Iranian citizens yearning for US to start a dialogue

TEHRAN -- At a time of worsening tension between Iran and the United States, many Iranians are asking whether the two estranged nations can still move past their old arguments and at least communicate civilly, if not reconcile.

Young Iranians are often quick to say they don't like their government's handling of the issues that divide the two countries, but many also say the US policy of isolating Iran has entrenched the conflict. From reformists to hard-liners, Iranians suggest that the United States needs to take the first step toward resuming a diplomatic dialogue -- by showing Iran some respect.

"If the United States just corrects its behavior against Iran, we can open the door," said Deputy Foreign Minister Saeed Jalili, who has worked closely with the nation's top clerics. "We have a proverb: 'We don't expect any benefits, but just don't hurt us.' "

Formal contacts between the two countries all but stopped after the countries broke relations after the seizure of American diplomats at the US Embassy in Tehran in 1979, at the height of the Islamic Revolution that toppled the shah. Under US policy, American diplomats are not allowed to talk to Iranian officials. The governments grant few visas for each others' citizens -- and last month Iran began fingerprinting arriving American visitors, matching the US practice for Iranians.

But many Iranians go out of their way to tell visiting Americans that they think their government's "Death to America" antipathy to the United States is pointless rhetoric at best.

In a restaurant in Isfahan, a city whose blue-tiled mosques testify to its history as the former seat of Persian dynasties, two dozen miniature flags lined the shelf above an impressive dessert. The flags of Paraguay and several African countries were there, but the Stars and Stripes was nowhere to be seen.

Asked about it, the owner leapt from his chair.

"You are Americans? We apologize!" he exclaimed. "It's the politicians. That's just how it goes here. I am a fanatic of America -- I love those people! I was a manager in the Cheesecake Factory!"

The restaurateur, an Iranian in his 20s who didn't want his name printed, confided that the recipe for the fudge mint cake beneath his row of flags came home with him from Atlanta, where he worked for the restaurant chain for two years.

The mixed message matches Iranians' mixed feelings about the United States: They may like American people, movies, and music, but most don't like the US government or its policies in the Middle East. And they are anxious for Americans to draw the same distinction: Iranians, they insist, are not the same as the Iranian government.

Prospects for increased contact got a boost this month when the Iraq Study Group, the bipartisan American panel established to recommend solutions to the Iraq crisis, recommended that the US government talk directly to Iran, which as a Shi'ite Muslim country has affinity and influence with many of the majority Shi'ites in neighboring Iraq.

Talks with Iran would be a significant departure from President Bush's policy of isolating the country that his 2002 State of the Union speech dubbed part of an "axis of evil." Bush insisted last week that he will not deal with Iran until it abandons its uranium enrichment program.

Iranian officials have reacted cautiously to the Iraq report. "They haven't changed their policy; why should we change ours?" Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad-Ali Hosseini told reporters last week in Tehran.

Others reacted with threats.

In a recent interview, Mohammed Ali Ramin, a close adviser to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, said the United States should have talked to Iran throughout the process of planning and executing the Iraq war. Now, he said, the only thing to talk about is under what terms Iran will allow US forces to depart Iraq without being attacked on the way.

But some Iranian politicians, even some conservatives, called the report a positive step.

"Some wise people in the administration are thinking intelligently," said Asadollah Badamchian, who won a seat in Parliament in elections Dec. 15 representing the Islamic Coalition, Iran's oldest Islamic party. "It opens a new horizon."

But other developments suggest contact could be further reduced. On Saturday, the UN Security Council unanimously approved sanctions against Iran over its refusal to halt its enrichment program.

And Iran is increasingly flexing its muscles in the Middle East, demanding to be recognized as a regional power and explicitly challenging US dominance in the region. Iran's senior security official, Ali Larijani , said at a conference of Arab officials and business people in Bahrain that Persian Gulf countries should eject US military bases and instead form an alliance with Iran.

Perhaps the thorniest problem, though, is Iran's support for groups the United States considers terrorists, including Hamas and Hezbollah, which Iran vows not to ease until Washington reconsiders its tight alliance with Israel and the Jewish state's occupation of Palestinian territories.

The Iranian government's escalating campaign against Israel, culminating with a conference in Tehran this month for an array of Holocaust deniers and Israel-bashers, is also dampening any US interest in dialogue.

And any discussion of improving ties quickly gets caught up in events of the past. Iran and the United States can't get beyond the litany of slights that each nation feels it suffered at the hands of the other.

In an interview in Tehran last week, Jalili, the deputy foreign minister, began a discussion of the current US-Iran stalemate by recalling 55 years of history, starting with the British-inspired intrigue in 1951 that led two years later to the US-backed coup against elected Iranian leader Mohammad Mossadegh as Iran was about to nationalize its oil industry.

Jalili went on to cite the perceived US failure to recognize the Iranian Islamic Revolution in 1979, saying, "We hoped that the next day the USA would support us ." And he remembered the US support for Saddam Hussein during the deadly Iran-Iraq war from 1980 to 1988, and the accidental US shoot-down of a civilian Iranian airliner in 1988 that killed all 290 people aboard.

Jalili skipped over the event that is indelibly etched in Americans' minds: the embassy takeover in November 1979 and the abduction of 52 US hostages for 444 days. That led the United States to impose economic sanctions against Iran that remain in place -- and have been tightened amid US accusations that Iran is supp orting terrorist organizations and pursuing nuclear weapons. Iran denies the allegations , saying it only wants nuclear power plants.

Yet an agreement on renewed dialogue is possible, said Saeed Laylaz, an adviser to Iran's reformist wing of politicians and former managing director of the country's largest automotive manufacturer, Iran Khodro.

Laylaz said that if Washington removes existing US sanctions, issues a guarantee that it won't seek to topple Iran's government, and gives Iran access to its financial and technological markets, "they could go to an agreement."

"The Iranian taste for life is American," Laylaz said over dinner at a French restaurant, one of the many trendy places springing up as Iranians spend their money from booming oil markets and enjoy social liberalization that allows couples to spend candlelit evenings in public.

"Most people like cowboys, Clint Eastwood, Tom Cruise," he said. In spite of Iran's public embrace of leaders like Venezuelan anti-American populist Hugo Chávez and Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, "There are no Venezuelan movies or Syrian movies."

Still, Iranians have a deep-seated sense that the United States does not respect their country.

"The American discourse toward Iran is always a threat," said Mohammad Ali Mohtadi of Tehran's Center for Scientific Research and Middle East Strategic Studies. "I think the first step should be taken by the United States, to change its discourse toward Iran."

On this theme, reformists, who push for more ties with the outside world, sound remarkably the same note as hard-liners calling for negotiations based on "respect."

On the street, Iranians say the mistrust is coming from both governments because they create unnecessary confrontation.

"We should have a wrestling match. Let Bush and Ahmadinejad wrestle, let them see who is the winner," Mehran Ferdosi, 24, a slight young man with trendy black-framed glasses and an Elvis-style pompadour, said in Isfahan.

The US Embassy, a walled compound that takes up a large block in downtown Tehran, now mainly houses classrooms and offices for Revolutionary Guards and other government loyalists. Once a year, on the anniversary of the hostage-taking, the public can stroll the grounds and admire a statue of a hostage with his hands behind his head.

The walls are covered with anti-American murals. One shows the Statue of Liberty as death, a gray skeletal face peering out from beneath its green crown.

On the surrounding streets, though, Iranians' thoughts about the hostage seizure range from indifference to embarrassment.

Morteza Yeganeh, a 22-year-old civil engineering student, said he thinks of America as "a free country" and a mecca for education. His impression dimmed with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, he said. But as for the nearby embassy display, and the hostage-taking it glorifies, he said, "We apologize."