Independence without Freedom: Iran's Foreign Policy

Iran, Democracy, and the United States

[ 335 ] “Iran, Democracy, and the United States” was originally published in The Future of Liberal Democracy: Thomas Jefferson and the Contemporary World, ed. R. K. Ramazani and Robert Fatton (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 185–201, and is reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan. iran, democracy, and the united states While the Bush administration includes Iran in its “axis of evil,” the Iranian people see this designation as a threat to Iran’s historical pro-democracy movement. Decades of mutual vilification between Iran and the United States predated President Bush’s moralistic identification of Iran as evil. The hostility between the two countries dates back to the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The revolution destroyed Mohammad Reza Shah’s regime, a longtime strategic surrogate of America in the Middle East, particularly in the oil-rich Persian Gulf. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, endorsed the seizure of the American Embassy and the holding of Americans hostage for 444 days. This single event, perhaps more than any other at the time, fueled American antagonism toward Iran and prompted President Jimmy Carter to break diplomatic relations with Tehran. A quarter of a century later there is still no real indication of a resumption of official relations. The pro-democracy aspirations of the Iranian people are more than a century old. But never before have so many millions of people struggled so gallantly for democratic values as they are doing today. Young women and men, especially students, are the vanguards of this pro-democracy movement. They are under the age of 30 and form two-thirds of the 65 million or more population of the country. Furthermore, while anti-Americanism is sweeping across the Arab Middle East, the non-Arab Iranians demonstrate genuinely pro-American sentiments. One objective of this essay is to probe the deeper meaning of the Iranian pro-democracy and pro-American movement. This task is made possible by placing the movement squarely within the broad outlines of the Iranian cultural legacy. The other objective is to show why the people of Iran perceive the Bush administration’s foreign policy as a threat to their pro-democracy movement. the legacy of the triple political culture Iran’s cultural heritage has become threefold in nature over the millennia at least in part because of its remarkable continuity. Despite momentous [ 336 ] The Shah and Israel, Khatami and Bush changes the past has always been present in Iranian culture. Even in comparison with such old civilizations as those of Egypt and Syria, “which underwent great changes in the course of two millennia of history,” Richard Nelson Frye says, “Iran seems to have preserved much more of its ancient heritage.”1 Iranian culture took shape between the sixth century bc and the seventh century ad, before the coming of Islam. Pre-Islamic and Islamic cultures both underpin the Iranian sense of identity and one cannot trump the other. Emblematic of these two strands of the cultural heritage is the statement of the Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi. In accepting the prize, she proudly declared to the world on December 10, 2003: “I am an Iranian, A descendant of Cyrus the Great” and “I am a Muslim.” To these two older, premodern strands of Iranian cultural legacy must be added a relatively newer one—that of modernity. For two hundred years, specifically , since the imperial Russian invasion of Iran in 1804, Western civilization has penetrated the Iranian culture. Modern ideas of nation-state, constitution, temporal law, civil society, and representative and liberal democratic government , among many others, have been imported by Iranian intellectuals, who in essence believe in the principle of the rule of the people and human rights as opposed to the millennial legacy of autocracy. Modernist Iranians, religious as well as secular, believe that Islam is essentially compatible with fundamental Western political principles. Shirin Ebadi told the sitting members of the European Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Relations in Brussels on February 25, 2004, “Islam accepts democracy. There is no conflict between human rights and Islam.” The renowned philosopher Abdul Karim Soroush and intellectually oriented President Mohammad Khatami essentially claim the same, although their conceptions of “democracy” and “Islam” are quite different. To appreciate the historical longevity of the theory of compatibility of Islam with democracy, let me cite a nineteenth-century example. Mirza Yousef Khan, known as Mostashar Dowleh, argued in his important work Yek Kalameh (One word) that Islam and liberal democracy...