Trying something new

Iranians See Talks With U.S. as Historic

Karl Vick in the Washington Post: Iran's acceptance of direct talks with the United States over Iraq is being regarded among Iranians as a major foreign policy development, a historic if still tentative departure from 27 years of official enmity that held the government of the "Great Satan" as one to be spoken against, but never with. ...

Vehement opposition to the United States has been a pillar of Iran's theocratic system since 1979, the year an angry population overthrew the monarch Washington had helped install 26 years earlier in a coup engineered with the help of the CIA. From the U.S. side, a similar enmity was embedded in policy when student militants overran the red-brick U.S. Embassy in Tehran, taking 52 Americans hostage and holding them for more than a year.

The United States severed diplomatic relations with Iran, and over the next quarter-century both countries consistently found a reliable villain in the other.

Inside Iran, however, an appetite for rapprochement grew along with a population whose youthful majority had no memory of the revolution.

In 2002, a poll found that three-quarters of Iranians surveyed favored talks with the United States. The pollster was thrown in jail, but the reality drove a quiet competition between Iran's two rival political forces. ...

"Whoever could take the prize" of U.S. rapprochement would, it was widely believed, dominate Iranian politics for the foreseeable future, said Mehdi Karrubi, a moderate cleric who was speaker of the last parliament dominated by reformers.

The competition, however, had paralyzed the effort: Neither side would allow the other to reach out to the United States without risking accusations of betraying the Islamic revolution.

That changed last year, when conservative clerics edged reformists out of government, unifying Iran's elaborate ruling structure for the first time in nearly a decade. It also cleared the way for the opening to Washington, and even reformists urged the conservatives to act.

"This might be a historic irony, but it's true the state is in 'harmony,' " said Mostafa Tajzadeh, a prominent reformist theoretician, speaking before the announcement of the direct talks. "No time has been more convenient for talks between the two countries. We are less sensitive than at any time since the revolution."

A few conservatives quietly urged the same. Behind the scenes of Iran's conservative establishment, insiders whispered about the prospect of negotiations. ...

"The public image the U.S. has made of Iran is a monster. They have to do something, at least break a horn," [Tajzadeh] said. "There is only a small chance. This is negotiation.

The public also appeared to welcome news of talks. "I think both sides should take advantage of this opportunity. They should be friends," said Kobra Mehdipour, 68, clutching her chador against the March wind.

Asked who in Iran might feel otherwise, she said, "There might be some illiterate people in the provinces who want to be friends with other countries but might be under the influence of some kind of propaganda."

Vick's article is one of the few informed, unbiased looks at Iran I've seen lately. The quote from the old woman is funny--part of Iran's problem has been part of it's population has always been willing to through in its lot with the West rather than with its own 'illiterate people in the provinces', an economic and psychological gap that was only enhanced by the U.S. puppet shah.

So it makes sense that, just as only Nixon could go to China, only a hard-line conservative government--American as well as Iranian--could talk to the other side.

And once you start talking, it's kindof hard to paint the other side as a monster, somehow non-human; it's why the Israelis refuse to talk to the Palestinians, and why from Israel's point of view they'd rather we continue to listen to them on Iran rather than the Iranian government.

Uncredited photo of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from China's Peoples Daily online.

March 19, 2006 photo of President George W. Bush by Jonathan Ernst/ Reuters.