Obama's Norouz Message

Kamran and I have guest posts up at Harry's Place. (Mine is Naivety, Diplomacy, and Threats and Kamran's is Obama’s positive New Year message to Iran, even though Kamran originally called it a Wolf in Sheep's Clothing.

Here are excerpts:

A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing:

The Iranian regime wants us Iranians to believe that President Obama is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. This message is their response to Obama’s election and policies regarding talks with Iran. Don’t forget that Ahmadinejad said that a black man could never be president of America. That means they were not prepared to deal with someone who would publicly offer a hand for dialogue and a better relationship.

Is President Obama sincere in his attempts to start a better relationship with Iran? We still need to wait and see. What is clear by now, is that if his policy of engagement fails it won’t be the fault of the US alone. It is fine if Obama want to quote our beloved poet, Saadi, to show respect and understanding of our long history, but we have heard this before, we have been there, and we know that game very well,

The US needs to come up with concrete steps and let us Iranians know what they are offering publicly. The one thing that Iranians from all walks of life agree on is our desire to be an independent nation. We won’t accept anything less.

There are a lot of measures that the US government can take to build trust. Not all of those have to do with the Iranian government’s willingness to start dialogue with the US. I see Obama’s New Year message as positive, but we need more than that.

At the same time the response of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, can be understood as nothing other than asking the US to go down on its knees and beg for forgiveness and take responsibility for the manipulation of the last 500 years of Iranian society. His demand for changes without discussion is the same as the American policy of demanding preconditions for talks.
Read the rest

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Diplomacy, Naivety, and Threats

Everywhere I went in Iran, I met people who claimed to despise the actions of their government and the clerical regime. Taxi drivers, hotel clerks, waiters, government employees, mothers, fathers, accountants and butchers all expressed dismay and disgust at the Iranian government. Yet after four years living there I realized that despising the regime is a kind of national sport in Iran. It’s not new or even confined to the current regime. A nineteenth century French diplomat described Persians as “full of adoration for the country itself, they do not believe in any means of running it.” (You can read that quote in Fariba Adelkhah’s great book Being Modern in Iran.) The only politicians Iranians respect are those, like Mossadeq, who never had the opportunity to screw up because they were removed from office forcibly. While the actions of their government have very real consequences for the daily life of every single citizen of Iran, in reality most Iranians see it as superfluous: at best, defenders of Iran’s national interests; at worst, another tyranny to survive.

Since my stay in Iran, I have come to see the sanctions and the lack of diplomacy as counter-productive. The lack of official diplomacy with Iran since the revolution has, on one hand, been a boon for America’s image in that country. It meant that I was welcomed and beloved in every corner of Iran, despite what you might think if you are a viewer of Fox News. It’s fantastic to be an American in Iran. In fact, I doubt there is a more pro-American population outside of Texas. Why? Because we have not compromised with a corrupt and despised regime as we have in other parts of the world. That said, I don’t see that the lack of diplomacy and the sanctions have done any favors for Iran’s opposition or its people. The sanctions have strengthened the most powerful supporters of the regime who now have a stranglehold on the economy; read Abbas Milani’s article “U.S. Foreign Policy and the Future of Democracy in Iran.” (pdf). They have forced millions of Iranians into dependency on the government itself for work, food and basic necessities.

Read the Rest

Republic of Suffering

I heard a fascinating interview with historian Drew Gilpin Faust who writes about the American Civil War. She talks about the way the Civil War forced Americans to redefine their notions of what made for a good death. In pre-CW America, apparently, the way a person died was a predictor of how they would be received in the afterlife. A Good Death meant a quick transition into heaven. She reads from a letter that a soldier writes while he is dying and states that he knew his father would be "delighted" to hear from his son as he died. It's really an interesting an interview.

Here is an excerpt from her introduction to her book, This Republic of Suffering:

The Civil War confronted Americans with an enormous task, one quite different from saving or dividing the nation, ending or maintaining slavery, or winning the military conflict—the demands we customarily understand to have been made of the Civil War generation. Americans North and South would be compelled to confront— and resist—the war's assault on their conceptions of how life should end, an assault that challenged their most fundamental assumptions about life's value and meaning. As they faced horrors that forced them to question their ability to cope, their commitment to the war, even their faith in a righteous God, soldiers and civilians alike struggled to retain their most cherished beliefs, to make them work in the dramatically altered world that war had introduced. Americans had to identify—find, invent, create—the means and mechanisms to manage more than half a million dead: their deaths, their bodies, their loss. How they accomplished this task reshaped their individual lives—and deaths—at the same time that it redefined their nation and their culture. The work of death was Civil War America's most fundamental and most demanding undertaking.

Political Paralysis

"We love Americans; we just don't love your government," Iranians everywhere told me over and over and over again. "We have the same problem: bad governments," many added. When they did, I invariably responded: "The American government represents the people: you should hold us responsible for the actions of our government." It was kind of a mini civics lesson.

The fact is that most Americans do not know the extent and effect of American foreign policy. We are mostly concerned with domestic issues. And now, on top of that, most are *not* represented by the current government.

What I found most distressing during my recent stay in The US was the extent to which Americans had become more "Iranian." In Iran I met people frustrated with the system who had given up affecting it. I encountered a lack of will, a kind of political exhaustian in Iran. What I did not expect was to encounter this same phenomena in America. I have never ever ever experienced an America so at odds with its government and at such a loss about what to do about it.

Even though I met a couple of Bush supporters, most of the people I met in America were just paralyzed by mistrust and disgust. People are afraid there will be a war with Iran, they are sick of the war in Iraq, they are tired to the bone from lies.

What's next from this seemingly unstoppable administration?

More Links:

Peggy Noonan

Michael Winship

Interview 3: Gary Sick talks about negotiating with Iran

This is a long post, but I learned so much from my interview with Gary Sick, and I am certain my readers will also be interested.

Gary Sick served on the National Security Council under three U.S. presidents: Ford, Carter, and Reagan. He was the principal White House aide on Iran during the time of the Iranian Revolution.

I met Gary Sick for a couple of seconds when Kamran had an assignment to photograph him for an article about the “October Surprise.”(1)
We went to his New York apartment, photographed him outside, and left. He probably does not even remember, but I do.

Gary Sick was in the Carter administration during the taking of the American embassy by revolutionary Iranian students. His discussion of that time, the difficulty of the negotiations, and the analysis of steps, missteps, and surprises is compelling and concise. He was gracious enough to lend me some of his time for an interview. That interview is for the book I am writing about Iran.

With his permission, here are some excerpts from that interview. (All emphasis mine)

You were involved with Iran during a particularly confusing moment. Americans had been taken hostage in their embassy by revolutionary students, and no one was really sure who was in charge. How did this effect negotiations?

It was absolutely the centerpiece of our negotiation efforts. Iran was still in the revolutionary process. There was no real power center. Khomeini was certainly a power center, but he was in the shadows during the early days; his words were important, but he did not exert overt control. I think that was the way he wanted it at the time.

We had no one to negotiate with. We talked to various contacts we had, talked to various power centers, we just had to hope that we could get some word in. Eventually this worked, and we did make contact. We found Bani Sadr and Ghotbzadeh who were the president and the foreign minister at the time, but who turned out not to have any real power. We reached an agreement with them, but it was shut down by Khomeini who ultimately fired Bani Sadr.

Today it may be difficult to deal with Iran, but you know who the power centers are: negotiations have to start with Khamenei, of course, but take into account the majles [Parliament], the office of the presidency, Rafsanjani, and the bazaar, among others.

In Iran, most decisions are consensus decisions, made by a group of power centers.

Negotiating with dictatorships is easy. In dictatorships, you know exactly who to talk with and where the power is. In Iran this is not true at all. There are many power centers, and those power centers can be opaque. Iranians often use this to their advantage in negotiations.

...


What about the personal style of a negotiation?

Iranians seem to think they have an extra negotiation gene, a bargaining gene, one that is peculiar to Iran and a source of great pride. The Iranians I dealt with seem to think they can outwit, out-bargain anyone,
and they take great pride in this. This is another way that Americans and Iranians really differ. Americans do not grow up thinking their success or personal identity is determined by how well they bargain or that they can out-bargain or outwit anyone. It's just not part of our culture or our upbringing. It certainly is not a source of national pride.

As a result, Americans put into negotiations with Iranians are often at a disadvantage.

...

Iranians report that they feel that the West would like to trick them into agreements that end up making them feel cheated. Where do you think this feeling comes from? Do you have any ideas about what is needed to gain the trust of Iranians when negotiating?

The West did try to take advantage of Iran, there are no two ways about that. Look at the British oil deal, which gave an unfair advantage to the British and unfair terms to the Iranians. Look at the great powers kicking out the shah's father. Iranians earned their right to suspicion and paranoia.

That overall sense of grievance, prevalent in Iran and throughout the Middle East in general, that sense that Muslims are discriminated against,humiliated, badly regarded, again repeatedly humiliated in political terms: that grievance runs through the Middle East very strongly. These grievances are important to understanding the rise of political Islam. And it is not totally wrong. It is true that many of these countries have been victimized, but many also acknowledge they have assisted in that victimization. Their own governments have been terrible in promoting and protecting the self-interest of their citizens. They have failed at creating governments that can compete in the global marketplace of ideas. I meet people from the region all the time who desperately want to see better governance. They want better governance.

At least one of the factors that led to these humiliations is that they have been victimized by the rest of the world who portray them as backwards and incompetent and dangerous. This is an idea that they sometimes play into as well: Arabs and Iranians. An example of this is the discussion that occurred in the Arab world after 9/11. Arabs -- and I am talking about educated sources: magazine editors, intellectuals, professors -- claimed that Arabs could not carry out this type of operation. They argued that Arabs are completely inadequate to the task: it was just too complicated. Arabs were too incompetent and that is why the Mossad or CIA or some other organization had to have been responsible for 9/11. This was a serious argument We could not carry out something that big, many Arabs said.

The dilemma, which includes Iran, is that they are aware of their own shortcomings and how these shortcomings make them vulnerable, but they do not know how to address them.

....

When I was in Iran, most of the processes (both private & public) seemed paralyzed by a general fear/inability to make decisions. Is this also the case at the diplomatic level? Overall, how do you view the Iranian government's decision-making process? What kind of influence do the IR's negotiators have?

Iran is not a decisive culture. This is another contrast between Americans and Iranians. Americans, because of their move West and taking all these big decisions, well this has made it a decisive culture. Americans take big decisions and the responsibility for these decisions. Iranians do not have this same culture. And part of this is because the US history has been that we are rich and growing. Even if we make a mistake we can recover form it. You know what Churchill said, "The Americans always do the right thing...after trying all the other alternatives." Well, once we've tried everything else, we eventually find the right way.

We can make mistakes and get,away with it. In the US we believe that ultimately our strength will get us to a point where we can recover from anything, whether this is really still the case or not is unclear.

In Iran they have a sense that they are living a lot closer to the breaking point. Mistakes made can destroy their lives and even their country.

That does not mean that they do not make decisions. They do make decisions. For example, I believe that Iran has an actual nuclear policy. It's a real policy and they are pursuing it.

When the US decided that preemption was the new policy, the Bush administration immediately published a policy paper announcing preemption as a permanent addition to US national strategy. Iranians on the contrary do not announce their policies. They do not wave a banner and say "This is our policy, come and read it." They are more subtle and indirect.

One of the best descriptions I heard to describe this is that America is a football culture: it's all about confrontation and open head-to-head competition. Iran is more of a chess culture that proceeds with a subtlety of moves. They are always thinking three steps ahead, trying to make the opponent look foolish, trapping somebody so that they think you are doing one thing when you are really doing another.

This is a great source of misunderstanding between us. Iranians think that we do not mean what we say, that there must be something else behind our words. For out part, Ahmadinejad makes a statement and we think that statement is the policy.

...

Many people talk about taarof (The Iranian system of manners) and taqieh (a doctrine which permits Shia to lie in order to survive persecution) when they talk about dealing with Iranians. How important do you see these aspects of Iranian culture?

Elements. I don't think that Iran or even Muslims or Middle Easterners are the only people who lie or dissemble or pretend to do one thing when they want to do another. From what I understand about our current dealings with Iran: a lot of what we are doing is pretending to be bigger, stronger and more dangerous than we really are. That kind of dissembling is something we do as well. It's just something we don't do very well. Iran is also trying to make us believe that they are bigger and stronger than they actually are.

Iranians just have more experience and skill at dissembling than we do.

I do have this worry: because of their bargaining gene, Iranians always feel that they can get another 2 or 3 percent, so they always go for more. When they get an offer that meets 90% of their terms, they think that maybe they can get 93%. In the end this kind of negotiation means that they may lose the whole thing. Squeezing everything out of your opponent may backfire.

And it is not just Iran that does this. I've watched the US negotiate or not negotiate with Iran on the nuclear issue for the past 15 years. The kind of deal we could have gotten in 1990 or 91 would look so good to us now, but we wanted more.

We lost 50% of the game, yet we are still maintaining an all or nothing approach to the negotiations.

With regard to Iran...look at what they've done with foreign investment from oil companies. They need the foreign investment, but they squeezed so hard and drove such a hard bargain, that many companies said that it just is not worth it. Why should we do this? We've lost all of our profit margin in negotiations, we'll make ourselves unpopular with the US, who needs it? They walked away. Oil executives told me that the Iranians would negotiate vigorously and endlessly. Negotiate and negotiate and negotiate. When they thought that an agreement had been reached, it would start all over again. Finally Western companies said forget about it; it's just not worth it. They want to be there, but it is not possible. Iran is paying a very high price for this.

Iran has done great damage to its own interests by over negotiating.

There is some worry that the same is true with their nuclear policy with the whole inalienable right rhetoric. Insisting on the right to do something stupid, might not be best policy in the end. It seems that there are some in Iran who care more about the principle at stake than having a functioning nuclear program.

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(1)

October Surprise refers to a controversial book that Gary Sick wrote after serving on the National Security Council under Ford, Carter, and Reagan. The book documents evidence of secret negotiations between the Reagan campaign and the revolutionary clerics in Iran that ultimately led to a nefarious arms deal involving the Nicaraguan contras, Israelis, and revolutionary clerics in Iran. It is not the only book or article that Sick has written about Iran, he is also the author of the influential All Fall Down: America’s Fateful Encounter with Iran and many articles.

back to text

Before last night, the last time I attended a big public event was Ashura in Iran. Ashura commemorates the death of Mohammad's grandson in battle. The commemoration of this holiday is the at the heart of the differences between the Shia and the Sunni Muslims.

Last night I went to hear Parliament/Funkadelic (without George Clinton, unfortunately)at the Sweet Corn festival. (For people unfamiliar with Parliament/Funkadelic... well I just do not know what to say...) Here I was, with people lifting their fists in the air and chanting in unison: "We Got da funk..." I could not help thinking that there are many similarities between rock concert and Ashura in Iran: humans need group celebration; the experience of chanting and moving in unison. We want to mingle with our friends among strangers doing the same. It's the way we remember that we are not alone in the world.

I feel best about my fellow Americans when I see them celebrate something trivial like funk or an outdoor movie or big hair... Otherwise we are such strangers to each other. Just strangers...

Missing, 2

A great piece of reporting from FT's Najmeh Bozorgmehr and Guy Dinmore

Just why Robert Levinson, a former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent and now private investigator, should venture into Iran to meet a American fugitive wanted for murder in the US remains a mystery that the highest Bush administration authorities are trying to unravel.

As the Financial Times revealed this week, Mr Levinson disappeared on March 8 after a six-hour meeting on the Iranian island of Kish with Dawud Salahuddin, an American who converted to Islam and was recruited by revolutionaries to assassinate an Iranian opposition activist near Washington in 1980.

Friends of Mr Levinson are mystified that he took the risk of travelling for such a meeting. They fear he is the victim of a sting operation by Iranian secret services engaged in an escalating "dirty war" between the US and Iran, involving hostage-taking and covert cross-border operations.

Mr Salahuddin, who fled to Iran after the 1980 murder and has at times expressed interest in returning to the US to face justice, told the FT in Tehran that he, too, feared Mr Levinson was an "innocent victim" of the clash between what he calls Iran's paranoia about the US and Washington's misguided foreign policy.

Mr Salahuddin said they registered a room in the Maryam hotel before he, too, was detained that night but released the next day after his Iranian passport was checked. Mr Levinson has not been heard from since. Iran's foreign ministry says it does not know where he is. The US believes he is in ­detention.

Miniver Cheevy: Independence Day

Recommended reading from the Miniver Cheevy blog:

Miniver Cheevy: Independence Day:

"Independence Day is the High Holy Day of American political identity. If you think about it, the Fourth of July is a strange choice of date. Consider the French equivalent, Bastille Day, which commemorates the storming of the Bastille and thus the event which demonstrated that the French monarchy was over. By similar reasoning, we should be celebrating when Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown on 19 October, the battle of Lexington & Concord on 19 April, or (my favorite as an occasional lefty activist) the Boston Tea Party on 13 December.

But we don't. We celebrate the day that a bunch of guys signed a piece of paper."

America: love it and leave it

Happy 4th…

I was explaining to some friends that today is a holiday in America. "What kind of a holiday?"

"It's the day that we celebrate our freedom."

"Freedom from whom?"

"The British."

"Ehhh…," a young friend laughed. "Everyone has holidays to celebrate freedom from the British."

"They were everywhere," another laughs.

And while we are celebrating our freedom…

These are the things I celebrate most:

Free speech (It trumps democracy any day… although it probably requires democracy…)

Immigration

The capacity for change

Maybe I should make my own bumper sticker that reads: "America: love it and leave it."

Religion as law…Opinion as fact
It has been some years since I lived in America. In all that time, I have been unwilling and incapable of becoming an expatriate in the sense of how I have seen it lived by many expatriates: as knee-jerk anti-Americanism. When listening to their anti-American rants, I have often felt that it is much easier to count the sins of a nation/people than its virtues. Not that I want to close my eyes to the mistakes, injustices, and even evils of my nation/people, no not that. I just cannot close my eyes to its virtues. I cannot close my eyes to the idea of America as an unfinished project rather that as something complete, dead, and defined. As a child I struggled with conflicting views of America: one that saw America through the eyes of the Viet Nam war and one that saw America through the eyes of my immigrant relatives. I struggled to reconcile these conflicting views of America and was able to. As a result, my understanding of America is complex. I can never relinquish my American identity. It is not an identity that I shrink from. This does not mean that I am always proud of it or uncritical of it. No. It means that it is mine, and it is complex, and I will not disown it. I have been proud and amused by the way American ingenuity is so touted by us. I guess the real ingenuity is giving so many of the world's population opportunities to invent, work, and study. That has been our true ingenuity.

That said, I feel that my identity is under attack. Will my Americanism become a relic? Will people find me out of date, quaint even? Are free press, free speech, immigration, religious freedom, and the separation of church and state all coming under attack?

I have a friend here in Iran who is brilliant in his field but cannot complete his studies here because somebody (or bodies) has determined that he is not Islamic enough. Iran is a country that has shown itself willing to lose most of its best and brightest to the rest of the world: all in the name of ideology. America, having become wildly paranoid since 9/11, will no longer issue visas to these people. Trust me, they will go elsewhere. When they do go elsewhere, America will suffer.

My religion is a minority religion in both the US and in Iran. I do not want to live under the religious rule of either. I do not want them to live under the rules of my religion either. Why would I? When religions rule, they set themselves up as superior to civil law and other religious beliefs. Many Muslims believe that they should only do business with other Muslims. Many Christians believe the same. (To be fair, other peoples and religions believe the same, but I am only addressing the dominant religions of America and Iran.) This is how they interpret their religious mandate in the world. Disrespecting the wishes and even the legal protections of others is acceptable under religious rule because the ruling interpretation of God's word is more important than anything else. And that is key: interpretation. Law is always subject to interpretation. Proponents of religious law, however, can always claim that God is on their side which essentially means that you must bow to God's word. The ruling interpretation of God's word often needs to combine their interpretation with violence in order to enforce their ideas. After all, violence is acceptable with God on your side. We've all seen it.

When I was nine or ten, I heard a story from the Talmud about a group of Rabbis arguing about a law. One of the Rabbis argued that God was on his side and that he could prove that by performing a series of small miracles. None of the miracles was enough to convince the other Rabbis that their reasoning was incorrect and that they should change their opinion so that it was in alignment with the opinion of the Rabbi who had God on his side. In the end, God approves of their dissent. God says, "The Law is not in heaven."

Law is subject to change and interpretation.