I Just Got Back From Iran
Huff / Stephen Kinzer
12-Jul-2010 (2 comments)

In today's America, that's a conversation-stopper. Those of us able to say it become temporary objects of fascination, like our grandparents would have been if they had visited China or the Soviet Union in the 1950s. Traveling to Iran makes one seem like a bold adventurer on a dangerous foray into enemy territory.

The reality is more prosaic. Although few Americans visit Iran, there is in fact no legal obstacle to doing so. I accompanied a group of American tourists on a thousand-mile, two-week trip through the country. We met no government or opposition leaders, but we were free to talk with ordinary Iranians, and did so at every stop. Because the government has made it difficult for Western journalists to work in Iran, traveling the country this way may now be the best way to gauge its people's mood.

The first thing that strikes Americans who visit Iran is how amazingly pro-American its people are. Nowhere else in the Middle East, nowhere else in the Muslim world, and almost nowhere else on earth do people so unreservedly admire the United States. Opinion surveys confirm this phenomenon, and I remembered it from previous visits. Nonetheless it was disorienting, in the heart of the purported axis of evil, to to be surrounded, as I was at Imam Square in Isfahan, by giddy female college students shrieking "We love America so much!" At a Persian garden in Kashan, I met a solemn elder whose only English phrase is "America very good," and who... >>>

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"The second thing I learned in Iran is that last year's explosion of anti-government protest is finished, at least for the moment. Governments use repression against protesters for the simple reason that it usually works. It has worked in Iran. Many people are unhappy -- it is impossible to estimate how many -- but no one I met predicted more upheaval soon. Life is reasonably good for most Iranians, and a possibly stolen election is not enough to force them from their homes to face beatings and arrest."

"Bush was very bad," mused a math teacher I found sitting beneath a fig tree in the town of Rayen. "Obama is a little better. But Iranian people believe that when America and England look at Iran and Arab countries, it is only because they want to steal what we have."


"Sobering realities shape Iranian politics: There will be no regime change soon, and there is little the West can do to hasten it. Nonetheless, Iran may have more democratic potential than almost any other society in the Muslim world. Seventy percent of Iranians are under the age of 30. Change will come, but at Iran's pace, not America's."

 "Many people don't like the regime, but they don't want the Americans to come and rule us," a shopkeeper in the Shiraz bazaar told me. "They would rather live under a regime they don't like than a regime placed in power by foreigners."



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Does it make me patriot? Please categorize me as a patriot, would you? Please?