Justice for All

From a cultural, political, and even economic perspective, Iran is not an isolated state. Although some may question the quality and scope of Iran's engagement with the external world, Iran and Iranians continue to play a role in diverse areas such as sports, movies, science, energy resources, international organizations, and Middle East politics. In national security, Iran clearly operates unilaterally and is isolated from others. The political consequences of Iran's security isolation are enormous for the country's internal politics, national economy, and foreign policy. Iran maintains no military or security pacts with any other state and relies on its own capabilities and calculations to defend the country and its political system. The security apparatus in Iran is highly endogenous and carries strong ideological convictions to maintain the political and the cultural sovereignty of the revolution and the state. Therefore, understanding the perceptions of the United States held by Iran's top security and political officials is paramount to comprehending Iranian foreign policy toward the United States. Because Iran is not a member of any Western security, or for that matter, political, club and because officials of the two countries do not communicate bilaterally, misperceptions and misguided analyses dominate policymaking in both capitals.

Most of Iran's top leadership is passionately attached to revolutionary ideals, to Islam as their guiding principle, and especially to the notion of "cultural sovereignty." This attachment is not confined to a few individuals. Rather, it is collective, institutional, and permanent, although concluding that revolutionary beliefs and practices have been seriously challenged during the presidency of Mohammad Khatami would be accurate. The revolutionary and nonrevolutionary definitions of Iran among equally powerful political groups are a reflection of the country's highly intricate identity crisis that has protracted Iranian national development. Over the last 150 years, conflicting views of Iranian national identity have led to incessant political instability and unrest. Despite galactic changes at the international level, all layers of Iranian culture and sources of identity have been able to sustain their conceptual potency, social constituency, and political relevance. The efforts of the Pahlavi dynasty to weaken the Islamic component of Iran's cultural structure proved highly unsuccessful. Similarly, the Islamic Republic's attempt to subordinate nationalist attributes to Islamic beliefs has been resented by the young and by the professional sector of Iranian society. History provides strong evidence of the permanence of both Islamic and nationalist dimensions of Iranian culture.

Although Arabs do not dissociate their Arab nationalism from their Islamic heritage, Iranians have so far failed to blend Islam and Iranian nationalism meaningfully into an institutionalized macrocultural system, whereby the majority of the country's citizens can form a basis of national identity. When attributes of Western culture are superimposed on Iran's nationalist and Islamic legacies, Iranians' identity faces serious conceptual and methodological challenges. The belief structure of an average Iranian carries three diverse and at times conflicting strands: Iranian, Islamic, and Western. In their active and reactive cultural behavior, Iranians pick and choose from the three layers, depending on the issue at hand. The political developments of Iran since Western entry into the country two centuries ago are a reflection of contradictory cultural trends and the unsuccessful attempts of political leaders to forge cultural consensus-building processes. The nature of the political system in contemporary Iranian history has vacillated, as various cultural groups have been able to highlight the cultural contradictions of rulers and reach power themselves. Iranian culture, in this respect, is a much more powerful force at the disposal of Iran's leadership than Iran's long-range Shahab-3 missile.

Whether nationalist or Islamic, justice is an important element of Iranian political culture. In international affairs, Iranians, like most Middle Easterners, are obsessed with it. Realpolitik is a much weaker political ideology than egalitarianism. There is a powerful belief that all countries are equal, no matter their size, gross national product (GNP), or level of military technology. Throughout the region, Islam provides individuals with a...