TEHRAN, Iran — When I decided to bring two of my kids with me on a reporting trip to Iran, the consensus was that I must be insane. And that someone should call Child Protective Services!
TEHRAN, Iran — When I decided to bring two of my kids with me on a reporting trip to Iran, the consensus was that I must be insane. And that someone should call Child Protective Services!
That anxiety reflects a view that Iran is the 21st century’s Crazy Country, a menace to civilization. That view also animates the hawks who believe that only a military option can stop Iran.
Look, I have no illusions about Iran. On my last trip here, in 2004, I was detained and accused of being a spy for Mossad or the CIA. I’ve talked to people who have been brutally tortured. I think that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons capacity and that, if it were to deploy those weapons, this would be a huge and possibly fatal blow to global anti-proliferation efforts.
But we need a dollop of humility and nuance, for Iran is a complex country where we’ve repeatedly stumbled badly. For starters, consider for a moment which nation assisted Iran the most in the last dozen years. Not Russia, not China, not India. No, it was the United States under President George W. Bush. First, we upended the Taliban in Afghanistan, Iran’s enemy to the east, and then removed the Saddam Hussein government from Iraq, Iran’s even deadlier threat to the west. Look at the Iraq-Iran relationship today, and it seems we fought a wrenching war in Iraq — and Iran won.
Now we may be heading for another war — perhaps triggered by Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear sites — and this might well help the ayatollahs as well by igniting a nationalist backlash that would bolster their rule.
On my road trip across Iran, the regime seemed on the defensive, its base corroding. In Mashhad, I interviewed a grand ayatollah, Sayid Muhammad Baqer Shirazi, and he didn’t want to talk about politics at all. That seemed to me an acknowledgment that the regime now sometimes embarrasses even the mullahs who created it.
Americans think of Iran as a police state, but that overstates its control: Iranians are irrepressible. While interviewing people on a lovely Caspian Sea beach, a plainclothes policeman bustled forward. At first, I thought that the young woman I was interviewing was in trouble for criticizing the regime — but, no, her sin was rolling up her sleeves.
The policeman shouted at her. She shouted at him. Neither was intimidated. Finally, she covered her forearms a bit more, and he accepted a truce.
The confrontation was a reminder that Iran is a complex and contradictory country, in ways that don’t register at a distance. Iran imprisons more journalists than any other country, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, yet it has a vigorous Parliament and news media with clashing views (within a narrow range). Some ethnic Turks seek to secede and join Azerbaijan, but the country’s supreme leader is an ethnic Turk. Iran’s regime sometimes embraces anti-Semitism, yet Parliament has a Jewish member.
Iranians gripe about their government without worrying about being overheard, yet participants in protests are tortured, gays can be executed and the Bahai religious minority endures mind-boggling repression. Iranian women constitute almost 60 percent of university students and hold important positions in the country, yet, under a new law, a woman can’t even go skiing without a male guardian.
My daughter dressed primly in a head scarf and manteau because the police sometimes haul off women who are insufficiently covered (not foreigners, usually, but still). Iranian women we met spent their time helpfully rearranging her scarf.
“She has much better hijab than most girls these days,” one matron told us approvingly, even as she tugged it over a few escapee strands of hair.
Elsewhere, young women told my daughter to be more revealing. “Come on, you’re young,” declared one young woman, and she pulled the head scarf back so that it covered almost nothing. “Show it!”
We sometimes think that Iran’s leaders are impervious to public opinion, but women’s clothing reflects social pressures that have led them to back off in some areas. Women are still required to cover themselves, but many women in Tehran do so with gauzy, come-hither scarfs rigged to blow off in the slightest breeze. Hard-liners shudder, but they have long since given up flogging women for bad hijabs. In some areas, the regime can evolve.
We can’t do much to nurture progress in Iran, but promoting Internet freedom, shortwave news broadcasts and satellite television all would help. A war would hurt.
Our long-term aim should be the kind of “grand bargain,” however unlikely, that some Iranian officials floated in 2003 to resolve all issues between our countries.
Iran looks childish when it calls America the “Great Satan” or blusters “Death to America.” Let’s not bluster back or operate on caricatures. And let’s not choose bombs over sanctions and undercut the many Iranians who are chipping away at hard-line rule in tiny ways — even by flashing their hair.
Nicholas D. Kristof is a columnist for The New York Times.