TEHRAN: The young Revolutionary Guardsman in his light tan uniform was all smiles. "I had longed to see a real American," he said, extending a hand.
We were standing near the shrine to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the inspiration of the Islamic Revolution whose defense is the mission of the powerful Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps.
"And, what do you think?"
"On the surface, great," Mohammad Piri, 21, said. "But your government has done things that make me pessimistic."
Thirty years of noncommunication create a lot of mistrust. The mistaken U.S. shooting down in 1988 of an Iran Air Airbus with 290 people aboard is often cited. Conspiracy theories abound. That the radical Sunni Taliban was an American creation designed to discomfort Shiite Iran is a near universal conviction.Another Guardsman, Jaafar Dehghani, 22, stepped forward. "We can defend our soil with an M-1 rifle," he said. "We have God on our side." He pointed to the hundreds of thousands of graves of young soldiers killed defending Khomeini's Islamic Republic in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. "If I'd been alive then, I'd be lying here."
Iran, on the 30th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution, is full of defiance and suspicion of President Obama's motives in reaching out to Tehran. But it is equally full of longing. Most people are under 30 and, like these soldiers, they thirst for contact with the outside world and, above all, an America that looms with all the power of myth.
The Great Satan is great also in its power to exert fascination. "Death to America" has become background noise, as interesting as piped elevator music.
The revolution freed Iranians from the brutality of the Shah's secret police, Savak, and delivered a home-grown society modeled on the tenets of Islam in place of one pliant to America's whim. But like all revolutions, it has also disappointed. Freedom has ebbed and flowed since 1979. Of late, it has ebbed.
Beneath the hijab, that is to say beneath the surface of things, frustrations multiply. Women sometimes raise their hands to their necks to express a feeling of suffocation. Hard-pressed men, working 12-hour days to make enough to get by, are prone to hysterical laughter with its hint of desperation.
Competing pressures bear down on President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and behind him the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. They know that with unemployment at 14 percent (and rising), inflation at about 25 percent, oil revenues set to plunge by about two-thirds this year, and the country's oil and gas infrastructure in desperate need of modernization, opening to the West and its technology makes sense.
They also know Iran is composed of two worlds: the surface and the subterranean. The former is placid; the latter is hungry for more of the freedom the revolution promised. This, too, speaks for an engagement that might over time end Iran's bipolar state.
On the other hand, a revolutionary government that deprives itself of its great enemy is one that has lost the core of its galvanizing propaganda. Opening equals risk.
This is the background to Ahmadinejad's offer to "hold talks based on mutual respect" with a United States he continued to criticize. It came in response to Obama's best statement on Iran to date - one devoid of threats and one that spoke of the dangers, but not the unacceptability, of a nuclear Iran.
Mutual respect, a phrase Obama also used, begins with that. As Iranians often note, carrots and sticks are for donkeys.
The young soldiers pointed to how the United States backed Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war, another indication of American perfidy. "Everyone was with Saddam," Dehghani said. "Except Syria," I suggested, which prompted a guffaw.
"The Arabs are chickens," he said. "Just look at what Egypt did about Gaza. Those big-bellied Arabs, you take up a stick and they run away."
Scratch the surface and there's no love lost between Persians and Arabs, another reason to be careful in distinguishing Iranian rhetoric, which can seem monolithic, from Iran's many-shaded reality.
Dehghani offered me a bowl of Ash, a soup of noodles, chickpeas and vegetables. "Why not try to do something about your own country rather than going around the world waging war?" he asked.
I told him I thought Obama was trying to do just that. Then he told me his father wanted him to stay in the Revolutionary Guards because there's money to be made - Ahmadinejad has channeled funds and jobs their way - but he was more interested in starting his own business.
That's typical enough. Iranians are property-buying, car-mad, entrepreneurial consumers with a taste for the latest brands. Forget about nukes. Think Nikes.
We were standing near the shrine to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the inspiration of the Islamic Revolution whose defense is the mission of the powerful Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps.
"And, what do you think?"
"On the surface, great," Mohammad Piri, 21, said. "But your government has done things that make me pessimistic."
Thirty years of noncommunication create a lot of mistrust. The mistaken U.S. shooting down in 1988 of an Iran Air Airbus with 290 people aboard is often cited. Conspiracy theories abound. That the radical Sunni Taliban was an American creation designed to discomfort Shiite Iran is a near universal conviction.Another Guardsman, Jaafar Dehghani, 22, stepped forward. "We can defend our soil with an M-1 rifle," he said. "We have God on our side." He pointed to the hundreds of thousands of graves of young soldiers killed defending Khomeini's Islamic Republic in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. "If I'd been alive then, I'd be lying here."
Iran, on the 30th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution, is full of defiance and suspicion of President Obama's motives in reaching out to Tehran. But it is equally full of longing. Most people are under 30 and, like these soldiers, they thirst for contact with the outside world and, above all, an America that looms with all the power of myth.
The Great Satan is great also in its power to exert fascination. "Death to America" has become background noise, as interesting as piped elevator music.
The revolution freed Iranians from the brutality of the Shah's secret police, Savak, and delivered a home-grown society modeled on the tenets of Islam in place of one pliant to America's whim. But like all revolutions, it has also disappointed. Freedom has ebbed and flowed since 1979. Of late, it has ebbed.
Beneath the hijab, that is to say beneath the surface of things, frustrations multiply. Women sometimes raise their hands to their necks to express a feeling of suffocation. Hard-pressed men, working 12-hour days to make enough to get by, are prone to hysterical laughter with its hint of desperation.
Competing pressures bear down on President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and behind him the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. They know that with unemployment at 14 percent (and rising), inflation at about 25 percent, oil revenues set to plunge by about two-thirds this year, and the country's oil and gas infrastructure in desperate need of modernization, opening to the West and its technology makes sense.
They also know Iran is composed of two worlds: the surface and the subterranean. The former is placid; the latter is hungry for more of the freedom the revolution promised. This, too, speaks for an engagement that might over time end Iran's bipolar state.
On the other hand, a revolutionary government that deprives itself of its great enemy is one that has lost the core of its galvanizing propaganda. Opening equals risk.
This is the background to Ahmadinejad's offer to "hold talks based on mutual respect" with a United States he continued to criticize. It came in response to Obama's best statement on Iran to date - one devoid of threats and one that spoke of the dangers, but not the unacceptability, of a nuclear Iran.
Mutual respect, a phrase Obama also used, begins with that. As Iranians often note, carrots and sticks are for donkeys.
The young soldiers pointed to how the United States backed Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war, another indication of American perfidy. "Everyone was with Saddam," Dehghani said. "Except Syria," I suggested, which prompted a guffaw.
"The Arabs are chickens," he said. "Just look at what Egypt did about Gaza. Those big-bellied Arabs, you take up a stick and they run away."
Scratch the surface and there's no love lost between Persians and Arabs, another reason to be careful in distinguishing Iranian rhetoric, which can seem monolithic, from Iran's many-shaded reality.
Dehghani offered me a bowl of Ash, a soup of noodles, chickpeas and vegetables. "Why not try to do something about your own country rather than going around the world waging war?" he asked.
I told him I thought Obama was trying to do just that. Then he told me his father wanted him to stay in the Revolutionary Guards because there's money to be made - Ahmadinejad has channeled funds and jobs their way - but he was more interested in starting his own business.
That's typical enough. Iranians are property-buying, car-mad, entrepreneurial consumers with a taste for the latest brands. Forget about nukes. Think Nikes.
A few days after this meeting, I found myself on the Tehran subway. A bunch of youths started smiling and pointing. "This guy's an American!" they exclaimed. There was no menace, only curiosity.
A young woman in a black hijab was standing near me. Abruptly, she looked me straight in the eye and said in English: "Where are you from?"
"New York."
"Oh." And she smiled.
America, think again about Iran.
International Herald Tribune
A young woman in a black hijab was standing near me. Abruptly, she looked me straight in the eye and said in English: "Where are you from?"
"New York."
"Oh." And she smiled.
America, think again about Iran.
