Misunderstanding Iran

With the first international dialogue in years about the Iranian uranium enrichment program opening next week, the troubled relationship between Iran and the West is at an important crossroads.

After years of open hostility between both sides, a new dialogue is being opened. This is a golden opportunity to decrease tension that cannot be missed. In order to succeed, Americans need to understand a few things about Iran.

An Iran armed with a nuclear weapon would be bad, but not nearly as bad as most Americans think. It is likely that there is something fishy going on with Iran’s nuclear program, but there is absolutely no proof of this that we know of. There is a strong possibility that Iran is working toward nuclear capability, but it is unlikely that they will actually develop a bomb. A nuclear-armed Iran would pose a threat to the United States, but only indirectly.

Iran is perhaps the country most misunderstood and misrepresented by the American public, the vast majority of whom write it off as simply another crackpot Arab dictatorship.

Besides being completely untrue, the situation is far more complex than that. A history lesson for most Americans would go a long way toward assuaging the tensions between our two (similar) nations. The comparisons that many Americans draw between Iran and the Arab world are almost entirely superficial.

Iranians are, in fact, not even Arab; they’re Persian. They do not speak Arabic, but a completely unrelated and far older language called Farsi. They do not practice Sunni Islam, as the vast majority of the Arab world does, but are mostly Shia. Iran’s history and culture are far older and – many Iranians believe – more sophisticated than that originating in Arabia, which some Iranians look down upon. Iran has, at best, a suspicious and distant relationship with its Arab neighbors.

The Iranian population is immensely proud of Iran’s history and past accomplishments, but there is a very palpable sentiment among most Iranians that the world has forgotten their past glory and is ignoring their influence, which is perceived as an enormous affront by most Iranians. 

A nuclear program for Iran is just a means to an end: Iran is vastly more concerned about regaining its lost influence and glory than it is about developing nuclear weapons. This is why several scholars, including Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, a game theorist who analyzes data to predict future events in foreign affairs (the CIA says he’s 90 percent accurate, twice the accuracy rate of the CIA’s analysts), thinks Iran will almost certainly come incredibly close to making a bomb, but will then back off.

They’re just trying to show us that they can make a bomb – they don’t actually want to use one.

Which is why most Americans overreact about an Iranian nuclear program. Iran is not a crackpot dictatorship hell-bent on American and European destruction. It actually has one of the most pro-American populations in the Middle East. 

Iran is concerned not with wreaking havoc but with building prestige. They want respect, not violence. 

Let’s start giving them a little.