaining military capabilities. At the same time, Iranian pilgrims have begun to take organized, carefully policed tours to Shiite shrines in Iraq even as the slow exchange of remaining prisoners of the Iran-Iraq war continues. In fact, the two countries maintain diplomatic relations with embassies and chargés d’affaires in each other’s capitals. “We are condemned to be neighbors,” Iran’s Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi once said of Iraq, meaning that Iran has to figure out a way to coexist with whatever regime is in power in Baghdad.

Iran has also had to face the reality that its revolution has failed to make it the leader in the Muslim world. So Iran has pushed ahead in building relationships with its Persian Gulf neighbors, particularly Saudi Arabia. In a classic display of balance-of-power politics, Iran and Saudi Arabia, OPEC’s largest oil producers, have shaped a more normal relationship around their common interests—stabilizing oil prices and containing Iraq. That effort accelerated in December 1997 when Crown Prince Abdullah met President Khatami in Tehran at the quadrennial summit of the world’s Islamic countries. This was “the start of a new era in relations between the two big countries of the region,” Khatami told Abdullah.

It’s not that the Saudis have any illusions that Iran has abandoned its long-term goal of dominance in the Gulf. But for the sake of regional security, the Saudis cannot afford a hostile Iran. One example of Saudi accommodation may be its response to the terrorist bombing that destroyed Khobar Towers, the American military barracks outside Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, in June 1996, killing nineteen American servicemen. U.S. officials have said publicly that they suspect an Iranian link to the bombing but they have never been able to prove their case. Some American intelligence officials have speculated that the Saudis will squelch any evidence of such a link if Iran, in exchange, ends its support for Saudi dissidents.

Iran has also emphasized diplomacy over force in its relationship with the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. To the Iranians, the Taliban—a Sunni Muslim movement that follows an extreme, repressive version of Islamic law—are backward peasants who have given Muslims a bad name. Iran may require its women to cover their heads and bodies, but at least they can vote, pursue careers, and participate in society. In Afghanistan women cannot work and must cover their faces and most girls are not allowed to go to school. “A disgrace to Islam,” was the way Kharrazi characterized Taliban rule.

The Islamic Republic (in loose collaboration with Russia) has supplied other Afghan factions with weapons, money, and logistical support, and by late 1998, Iran and Afghanistan seemed to be on the brink of war. But in the end, cool heads prevailed. If the entire Soviet military could not tame Afghanistan, the thinking went in Tehran, how could Iran hope to do so? Iran withdrew the troops it had sent to the border, and the crisis dissipated.

Outside its immediate neighborhood, the strains in Iran’s relationships with vast swaths of the world have receded in recent years. It has, for example, forged partnerships with both China and Russia. Russia is helping Iran complete construction of a nuclear power plant at Bushehr on the Persian Gulf, over American objections, and has broken a pledge to the United States to stop selling Iran goods, services, and technology that could help Iran develop weapons of mass destruction or ballistic missiles. China has remained a key supplier of weapons to the Islamic Republic, although it has ended its nuclear cooperation; Iran, in turn, has begun to help China meet its growing energy needs with oil exports.

Iran has also built a mosaic of political and commercial relationships with Europe. A $2 billion deal between the Iranian government and the French company Total (together with Russia’s Gazprom and Malaysia’s Petronas) in September 1997 was particularly problematic because the U.S. Congress had passed legislation requiring sanctions on foreign companies that invested more than $20 million in Iran’s energy sector. The legislation infuriated European governments, and in May 1998 President Clinton waived the sanctions against the companies. After assassinations in Europe of Iranian opponents of the Islamic Republic abated, relations between Iran and Europe warmed even more.