Back to previous page Published: December 15, 2001 Iran Could Be a Valuable Friend By CAMERON KHOSROWSHAHI PALO ALTO, Calif. -- In the long-term war on terrorism, forging friendships will be critical, and one of the countries most important as a potential American ally is Iran. To many Americans, rapprochement with Iran seems repellent. Iran took 52 Americans hostage in 1979 and kept them for 444 days. Its leaders referred to the United States as the Great Satan, and only last month, our confiscated embassy in Tehran was turned into a kind of anti-American theme park. But Iran is important to us. Not only is it one of the Middle East's most populous countries, with 70 million people, but it is strategically located, bordering several powerful or volatile states. And the apparent reflexive anti-Americanism of Iranians may not be what it seems. The major grievance of almost all Iranians against the United States is from the past: the C.I.A. engineered the removal of Iran's partially democratic government in 1953, replacing it with the autocratic shah. In Afghanistan, Iran not only disliked the Taliban, who In Afghanistan, Iran not only disliked the Taliban, whose rule it viewed as a perversion of true Islam, but supported the Northern Alliance. Many Afghans speak either Dari or Tajik, dialects of Persian, and Iran could, if it chose, influence Northern Alliance leaders to work smoothly with the other Afghan constituencies as they try to put a truly representative government in place. Iran also continues to be an enemy of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq and, as a Shiite country, could conceivably persuade Iraqi Shiites, who make up at least 55 percent of the population in Iraq, to work more closely with opposition groups like the Kurds for a new, more democratic Iraqi government. It is true that hard-line factions within the Iranian government support terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas. However, there are factions that do the same in countries that are our staunchest allies in the region, like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. And Iran has moderates, including many supporters of President Mohammad Khatami, who favor rebuilding friendly relationships with the Western world. As an 11-year-old in 1979, I watched on television as angry crowds swallowed cities in Iran, the country of my father's birth. My classmates in America didn't understand the fanaticism and, at that age, neither did I. Later, studying history, I read, "The will of the Almighty . . . expressly disapproves of government by kings." It sounded like Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini preaching against Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, but it was Thomas Paine in "Common Sense," calling for American colonists to rise up against George III. The Iranian revolution was wrapped in religious terms, but after two decades, Iran is changing. Despite the extremism of their mullahs, the Iranian people still share many of America's core values. Like America, and unlike most Muslim nations, Iran has a tradition, stretching back to the Tobacco Revolt of 1890, of broad-based resistance to the tyranny of kings. Today, Iran has democratic institutions, and it has had no military involvement in governmental changes for two decades. Voter turnout for national elections is high, and in 1999 voters in cities and villages elected about 200,000 local council members, including more than 500 women. Iran's is not a full democracy. Civil liberties are curtailed, and a Council of Guardians, dominated by the authoritarian mullahs, approves candidates for office and heavily influences what the president can do. But Iran is farther along the road to democracy than many of the regimes America supports in the Middle East and elsewhere. We can encourage democratic development in the region and serve our strategic interests as well by engaging more fully with Iran. Cameron Khosrowshahi was a Fulbright scholar in Morocco in 1996 and writes about the Middle East. Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company Back to previous page

©2006 Ted Weinstein Literary Management