A New Approach to Tehran

Several years ago, I spent three days in Isfahan, Iran, at a conference organized by the reformers at the Center for Dialogue among Civilizations. Asked to visit the rest of the country, I met with Iranians in Qom, Shiraz, Kashan and Tehran. What struck me most were the little shrines I saw all over the country at the sides of the road and at the entrances and exits of towns and villages. They are dedicated to Iranians—about five hundred thousand—who died young during the eight-year war with Iraq. Pointing to these shrines, my hosts bemoaned their losses the way Germans talk about WWII and the Nazi era: as traumatic experiences that have shaped their psyche and whose repetition they are keen to avoid at almost any cost. The Iranians I met—granted, a few years back, in 2002—were very war allergic.