The Ayatollahs' Democracy: An Iranian Challenge

by Hooman Majd

  The “Death to America” that Americans see and hear Iranians chant, and the burning of American flags at every anti-imperialist rally in Tehran, are deceptive indications of Iranians’ feelings toward America. The chanters and burners are sincere, but they are sincere in their dislike and even hatred of American foreign policy, not of America itself or Americans. Never in history has an abbreviation, “American foreign policy” to just “America,” caused so much misunderstanding, but Iranians who chant and burn flags are always amazed when they are told exactly how Americans regard their theatrical displays of anger. “What about Americans who burned their own flag in their protests?” some will ask, referring to the Vietnam War era when images of American protests filled television screens. “Those people were also protesting their foreign policy.” Sure, one says, but that was forty years ago. Some Iranians, it seems, are forever caught in the past. Their numbers are dwindling, however, and fewer and fewer Iranians feel the urge to burn an American flag or wish death on it, even though they will, using a common Farsi expression, wish death on themselves a few times a day whenever horror strikes them. Or wish death to potatoes, as they did en masse during their own presidential campaign when Ahmadinejad, in what was seen as a cynical and desperate attempt to gain votes, gave out free spuds to poor families. “Death to” has never meant anything more than disapproval, and although disapproval of American policy toward Iran (and other weaker countries) has long been a predominant sentiment among Iranians, weariness with thirty years of blaming America for its problems was beginning to show as the George Bush years were coming to an end.

  Despite doubts expressed by many Iranians that America might vote for a black man with a Muslim name as opposed to a white Christian war hero, some Iranians contracted Obama fever anyway, just as their American (and European) counterparts did. After the Democratic convention had finally confirmed to them that at least most Democrats, a large enough population, would be voting for a black man with a Muslim name as opposed to a white woman with all the right credentials, Tehran was filled with rumors, some preposterous and some only marginally less so. In Tehran in September 2008, I was surprised to learn from ordinarily sane and wise Iranians that not only was Obama a black man with a Muslim middle name, but he was in fact Iranian (with presumably Shia roots). Persians, as is their wont with those they admire, had begun to claim Obama as their own. What I have to think began as a joke, that Obama’s family had Persian ancestry and was originally from the city of Bushehr (on the Persian Gulf, and once a major trading post with Africa), was fast becoming accepted by some as either possibly or definitively true. Kayhan, the ultra-conservative newspaper and media organ of the Supreme Leader, published the information, implying that Obama’s original family name was Ab-ba-ma, meaning “water with us.” This convinced many that the story had merit, but it is likely that Kayhan picked it up from a satiric website that had first floated the notion. Although it is within the realm of possibility that Obama has Persian ancestors, just as I and everyone else on the planet certainly have African ones, the fact that Iranians wanted to believe it was a sign of how keen they were to have an American hero, one who might reverse the decades-long antagonism between their two governments. Most Iranians, even those reflexively anti-American, have grown tired of not just rhetoric, but the antagonism itself. Superstitious Iranians, a large group in a country where Shia superstition plays a big role, also parsed his names, both Barack and Obama, for any signs of virtue. “Barack” can mean auspicious in Farsi, and “Obama” can be read to mean “he’s with us” (sounds much better than “water with us,” whatever that means), so many believed, and probably still do, that President Obama was meant to ascend to the presidency if only to put Iranian-American relations on the right track.

  The Iranian government was wary before the election, neither wanting to appear to be pouring cold water on the idea that the United States might actually change, nor wanting to champion an American candidate no matter his color or even Muslim connection. But in conversations with Iranian authorities, it was clear that they were preparing for the worst, the worst being either the McCain “Bomb, Bomb, Iran!” presidency or an Obama presidency that would be difficult to demonize. (A number of officials, however, told me that neither scenario was a probability, because if McCain won, he wouldn’t dare attack Iran, and if Obama won, he would not be the friend to Iran that many hoped he would.) Nonetheless, the Iranian government, which generally tries to stay away from appearing to endorse, and therefore interfere, in the elections of any foreign country, couldn’t resist the temptation in 2008. The night before the U.S. election, state radio, always reflecting the government’s view, broadcast a commentary in favor of Obama, highly ironic in light of the Iranian election of June 12, 2009, saying, “Obama entered the race under the slogan of change. The American people expect their government to put aside neo-conservative policy of unilateralism and return to dialogue in their dealings with the international community.”

  When Obama won the election, President Ahmadinejad, wanting to get out front with an overture of his own, sent the president-elect a congratulatory note, unprecedented in the thirty-year history of the Islamic Republic. It was an exceedingly clever bit of ta’arouf—the defining Persian characteristic that can include not just exaggerated politesse and self-deprecation but also one-upmanship and manipulation—for if Obama responded positively, then Ahmadinejad would claim that it was Iran that had quite reasonably first reached out to a former foe, and if Obama did not respond, then Ahmadinejad could claim (as he later did) that not only was the American president a boor, but the United States was in fact insincere in its desire for change. The hard-line daily Kayhan in fact, on the Wednesday after the U.S. election and in preparation for the latter, had already run the headline “A Shift in the White House—He Returns in the Cloak of a Dove” (aan baz dar lebass’e kabootar amad). Employing the flowery and obfuscating language Persians love, it implied that any U.S. president, “he” (although “aan” is not gender-specific), is ever a hawk, never a dove. Rudeness is unforgivable in Iranian and indeed in Middle Eastern culture, and either Obama’s reputation or his strategy was sure to suffer, if even only slightly, no matter how he dealt with Ahmadinejad’s letter. The president-elect’s first detailed discussion of Iran (and one that didn’t acknowledge the congratulatory note) came in December 2008, in an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press. In response to what his strategy for Iran might be, he suggested one of “carrots and sticks” to induce Iran to change its behavior, a wince-inducing phrase to almost all Iranians. Carrots and sticks, as former secretary of state James Baker once innocently told Ali G on his mock television talk show, may be tools of diplomacy, particularly in the arsenal of a superpower, but the language is insulting to a nation that simply does not consider itself inferior to the United States and, perhaps more important, is not particularly intimidated by the United States.

  Sticks? In the summer of 2006, the day after the UN Security Council, under American guidance and prompting, passed its first resolution demanding that Iran suspend uranium enrichment, I was sitting in deputy ambassador Mehdi Danesh-Yazdi’s office at the Iranian Mission in New York.

  “Do the Americans think we’re afraid?” he asked me. “We’re a generation that has seen the most horrific war, we’ve had bombs and poison gas rained down on our heads, we’ve watched as our brothers have died in our arms, and the Americans think we’re afraid of them, or of a UN resolution?” Danesh-Yazdi, as gentle and progressive an Iranian official as there was, was not being hostile or engaging in bluster; he was merely suggesting, as he always did, that Americans misunderstood the Iranian psyche and made policy decisions that could only lead to more misunderstanding, on the part of both sides.

  Predictably, though, the Iranian response to Obama’s first foray into U.S.-Iran relations was laced with ta’arouf. The Foreign Ministry also made it abundantly clear that the very concept of “carrot and sticks” will not work with a country like Iran. (
Ministry officials would likely have asked, like Ali G, “What if we don’t want any carrots?” Iranians do not see themselves as a naughty child or much worse, a donkey that requires discipline if it does not do as it is told, and rewards if it does.) But even before Obama’s Meet the Press appearance, many conservative Iranians had their suspicions of him confirmed when he repeated some of his campaign slogans at his first press conference after the election. “Iran’s development of a nuclear weapon…is unacceptable,” he had said, and “Iran’s support of terrorist organizations…is something that has to cease.” Ali Larijani, the conservative speaker of Parliament and a political rival of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s, but a pragmatist who has long advocated negotiations, even conciliatory ones, with the West, was the first to condemn the remarks, saying, “What is expected is a change in strategy, not the repetition of objections to Iran’s nuclear program which will be taking a step in the wrong direction,” and “Obama must know that the change that he talks about is not simply a superficial changing of colors or tactics.” A rather harsh reaction, it would seem to most Americans, given that Senator Obama had just been elected president and had hardly any time to formulate an Iran policy, let alone a response, if there was to be one, to President Ahmadinejad and his letter. So why the strenuous objections to these throwaway statements? And why did the Saudi stock market then immediately suffer a steep decline, a decline the Saudis attributed to Mr. Obama’s pronouncements on Iran? It had to do with ta’arouf, and the way Iranians, and to some degree Arabs, parse every word for nuance.

  Ta’arouf has many forms, including supreme politesse that can sometimes mask darker or even sinister sentiments, but its use (and Iranians cannot help themselves in employing it) means that signals are constantly being sent with layers of language. Messages received in return that do not allow for ta’arouf are resented, and even rejected. Barack Obama’s oft-repeated proclamation during the campaign that his offer to negotiate with the Iranian leadership meant he would meet with them “at a time and place” of his “choosing” was viewed as insulting in Tehran because the language implied that America was the superior party that could dictate terms to an inferior Iran. Negotiations, the Iranians believe, are a matter of mutual consent between parties that at a minimum require some measure of respect (a word Iranians are perhaps excessively fond of) toward one’s adversary. And Obama’s proclamation at his press conference that Iran’s “development of a nuclear weapon is unacceptable” was straightforward enough but offensive to some Iranians on two levels: it implied first that Iranians were lying about their nuclear program (and that the Supreme Leader, who had issued a fatwa against the development and use of a nuclear weapon, was a supreme liar), and second, that the United States had the moral superiority to decide for the rest of the world what is “acceptable” and “unacceptable.” (That Israeli possession of nuclear weapons was evidently still “acceptable” to the United States grated even further, and not just on Iranians.)

  The Saudi stock market reaction was one of worry: that a new president of the United States might simply continue familiar U.S. policy and language toward Iran that the Arabs, at least, understood didn’t work with the Persians. “Iran’s support of terrorist organizations,” another seemingly straightforward statement and a fact that President-elect Obama believed “must cease,” was presumably a reference to Hezbollah and Hamas, neither of which, despite U.S. insistence, are considered terrorist organizations by the vast majority of the people of the Muslim world. In any case, the Iranians were under no illusion that President Obama would remove, with a wave of his hand, Hamas and Hezbollah from the list of terrorist organizations or Iran from the list of state sponsors of terrorism, for that was to be negotiated as far as they were concerned (and something they actually offered to do in 2003).

  U.S. politicians have often been blissfully unaware of both the psychological makeup of Iranian leaders and what motivates them, if not Iranian culture as a whole. During the almost two-year-long process for the UN Security Council to implement three sets of sanctions against Iran, the Iranians made it clear, to use former UN ambassador Javad Zarif’s words, that they were “allergic” to a certain kind of language—the language of threats and intimidation, and a language bereft of ta’arouf. President Obama’s messages, in his very early days as president-elect, didn’t come back to haunt him, but he quickly came to understand how language was going to affect the future of Iranian-American relations.

  As it happened, Obama’s first real outreach to Iran (and the Muslim world in general) didn’t come until his inauguration, which included his famous “unclenched fist” remark. Many Iranians reacted positively, except for those who saw it as rhetoric unmatched by deeds. The Iranian propaganda machine, now recognizing a delicate mission, once again went into overdrive. It pointed out to its audience that a nation with armies on either border of Iran and a navy in its waters, a nation that had imposed debilitating sanctions on a smaller and weaker country, and a nation that repeatedly refused to take the option of military assault on their nation “off the table” could hardly be described as extending a “hand,” whereas a nation, Iran, that had not threatened another in centuries, and one that merely defended its independence and its rights, could hardly be described as presenting a “clenched fist.” Westerners may have been delighted with President Obama’s address, and it was an admirable one, but it gave Iranians who don’t see their country as a threat to the United States an excuse to play victim once again.

  The man supposedly from Bushehr, however, still hadn’t lost his overall appeal with average Iranians. Many in Iran ascribed his Iran statements both before and after his inauguration to naiveté, or to the indebtedness of all American administrations to the Israeli lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, something that is assumed as fact throughout the Middle East. But with Obama, Barack Hussein, they still hoped that he might be the one president who could break free of AIPAC, and apply an unbiased strategy to the Muslim world.

  In March, two short months into his presidency and with Iran high on his foreign policy agenda, Obama took the further unusual step of sending an open message to the Iranian people and the Islamic government, which the United States still had not formally recognized since breaking off relations in 1980. As Iranians prepared for the Norooz celebration, the Persian New Year (equivalent to Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and New Year’s all rolled into one), Obama recorded a video message congratulating Iranians and the Islamic Republic of Iran, his use of the country’s full name extending it de facto recognition. But President Obama’s message, which was warmly applauded by Iranian-Americans and by many Iranians unaccustomed to congratulatory notes from American presidents, again gave Iran’s government a golden opportunity to criticize American attitudes toward it. Ahmadinejad may still have been sulking because his own congratulatory note to Obama had gone unanswered and unmentioned for almost five months, but it wasn’t left to him to react to the Norooz greeting, even if he wanted to. In the video, Obama praised Iranian culture and history, but he also suggested that Iran would have to behave according to Western standards, according to Western determination of what is good behavior, before it could take its rightful place among the family of nations. It took a full day, evidence of the seriousness with which Iran’s leadership took Obama’s message, but at the end of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s long speech in Mashhad the day after America’s message was aired, he said, “If you change, our behavior will change too. If you do not change, our nation will not change, as it has only become more and more experienced, patient, and powerful in the past thirty years.”

  The fact that the Supreme Leader himself responded showed the concern the government had with Obama’s popularity, but his words rang true for many Iranians. Not only had Khamenei acknowledged, for the first time really, that Iran might change (something hitherto deemed unnecessary as Iran’s behavior, we were always told, was exemplary and faultless), but he tapped into the Iranian superiority/inferior
ity complex, one that causes Iranians to view themselves as victims of a more powerful West while still enormously proud of their culture and sometimes too confident in an innate superiority.

  The complexes Iranians suffer from have deep roots, all the way back to Shia Islam itself, multiple foreign invasions of their country, and the lost glory of the Persian Empire. Iranians may believe in their superiority because of a long history as a cultured, sophisticated nation with definable and ancient borders in a region where no other country has existed as a nation-state for longer than a hundred years, but they can simultaneously feel inferior because of the West’s obvious technological, educational, and economic advantages, to say nothing of the sheer military might it possesses. Those most loudly proclaiming Iranian superiority and Iran’s ability to be independent from Western influence, though, are not immune from a pronounced inferiority complex. Ali Kordan, the archconservative interior minister in Ahmadinejad’s first administration, was impeached by the Parliament in 2008 for his solecistic claim and boast that he had received his degree not from a competent Iranian institution, but from “London’s Oxford University,” proof enough of the superiority/inferiority complexes at work even in the most ardent revolutionaries.

  The Supreme Leader, well aware that a new era had dawned in the United States, had in fact already given a speech before Obama’s message in which he prepared his people (and himself) for the inevitability of restoring relations with the United States. In his speech in Mashhad, however, he put the onus on the American president to make the changes necessary to bring that about. The truth is that Iran has long wished for a real détente with the United States, including recognition of Iran’s legitimacy as a sovereign nation with its own concerns and interests, but, above all, with mutual respect and recognition of Iran’s rights under international law. In February 2009—a mere month after Obama took office—Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Reza Salari, on a trip to Mexico to determine why Iran’s influence and trade with a country sharing a long border with the United States hadn’t reached the levels it had in South America, said to reporters, “After President Obama, we think that the tone has changed in America. We want to be patient, give them some more time to thoroughly investigate and see for themselves what are the real solutions for the ambiguities and the crisis.” Coming from the foreign ministry of a hard-line Ahmadinejad administration, it didn’t sound like Iran was shying away from a potential thaw in relations with its archenemy. (Granted, for those Iranians who don’t wish for détente, hard-line clerics such as Mesbah-Yazdi and some hard-liners in the Revolutionary Guards who believe relations with America, any America, will lead to Iran’s weakening, Obama is their biggest nightmare, mainly because he is more likely than any other American president to deliver what Iran craves, and insists on having, in its relations with the United States.)