Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (57 page)

Earlier that year, the Russians had signed a contract to complete the reactors, which were started by the Germans under the Shah and were damaged by the Iraqis during the Iran-Iraq war. On the day of my visit, I asked my host about the gaping holes in the inner dome of the less-damaged structure. “Blisters,” he replied, waving his arm as if to swat away flies. “It’s nothing.” I’m no engineer, but they looked pretty bad to me.

Complicating progress on the site is that the Germans, bowing to American pressure, had withheld the blueprints, making it difficult to fit 1,000-megawatt Russian-made reactors and turbines into a structure intended for German-designed 1,200-megawatt reactors—sort of like putting a Zil motor and body onto a Mercedes chassis. I’ve joked that if the United States truly wanted to shut down the reactor site, it could mount a covert operation that would send boats filled with environmental activists up and down the Persian Gulf with bullhorns predicting nuclear catastrophe.

As much as America has wanted to punish Iran for its provocations, the U.S. government has never lost its appreciation of the Islamic Republic’s value as a potential partner on the eastern flank of the Arab world. Even as successive administrations demonized and isolated the country, they also took stabs at engaging and rewarding it, dreaming of pulling it back into an orbit where the United States could deal with it again. But for twenty years all those efforts failed, sometimes ludicrously, leaving Iran the Bermuda triangle of American foreign policy.

Ronald Reagan secretly sold weapons to Iran in a vain effort to help free the American hostages held in Lebanon, even as he vowed never to negotiate with terrorists. George Bush expressed a simple policy, “Goodwill begets goodwill,” leaving the door open for dialogue and promising to reward Iran for “good behavior.” His enthusiasm backfired on him one day, when he eagerly picked up an Oval Office telephone to talk with a man he thought was President Rafsanjani. It was a hoax.

Bill Clinton took a more confrontational position, choosing to view Iran as a reflection of its openly belligerent neighbor, Iraq. His policy was even given a name: “dual containment.” But to call it a policy is to dignify its haphazard and off-the-cuff genesis. Not long ago, I asked Martin Indyk, the creator of the “dual containment” concept during the time he was Assistant Secretary of State in charge of the Middle East, whether he ever regretted uttering the two words. “No, it was a very good slogan, and you suggested it, actually,” he replied. Me?

In fact, in 1993, very early in the Clinton administration, I had written an article for
The New York Times
on the emerging yet unarticulated American policy toward Iran and Iraq. The administration, I wrote, “argues that neither regime should be strengthened and that each should be dealt with as a separate problem—a sort of parallel containment. Framing the policy in that way leaves the unfortunate impression that Iraq is less and Iran is more of an enemy and that parallel containment may be just a reworked version of old-fashioned power balancing.”

Shortly after my analysis appeared, Indyk gave a speech laying out American policy goals in the Persian Gulf. He called the Clinton administration’s new approach to Iran and Iraq “dual containment.” My wording—“parallel containment”—would have been bad enough, since I had intended it as a deliberate effort to point out the weakness of the policy. But “dual containment” was an even more unfortunate phrase. It seemed to equate the two countries, and it raised the question: was Iran really as dangerous as Iraq, a nation that had overrun a tiny neighbor; used poison gas against its own citizens; fought a major war that united the West, most of the Arab world, and Israel against it; and refused to abide by United Nations resolutions regarding weapons of mass destruction? Still, the slogan stuck, even though it became an object of wide criticism among experts on the Middle East, and was quietly dropped by many—but not all—in the Clinton administration in the late 1990s.

After Khatami’s election in 1997, Clinton took small, politically safe steps to make amends. He called Iran a “great civilization” and said that it was not normal that the two countries did not have diplomatic relations. He asked Iran to begin an official dialogue. In April 1999, Clinton even acknowledged Iran’s historical grievances, saying, “Iran, because of its enormous geopolitical importance over time, has been the subject of quite a lot of abuse from various Western nations. And I think sometimes it’s quite important to tell people, look, you have a right to be angry at something my country or my culture or others that are generally allied with us today did to you fifty or sixty or one hundred or 150 years ago.” The Clinton administration also eased sanctions slightly, allowing Iran to import food and later to export carpets, caviar, dried fruit, and pistachios.

This could be a start, but at the same time the United States may be asking Iran to do more than it can be expected to do given its unsettled political situation. Scarred by recent history, fearful of a backlash in Congress, wary of Iranians who look like “moderates,” the United States has told Iran that the way to an improvement in relations is through an authoritative, official dialogue. But the Iranian way of negotiating has been to maintain room for maneuver, to keep things in the shadows, to conduct important business in private.

Yet for all the misunderstandings and missed opportunities by the leaders of both countries, many Iranians have their own private view of America, a view that I have often found compelling and that gives me hope that if the United States made concrete gestures to resolve specific problems, those gestures would not be rebuffed. The great majority of Iranians I have met retain an unabashed affection and admiration for the country they call “The Fortune Land.” Iranian demonstrators might still occasionally burn the American flag, but an audience watching
Primary
Colors
during a film festival in Tehran cheered when the American flag filled the screen. There are so many marriages arranged with Iranian-born men who have become naturalized American citizens that one joke going around Tehran is that Iran’s biggest export is not its oil or its carpets but its women.

Other Iranians find a different way to articulate the lure of America. “The United States is the last station on the train, the highest rung on the ladder,” said my friend Monir, the hairdresser. “When I lived in the United States and went to apply for my Social Security card, all the nations of the world were represented in the waiting room. We all got equal treatment. When I went to register as a hairdresser, they told me I needed a hundred hours of training. I proved that I had years of experience. So they calculated my experience and said, ‘Okay, you get so many points for this and so many for that.’ And they gave me my license. I didn’t have to know anyone important. I didn’t have to bribe anyone. It’s a country of laws where everyone is equal before the law.”

Such positive feelings toward the United States are rejected by the conservatives. In 1962, the writer Jalal Al-e Ahmad first identified what he called the cultural “illness” that had stricken the cities and towns of Iran, and in the process he invented a concept that I cite frequently: “Westoxication.” It is even harder for a Westerner to translate Al-e Ahmad’s Persian word—
gharbzadegi
—than it is to pronounce it. Westoxication probably expresses it best. Ayatollah Khomeini loved the concept and used it often in his sermons.

But the conservatives are not the only ones who hold power in Iran today, and there are strong signals that a struggle is underway to bring Iran into a new understanding of its place in the world. Indeed, a principal reason for the failure of previous efforts to improve relations with America has been the sense that it was impossible to tell who was really in charge in Iran. When the landslide for Khatami as President was followed by a landslide for reformist legislators associated with him, it did not change the fact that conservative clerics could still veto efforts to establish the rule of law and improve relations with the West. But at least the elections of 1997 and 2000 have now made it clear where the population stands and which politicians can count on popular support. With “rule of law” a watchword for the reformists, an argument is gaining currency in Iran for warmer ties to democracies around the world, especially if such ties will bring the country into the global marketplace.

The reformists in Iran are thus beginning to adopt a more nuanced and dispassionate view of America, saying that if it is in Iran’s national interest to develop a relationship with the United States, so be it. After all, the United States and Iran share a number of significant interests: opposition to a rearmed Iraq, opposition to the excesses of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the desire for a secure Persian Gulf, an eagerness to control the flow of drugs from Afghanistan.

In the last few years, it has become more acceptable for Iranians to discuss publicly the possibility of improving relations with the United States and to criticize the long-held belief in conspiracies. There is even an expression these days with which to ridicule old thinking:
tavahom-e tote-eh
or “imagining of conspiracy.” This view was on display during the unrest in July 1999, when commentators began to challenge the official line that the United States was the hidden hand behind the demonstrations and riots. “Why do we accuse the foreign enemy, instead of acknowledging the truth and finding our own weakness?” asked an editorial in the reformist newspaper
Khordad.
“Do we have a foreign enemy that is so strong that it managed to penetrate and riot even in the most central streets of Tehran?”

A small pro-reform newspaper,
Iran-e Vij,
argued that two decades of hostile relations with the United States had made Iran the loser. “For twenty years our nation has repeatedly and at every occasion shouted ‘Death to America,’” it said. “In practice, our national currency has lost its value hundreds of times over . . . and Iran has been turned into a major debtor in the world. Surely, this hasn’t been the aim of our struggle against the United States.”

Even the state-run demonstrations in front of the former American embassy in Tehran and in cities and towns around the country on the anniversary of the embassy occupation have lost their fervor over the years; the crowds have shrunk and the chants of “Death to America” have grown weaker. On November 4, 1998, the nineteenth anniversary, Mohsen Rezai, the Secretary of the Expediency Council and the former commander of the Revolutionary Guards, proclaimed, “It’s not possible to reconcile with the United States,” only to have a group of schoolboys in the back of the crowd chant back, “It’s possible. It’s possible.”

Then after Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s speech in March 2000 announcing that the United States would allow the import of some Iranian goods and acknowledging past errors in U.S. policy toward Iran, Rezai softened his line. He called the speech “a new chapter” in U.S-Iranian relations and predicted major developments in the coming year.

Two decades on, even the hostage-takers have mellowed. Abbas Abdi, one of the masterminds of the embassy seizure, no longer marches in street demonstrations, condones violence, or justifies the violation of international law as part of the natural process of revolution. He calls himself a democrat and advocates a civil society, freedom of speech, due process of law, and the formation of political parties. He believes that Iran must focus on its national interests, not on what others say it should and shouldn’t do. Iran, he says, is strong enough to deal with the United States, even if the interests of the United States do not coincide with those of a potentially more democratic Iran.

Abdi now runs a consulting and research firm near the University of Tehran. As the editor of the leftist newspaper
Salaam
in its early days, he wrote articles critical of Iran’s conservatives and of the corruption of the giant foundations and called for the creation of institutions to bolster democratic reform. In 1993, his editorials, sharply critical of the clerics’ undemocratic ways, landed him in prison—and solitary confinement—for eight months. “I am always asked how I have changed,” he said in November 1999, in a speech to mark the twentieth anniversary of the hostage seizure. “Well, I am older now. Young people don’t care so much about the costs of their political actions.” And older people, he added, tend to weigh the risks against the benefits.

But that doesn’t mean that Abdi is naive about what it will take before Iran and America kiss and make up. I found that out when I later met Abdi at a conference in Cyprus. He gave a long speech that laid out why American policy toward Iran was misguided. But Abdi added an interesting twist. He said that American policy toward Iran had been much softer in the 1980s, a tense decade of Cold War and terrorist activity, than it was in the more quiescent and reformist 1990s. This, he said, proved that any further gesture of friendship by Iran would lead not to reciprocity but to even more pressure by the United States. After the first round of parliamentary elections in February 2000, Abdi offered an even tougher assessment. Iran had become too democratic and open for the United States, he said. “Americans prefer to negotiate with an undemocratic system behind closed doors so that they can take advantage,” he was quoted as saying in the reformist daily
Asr-e Azadegan.
“This is impossible in a democratic system because as soon as such negotiations take place, the press would report them.”

And yet my experiences in Iran over more than twenty years tell me that the Iranians will not be content to leave matters at an impasse. They remain masters of improvisation, masters of making room for themselves even within the most rigid and restrictive rules of conduct.

Perhaps there are more surprises in store. Just as one day Iran freed the hostages, just as one day Iran ended the war with Iraq, so one day Iran may find a way to restore some sort of relationship with the United States—if America is willing to listen. “Iranians have a strange habit,” said Michael Metrinko, who lived for years in Iran as a Peace Corps volunteer and diplomat and suffered as one of the American hostages. “They’ll call you after you haven’t spoken in months and say, ‘Why haven’t you called?’ One day, the Iranian government will wake up and say, ‘Why haven’t you established relations with us?’ And we’ll wonder what the hell is going on.”