by Hooman Majd
THERE HAVE BEEN missteps, or perhaps better described as premature steps, along the way toward a revived Iranian empire. Iran is quick to acknowledge these missteps, but the reactions of its Arab neighbors betray their fear of Iranian dominance. In February 2009, Bahrain, home to the U.S. Fifth Fleet and a staunch ally of the West, in a fit of apoplexy, broke off negotiations with Iran over a proposed gas-export deal. Bahrain is one of those tiny kingdoms in the Persian Gulf that Qaddafi referred to a year earlier as being Persian in everything but its rulers, and it is in fact the one Persian Gulf Arab nation that has a majority Shia population that views itself as oppressed by the Sunni leadership. That leadership was apoplectic not over terms of the gas deal, but over remarks made by cleric Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri, speaker of Parliament at one time, presidential candidate, and close confidant of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. Nateq-Nouri had been quoted as saying that Bahrain was Iran’s fourteenth province until 1970, the year of Bahrain’s independence, a statement perhaps uncomfortably reminiscent of Saddam Hussein’s claim right before and after he invaded Kuwait that that country was in fact nothing more than Iraq’s Province 19. Although Iran did rule Bahrain in the seventeenth century, when the second Persian Empire, a Shia one, was at the height of its glory, some Iranian hard-liners believe that Iran still holds sovereignty, at least emotional sovereignty, over the island. The Iranian government quickly distanced itself from Nateq-Nouri’s statement, insisting that Iran had no territorial ambitions on Bahrain, but the suspicion remains that Bahrain would be one of the lower-hanging fruits ripe for an eager Persian picking.
In Central and South America, there have been missteps too—not necessarily premature steps, but instances where Iran’s appetite may have been larger than its stomach. Having had no experience in imperialism for over four hundred years, and with economic problems of its own, Iran can be thought of as being on a learning curve. In Nicaragua, after Daniel Ortega’s victory in the presidential elections, Iran opened an embassy and began courting the anti-American government. But the announced aid and multi-million-dollar economic projects have yet to materialize. With little obvious in common with Latin American nations other than revolutionary zeal combined with anti-imperialism, Iran recognizes that it will have to do more to win hearts and minds than merely promise to pour its oil riches into the region. Yet even so Iran has made strides in Paraguay with its proxy Hezbollah, and soared in Venezuela under Hugo Chavez, a leader perhaps more disdainful of the United States than even some of the Ayatollahs. At the Venirauto factory in Maracay, Iranian automobiles are being built, sometimes one at a time for lack of parts or for other reasons, for a Venezuelan market apparently desperate to have them, based on the number of inquiries it receives from potential customers and the almost equal number of requests for cars it turns down.
At one point in 2008 it seemed that every foreign reporter based in Caracas, perhaps curious about the IranAir flights landing at the airport, made the trek to Calabozo, ground zero in Iran’s economic ties to the region, and filed reports about the worrisome growing presence of Iran in America’s backyard. The BBC even broadcast a special report on the phenomenon on Radio 4, and interviewed Iranian project managers and Venezuelans involved in everything from construction to maize-processing plants. Maria Cristina Rodriguez, a worker from President Chavez’s United Socialist Party and a resident, was quoted as being proud of Calabozo’s association with Iran. “For the first time our young people are being trained properly,” she told the BBC, pointing out that her father owned a Veniran tractor, one assembled at an Iranian-built factory with Iranian parts. In Calabozo, apart from the tractor factory and agricultural engineering, Iranian engineers and specialists are building thousands of low-income housing apartments, and a twenty-seven-hundred-unit apartment complex going up in Venezuela’s dusty southern plains is not too far from the Iranian club, yes, the Iranian Club, where the engineers from the contracting firm and other Iranian specialists based in the area spend their free time playing pool, socializing, and eating halal abgousht and other Persian food (expertly prepared by Venezuelan cooks) with other Iranians. It is oddly reminiscent of the British clubs in far-off colonies that were symbols of Great Britain’s imperial reach, but tropical cocktails are unlikely to be invented at the Iranian club in Calabozo. No alcohol please: we’re Persian. But Iran’s bank in Caracas, Banco Internacional de Desarrollo, or BID, which was inaugurated to facilitate Iranian economic development in the region (such as in Calabozo), has fallen under U.S. sanctions and has undergone intense scrutiny for possible links to Iran’s attempts to circumvent those sanctions as well as sanctions against the purchase of weaponry. The bank cannot, just like its domestic banks Iran has learned, gain access to the U.S. monetary system, which hinders it immensely. Yes, it’s a learning curve, and one that does not come without setbacks.
Iran has benefited from elections in Latin America that have brought left-wing and intuitively anti-imperialist presidents to power, most notably in Venezuela, but it wasn’t about to squander an opportunity in South America’s largest nation, Brazil. The election of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, better known simply as Lula, has allowed Iran to forge closer ties with his country, a country whose economic and military clout surpasses that of all other nations in the region. While not a country in need of Iranian technology or aid, it is a country that could offer long-term benefits to Iran, whether it be through joint economic development projects, a dramatic increase in trade, or cooperation on nuclear energy projects. Perhaps more important, Brazil’s support for Iran in the international arena (particularly at the UN) is vital, for it is seen, despite its leftist government and unlike Venezuela or Nicaragua, as a Western-style democracy with no overt anti-American agenda.
Iran’s investment in Brazil paid off dramatically in 2009 when the overwhelmingly popular President Lula rushed to Ahmadinejad’s and Iran’s defense, even using Ahmadinejad’s language in comparing the protesters on the streets of Tehran who believed his re-election to be fraudulent to fans of a losing soccer team, and describing them as “poor losers.” That may have been good enough for Ahmadinejad, who craved international legitimacy in the aftermath of the elections, but Lula went further than that. At the UN General Assembly in New York only a few months after the election, Lula met with Ahmadinejad, was filmed smiling with him and slapping his back, and gave an interview in which he strongly defended Iran’s nuclear program, including its right to enrich uranium. He also invited Ahmadinejad to Brazil for a state visit later in the year, an invitation Ahmadinejad immediately accepted, expecting a reciprocal visit by Lula to Tehran, which will do even more for Iran’s standing in the world, particularly with respect to its nuclear program.
Brazil’s cozy relationship with Iran did not go unnoticed by Israel—already concerned with Iranian influence in the region—and President Shimon Peres quickly scheduled a visit to Brasilia only two weeks before Ahmadinejad’s to “discuss the Iranian infiltration into South America,” according to the Israeli government. In the game of winning hearts and minds, Israel appeared to be playing catch-up everywhere outside of Europe and the United States. Nonetheless, Lula warmly received Ahmadinejad in Brazil (with a bear hug, no less, that a Brazilian friend of mine deemed “embarrassing”), and the Iranian president and his delegation of over ninety cabinet members, advisors, and Iranian businessmen signed a number of agreements with their Brazilian counterparts that could not have made either the United States or Israel very happy.
IN 1964 my family was posted to North Africa. Before that, my brother and I had attended the American School in New Delhi, India, a big, well-equipped institution populated with children of Americans assigned to the large U.S. Embassy nearby, and a handful of non-American “diplobrats” like ourselves. We had, in my short life to that point, lived in London (only months after I was born), then San Francisco, and then Tehran for a short time, where we also attended the American school—a smaller school, which indicated to me that India had to be more
important than Iran. While in India, I vividly remember the day in 1963 (or the next day, given the time difference) that President John Kennedy was shot. My parents grieved along with their American friends—it seemed the whole world grieved—and I remember walking with my young American schoolmates, arms over each other’s shoulders, in silence, aware that something had gone horribly wrong but something that we didn’t really understand.
America was a supreme nation to me, so the assassination of its president was of vital significance, and India was big and majestic—significant to a world that knew Gandhi and Nehru—but what about Iran? None of my mostly American classmates in India had any awareness of Iran, and in the segregated diplomatic community where we lived, I knew no Indians except for workers who spoke little or no English. (Pani-lau’o—“Bring me water”—was the one useful phrase I quickly learned.) So being a young child with no awareness of Iran’s great history, and its having little international significance ten years after the fall of Mossadeq, I identified more with America than I did with the country of my birth, the country that had sent my father to serve in Delhi. I was—like many of my countrymen, even in Iran—unaware that 1963 was also the year that Ayatollah Khomeini was arrested and later sent into exile for advocating an Iran different from the one the Shah imagined, and an Iran that, if nothing else, might become a source of inspiration for the world’s Muslims, tens of millions of whom lived at that time in India.
We were to go to Rabat, Morocco, next, my father told us one day, and although I knew where that was, I didn’t give it much thought other than to wonder what the American school might be like in that kingdom. At the last minute, however, even as our household goods were already on their way to Rabat, my father was diverted to the embassy in Tunis, Tunisia, a country I had no awareness of (and one that had been independent for only as long as I had been alive). Rabat, Tunis—it didn’t make too much difference to a seven-year-old, but when we settled in and started at the American Cooperative School of Tunis in 1964, basically a few classrooms (and no high school) in a nondescript one-story building by the side of the Tunis-Carthage road, I realized we were in a much smaller country that just had to be less important than Iran. I recognized also that we were now in a Muslim country, where Arabic and French were the two languages spoken, but it seemed to my young mind a country sorely in need of development. Tunis was, for Americans and foreigners, a country with Peace Corps volunteers (some of whom served as substitute teachers at my school), an outpost of the Ford Foundation, and an Iranian Embassy that was essentially a two-man operation with very little to do. The Peace Corps, which I understood even as a child, did not go forth into developed nations.
Toward the end of our stay, politics intruded on our lives in a way I hadn’t imagined, and in a completely different way than the Kennedy assassination did in 1963. At the start of the Six-Day War in 1967, between Israel and its neighbors, small mobs of angry Tunisians attacked American institutions, and the American school evacuated its students—I remember hurriedly piling into my father’s Volkswagen with a bunch of classmates, Iranians helping Americans—and we were home for the duration, all six days of it. This was an Arab versus Israeli war, and Tunisians were Arabs and Americans stand-ins for Israelis. But where did Iran fit in? Nowhere, as far as I could tell, but that troubled me, for I identified somewhat with the Muslim Tunisians who prayed like my mother did every day, but also with my American friends, some whose fathers were in the U.S. military and had already been on tours in Vietnam. If they were under attack, then I was under attack, right? Yes and no. Iran, a non-Arab country, had no dog in the fight, I knew, but sympathies had to be with fellow Muslims, even as the Shah had to bend over backward to avoid displeasing America, his patron.
If Tunisians were angry that their pro-Western government under President Habib Bourguiba didn’t express enough support for Arabs fighting Jews, or that it didn’t send troops fast enough to help its fellow Arabs, they were lashing out at Americans, who I thought had been sent there to help them. It was the first time that I became aware of foreign policy, American foreign policy, and of the fact that my country, Iran, didn’t seem to have one of its own. Unlike neighbor Libya, where the United States once had an air base, Tunisia remained essentially in the Western camp and under the iron fist of its dictator presidents and Western-trained intelligence services, but now, more than forty years later, Tunisians have no doubts where Iran stands when it comes to foreign policy, and about its independence from East and West. Iran’s embassy in Tunis is no longer a two-man operation, the children of its diplomats do not attend the American school, and its presidents and foreign ministers visit their Muslim counterparts in North Africa regularly. It is not that Tunis always agrees with Iran, or that Tunis stands with Iran against the West; it is that Tunis cannot, as Qaddafi once implied, afford to ignore or more specifically antagonize Iran. Iran has already largely won, after all, the hearts and minds of its people.
GUESS WHO’S COMING TO DINNER?
Iran and America in the Age of Obama
Cutting ties with America is among our basic policies. However, we have never said that the relations will remain severed forever…. Undoubtedly, the day the relations with America prove beneficial for the Iranian nation, I will be the first one to approve of that.
—SUPREME LEADER AYATOLLAH ALI KHAMENEI, Yazd, March 1, 2008
For the USA, preservation of dominance over others is important.
—Twelfth-grade social science textbook, Iranian public school system
In February 2007, when I was sitting with former president Khatami in his office in North Tehran, he asked me about Barack Obama. Iranians were just beginning to hear about this new force in American politics and had grown deeply curious of him.
“He could be the next president,” I said, “but you know, his middle name is Hussein, and that won’t go over well with many Americans.” Khatami was surprised to hear of Obama’s Muslim connection.
“Ajab! Really?” he said on hearing the news, with a big smile. The idea that a black man might be taken seriously in a run for his party’s nomination was surprising enough to the Iranian leadership and to most ordinary Iranians, but a black man with a Muslim middle name, the name of the prophet’s grandson and a Shiite saint no less, was almost too much to consider. Khatami, I felt, was humoring me when I spoke earnestly of Obama, as if he didn’t want to dash my hopes, but his expression gave away what he and all other Iranians I saw that winter really thought: it will never happen.
The Iranian revolution had been a revolution of the oppressed, and because of that, Iranian revolutionaries, still very much in charge, had a soft spot for African-Americans. The sentiments that led Ayatollah Khomeini and those revolutionaries to release all of the African-American hostages at the U.S. embassy in Tehran within a week or so of the takeover in 1979 had not died, despite the decades of animosity between U.S. administrations—its black officials included—and Iran. A year and a half later, in early September 2008, I was back in Khatami’s offices in Jamaran, Tehran, and he, along with most Iranians, was contemplating an African-American president in America.
“Do you think he can make it?” he asked me, still unconvinced.
“He is our next president,” I replied, “despite his name and his color.”
All of Iran had followed the American presidential primaries and watched the two political conventions on satellite television, but there was still astonishment that Obama might actually win the presidency. Iranians harbored a fatalistic disbelief that a majority of Americans would actually vote for him, no matter what the polls said (which, not surprisingly, echoed what was being said in some quarters in the United States too). For conspiracy-minded Iranians, no matter their education or sophistication (such as President Ahmadinejad, who is educated but decidedly unsophisticated), the idea that he would be allowed to become president was itself preposterous, no matter the vote. Hindsight allows us to consider that President Ahmadinejad, who expressed doubt
s as to whether Obama would be allowed to ascend to the highest office in the United States, knows a thing or two about allowing candidates a well-deserved victory. Iranians by and large once had a great admiration for America, a country that until the coup of 1953 had shown benevolence toward their country—even protecting its sovereignty from partial Soviet occupation in the aftermath of World War II—while other great powers had sought to bring it to its knees. Iranians continued to admire the very concept of America even after the CIA-sponsored coup that returned the Shah to power, but had lost faith that America’s promise was real, even more so during the eight years that George W. Bush was in office—most Iranians, like many of their American counterparts, believed his election was stolen—an era marked by American eagerness to utilize its military strength to accomplish foreign policy goals.