Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (56 page)

That development has left both Europeans and Iranians free to explore political and economic cooperation. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, European officials and corporations are positioning themselves for possible business deals and distancing themselves from American policy. “Iran has the capability to take on the role of a leader in the region,” said Italy’s Foreign Minister, Lamberto Dini, when he visited Iran in March 2000. “We want Iran to be the center of stability in the region.”

Iran even restored relations with its longtime foe, Britain, in 1999, an outgrowth of assurances by the Iranian government that it had no intention of carrying out Khomeini’s order to assassinate the novelist Salman Rushdie. Iran has benefited as well from the extraordinary public efforts by President Khatami to reshape Iran’s image. On a trip to Italy in 1999, Khatami proved himself a master of the photo opportunity as he pitched his call for a “dialogue among civilizations.” He went to the Vatican as a man of religion, to Florence as a man of learning, to Rome as a man of politics. He posed with the Pope, with scholars, and with the Prime Minister. During a trip to France later that year, Khatami asked to visit the Pantheon, the secular temple to the great men and women of France. After laying sprays of red and white carnations before the tombs of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile Zola, Victor Hugo, and Marie and Pierre Curie, Khatami climbed to the dome of the Pantheon, where he set in motion Foucault’s pendulum, the scientific instrument that a century and a half before had proved that the earth rotates on its axis.

To say that Khatami is open to some Western ideas about democracy and modern science, however, is to draw only part of the picture. It does not explain why the chasm with America remains so deep.

One difficulty is obvious: American officials, having been burned before, remain wary of the possibility that Khatami will prove unable to restrain the conservative forces still arrayed against him—forces that may have lost popular support but that still have great resources of power and money. They include clerics allied with Ayatollah Khamenei, bazaar merchants who resist reform, and Islamic foundations that control so much of Iran’s economy. Still, when it comes to America, the extent to which Khatami and Khamenei sustain a mutually dependent relationship is important to remember. They may differ in their views of the United States, but there is no sign that these differences are deep enough to cause a permanent rupture between them.

Americans also must reckon with a deeply ambivalent Iranian attitude about America, one that does not fit into a predictable equation about when to expect goodwill. It is shaped by experiences both good and bad with the United States, and it springs from Iranians’ unique sense of who they are.

In the eyes of many Iranians, America is a country of both dreams and demons. It is hated, admired, idealized, and challenged, sometimes simultaneously. There is not one view of the United States; there are several, operating on different levels.

In many ways, the Iranian view of the United States remains colored by Iran’s lingering resentment over America’s conduct during the Iran-Iraq war. Officially, particularly in the beginning, the United States took the position that both sides should stop the slaughter. Unofficially, many officials agreed with a sentiment expressed best by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger: “Too bad they can’t both lose.” Once Iran went on the offensive in 1982, the United States tilted toward Iraq. From then on, nothing could convince the Iranians that America’s motives were anything but hostile. Their worst fears seemed to be confirmed when the USS
Vincennes
shot down an Iran Air passenger plane in 1988. The United States claimed it was a terrible accident and years later paid compensation to the families of the victims. But the warship’s commander and crew were not punished; the commander was given the Legion of Merit for “exceptionally meritorious conduct” during the period of his command; the anti-air warfare officer was granted two Navy commendation medals for his service on the ship; the crew were given combataction ribbons for their tour in dangerous waters.

Another grievance, which cuts across all classes and all political persuasions, involves America’s use of economic weapons against Iran. Particularly galling for the Iranians are sanctions that prevent American and other foreign firms from investing in projects that would benefit Iran; the blockage of loans from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund; and the slowness in litigating the remaining cases of Iranian financial disputes against the United States. At times America has justified such steps by saying that it was punishing Iran for “unacceptable behavior,” including the use of terrorism and the development of ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction. But this phrase drives some of my Iranian friends crazy. Who are the Americans, my friends ask, to go around criticizing others for bad behavior, as if they are obstreperous children?

Related to this grievance is a deep resentment over the issue of Caspian Sea oil and gas, and over who will build and control the pipelines that will transport oil and gas to market. Iran has bridled at American efforts to shut it out of the pipeline sweepstakes by signing an agreement with Turkey, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkmenistan to build a pipeline to the Mediterranean port of Ceyhan, in southern Turkey. Iranian officials argue that Iran is the logical export route, and that if the Turkish route is completed, its impact will bolster Iran’s neighbors economically at Iran’s expense for decades to come.

Iran and the United States are also separated by a gulf of distrust over relations with Israel. The Islamic Republic does not accept Israel’s right to exist. Iran has given substantial amounts of money and weapons to the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah, which has long been active in armed attacks on Israeli military and civilian targets in southern Lebanon and northern Israel. Iran has provided political, financial, and perhaps military support to the Palestinian movements Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, whose mission is to sabotage peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Because resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict has for decades been one of the highest foreign policy priorities of American administrations—and certainly will be for future administrations—no other issue is higher on America’s agenda vis-à-vis Iran. Yet if there is one position on which both President Khatami and Ayatollah Khamenei agree, it is that Israel is an aggressive, racist enemy. Still, there may be room even here for maneuver. Khatami has met with the PLO leader Yasir Arafat and is on record as saying that Iran would accept any settlement acceptable to the Palestinians, even though Ayatollah Khamenei has called Arafat a “traitor and an idiot” and demanded the annihilation of Israel.

Complicating matters is that both Israel and Iran regard the other as a military threat. Israel is concerned about Iran’s development of ballistic missiles and is convinced that Iran is determined to become a nuclear power; Iran fears Israel’s military capability, its presumed nuclear arsenal and its military relationships with the United States and Turkey. Iran’s hostility to Israel extends to the smallest issues. Contact between Iranians and Israelis is regarded as so dreadful that when two wrestlers from Iran’s national team drew Israelis as opponents in an international competition in Colorado in March 2000, the Iranians called in sick and forfeited the matches.

Yet from time to time, there have been unconfirmed reports in the Iranian and Israeli press about business contacts, like the one in the November 22, 1999, issue of the Israeli daily
Yediot Aharanot
that disclosed an agreement in principle between Israeli businessmen and representatives of Iran’s Ministry of Agriculture for Iran to buy seeds for fruits and vegetables through a German middleman. A disapproving article in the conservative Iranian daily
Jomhuri-ye-Islami
in July 1999 reported that Israeli-made burglar alarms had become popular in Tehran.

A great many Iranians believe that politics ought not to get in the way of doing business, and that the United States can be a reliable business partner. So what if America wants to humiliate Iran, the argument goes, let’s be practical. America is the key to Iran’s prosperity and to its entry into the global economy.

The most active proponent of this view has been Ali-Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, the merchant-turned-state-builder who served as Iran’s President from 1989 to 1997. In 1986, when Rafsanjani was Speaker of Parliament, a Beirut newspaper broke the story about secret American arms sales to Iran—with Israeli complicity—to help free several American hostages being held in Lebanon. The Reagan administration was ridiculed for claiming it had found Iranian “moderates” among the uniformly hostile leadership of the Islamic Republic. If the revelations were an embarrassment for the Reagan administration, they were potentially even more explosive for the Iranians. But when Rafsanjani faced the nation at Friday prayers that very day, he adroitly dismissed the whole affair as strictly business. Iran had bought the weapons to fight the war with Iraq, he said, but had rebuffed the political overtures of the American envoys. He even joked about the chocolate cake (from a kosher bakery in Israel) that the envoys had brought as a gesture of friendship. Iranian security men, Rafsanjani quipped, “got hungry and ate the cake.” A master of concealment, he didn’t bother to tell the faithful that he himself had been deeply involved in the arms-for-hostages initiative.

A few years later, as President, Rafsanjani once again tried to get some business going. In early 1995, he quietly signed off on a multibillion-dollar deal with Conoco, an American oil company, to develop oil and gas fields in Iran. Shortly afterward, Warren Christopher, who was then Secretary of State, learned of the pending deal through a newspaper article. Stunned that the negotiating had been going on without his knowledge, and humiliated that his former law firm was representing Conoco, Christopher recused himself from policy decisions but made no secret of his firm opposition to the deal, which President Clinton quickly canceled. Once again, Rafsanjani was angry. He later told Peter Jennings of ABC News that the deal was intended as a “message to the United States” that even without diplomatic relations, the two countries could at least work together to make money. The message, he said, “was not correctly understood.”

Or perhaps it was, and Rafsanjani was the one who didn’t quite get the drift. The point of Clinton’s sanctions policy was that until there was a political opening, commercial contacts were unacceptable. Once again, Iranian thinking and American thinking were at cross purposes.

It is no exaggeration to say that when it comes to Iran, the United States is still dealing with the fallout from the hostage crisis of 1979–81. The images of that time—the crowds chanting “Death to America,” the blindfolded hostages being paraded before the news cameras, the wreckage of the failed military mission to rescue the hostages—remain embedded in the consciousness of America; Iran’s strident rhetoric has reinforced the idea that Iran was America’s most implacable and uncompromising foe.

If there was a moment when Americans began thinking of Iran as a place only of veils and terrorists, the hostage crisis was it. And later, Americans were given new reason to equate the words “Iran” and “terrorism.” In Beirut in April 1983, Shiite extremists blew up the American embassy, killing more than sixty people inside; six months later, suicide bombers destroyed an American military compound in Beirut, killing 241 American servicemen. In both cases, the bombers were believed to have had links to Iran. For years Iranian-backed extremists held American and other Western hostages in Lebanon, including, most notably, the Associated Press journalist Terry Anderson. Finally, in September 1991, after the hostages had outlived their political usefulness and Iran was eager to improve its international standing in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf war, Iran reportedly paid the kidnappers between $1 million and $2 million for the release of each hostage.

Americans have also been suspicious of the steps taken by the Islamic Republic to rebuild its military arsenal in the years since the end of the Iran-Iraq war. Tanks and fighter aircraft are simply too expensive. So Iran has improvised, focusing on its navy more than its army and air force. It has bought Kilo-class submarines from the Russians and cruise missiles from the Chinese that give it the capability to challenge the American naval presence in the Persian Gulf. With Russian help, it is also actively developing an eight-hundred-mile ballistic missile that could attack Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. Iranian officials insist that they need to develop their conventional capability in order to stabilize their borders, to deter Iraq and Israel from attack, and to project influence over the Persian Gulf.

The United States is particularly determined to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear capability. An Iranian interest in nuclear weapons would be easy to understand, given that Pakistan, Iran’s neighbor to the east, has tested a nuclear weapon; that Iraq, Iran’s neighbor to the west, came close to building one before the Gulf War and may still intend to build one; and that Israel is widely assumed to possess nuclear weapons. The consensus among policymakers and intelligence officials in Washington is that Iran is continuing to buy sophisticated equipment that serves no civilian purpose and can only be part of a nuclear weapons program. Iranian officials repeatedly and vigorously deny assertions that the country is seeking nuclear weapons. And they particularly resent Washington’s attempts to slow down their civilian nuclear power program.

Because Iran’s nuclear energy program doesn’t make obvious sense, it is easy to see why Washington is suspicious. Iran has two partially built nuclear reactors near Bushehr on the shores of the Persian Gulf that are frozen in time. For the Iranians, the enormous steel and concrete structures represent what might have been and what might be, a symbol of their legal right to develop nuclear energy and of their potential to become a great regional power. For the Americans, they represent a means for Iran to gain expertise that could be used in a nuclear weapons program. I visited the site in 1995 and it struck me quite differently: as an Iranian Chernobyl in the making.