Less than two weeks in Iran does not make me an Iranian expert or a seasoned Persian diplomatic hand. Yet this is more time than nearly all members of U.S. Congress have spent collectively in the country that they chose to revile by celebrating the speech that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered before a joint session on Capitol Hill.
As best I can tell, the only current or former U.S. lawmaker to visit the Islamic Republic since 1979 is former Rep. Jim Slattery (D-Kansas), who traveled to Iran for a conference in winter 2014. Here's what Slattery said of the continuing negotiations to freeze Iran's nuclear weapons capabilities: "They are very troubled by the prospect of ... putting their best deal on the table, only to have US lawmakers reject it."
Iranian negotiators who watched Netanyahu barnstorm across Washington can have little doubt that any Iranian-American treaty on nuclear arms that reaches the Republican majorities in Congress will suffer the recent fate of U.S. President Barack Obama - to be marginalized in the call to arms against Iran.
As defined by Netanyahu - and informally ratified by Congress in a series of standing ovations - Iran is a terrorist nation determined to develop a nuclear capability for possible use against Israel.
Implicit in the prime minister's remarks is the inference that if the United States negotiates a "bad deal" with Iran, Israel will have little choice but unilaterally to take out the Iranian nuclear capability.
By giving Netanyahu use of a joint session of Congress to draw his red lines in the sand, the Republican majority granted its approval of such a pre-emptive strike. Maybe they figure that smoldering mountainsides in Iran will make for excellent 30-second outtakes in the next election.
On the ground in Iran
Despite traveling to many corners of Iran - using trains and buses, going where I pleased, and paying my own way - I have no privy knowledge of Tehran's nuclear intentions, nor of its plutonium enrichment capabilities. Nevertheless, I did see the country in its truest form, and the impression that it left is that of a nation that would serve best as an American ally, rather than as an enemy.
Iran is Persian and Shiite, not Arab and Sunni, and most of its foreign policy tensions are with nearby Gulf states, as well as with Afghanistan, Sunni regimes, Azerbaijan, and Russia. Saddam Hussein's Iraq, armed with chemical weapons, attacked Iran for eight years in the 1980s. America might be a global power, but it lies well over the Iranian horizon, and in my travels no one mentioned the name Obama.
During the 1979 revolution of Ayatollah Khomeini, the United States played a useful role as a foil, the Great Satan, the power that had propped up the deposed Shah after, in 1953, it took down the government of Mohammad Mossadegh, who had nationalized Western oil concessions.
These events took place before most Iranians were born, and even the former U.S. embassy, where the hostages were held, looks no more evil than a Rustbelt warehouse, despite the best efforts of Hollywood's CIA bromance, Argo, to leave the lasting impression that Tehran is still up in arms about American imperialism.
However out of date, the phantom menace of an Iran under the sway of Islamic fascism contrasts well with American storyboards that depict Israel as a bulwark of democracy afloat in a sea of fundamentalist extremism. No wonder Congress took in most of the Netanyahu speech while on its feet.
Seen up close, Iran turns less on an axis of evil - it looks more like a post-imperial society turning in a world where it has few, if any, friends and an isolated economy. The takers of American hostages in 1979, who possibly included former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have largely departed the political scene, and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is in the dotage of his Supreme Leadership.
To be sure, the Supreme Cultural Revolution Council vets candidates for federal offices and can veto any liberal initiatives of President Hassan Rouhani, just as operatives in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps can still ship car bombs to Hezbollah or missiles to Syrian dictator Bashar al Assad.
Nevertheless, younger Iranians see no more purpose in such state-sponsored terrorism than do their counterparts in the United States (or Israel, for that matter) who want nothing to do with remote drone killings and undeclared wars in places like Iraq and Yemen.
In the course of my travels, I went to all the important religious shrines in Iran-notably those in Mashad and Qom-but in no way would I describe those I saw at prayer as "fanatics." In the Western press, Qom is full of hardline clerics calling obsessively for the deaths of Americans or Jews. Closer to the ground, Qom is Allah's Asbury Park, complete with gift shops, cruising teenagers, blinking lights, and, inside the shrine, mullahs on their cell phones amid small boys kicking soccer balls.
I have been to mosques in Pakistan, Syria, Turkey, and Egypt, and by the far the most tranquil are those in Iran.
Nor in my experience do Iranians hate Americans, despite the legacies of economic sanctions, military incursions, coups, and support for the Shah's kleptocracy.
