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Engaging Iran ■ By Dilip Hiro

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Washington won’t get far by threatening Tehran

TEHRAN

/ r i 1 he United States has reached I a dead end in Iraq, like a | trapped wolf,” Ayatollah Ali JL Khamenei recently said at a gathering of Shiite clerics. “It is trying to frighten people by roaring and clawing. But the people of Iraq will not allow the United States to swallow their country.”

Such comments are unsurprising, perhaps, coming from the Middle East’s most powerful Shiite leader, es-pecially at a time when U.S. forces are engaged in a pitched battle in the Shiite holy city of Najaf. But whatever the political motives for the remarks of Khamenei, who is the supreme leader of Iran, they raise deeper questions about the complicated relationship be-tween the United States and the two largest Shiite-majority countries in the world.

It is hard to judge what most Iranians think of Khamenei’s views on Iraq and the U.S. military presence there. On a recent joumey through Iran, I found public opinion about America and its invasion of Iraq to be diverse and nu-anced. Yet the U.S. position on Iran re-mains unyielding and focused on Iran’s nuclear weapons programs at the ex-pense of almost all else.

“Iran will either be isolated or it will submit to the will of the intemational community,” Condoleezza Rice, Presi-dent George W. Bush's national security adviser, said last week. Regardless of the merits of her position, her tonę surely struck most Iranians as threatening — exactly the opposite of the atti-tude America needs to convey.

While discussing contemporary Iraq, many Iranians refer directly or impli-citly to the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, which consumed at least half a million Iranian lives and caused untold misery. The nearer the Iraqi border, the morę pain-ful the memories of the conflict and the greater the dislike and distrust of Iraqis and Iraq — with or without Saddam Hussein as their leader.

Iran’s oil-rich Khuzestan province, bordering Iraq and the northern tip of the Gulf, suffered heavily in the war with Iraq. The city of Andimeshk, in the northern part of the province, was among the many urban centers that were hit repeatedly by Iraqi surface-to-surface missiles. A large billboard at one of the entrances to the city dis-plays the gaudily painted portraits of the war dead, routinely described as martyrs. Bronze sculptures of soldiers and airmen grace a busy square. Taeb Haideri, 55, a receptionist at the city’s Grand Hotel, said that the Americans should stay in Iraq for “10 to 20 years.” If they leave before then, he said, Iraq may once again create problems for Iran.

Along the Gulf coast is the port city of Khorramshahr, with about 140,000 residents. It was the site of fierce battles in the Iran-Iraq war. Here I found Sayy-id Mahmoud, a smali, dark, bespec-tacled man, fishing along the esplanade on the Karun River near its confluence with the Shatt al Arab (Arvand Rud, to Iranians). It was a dispute over this wa-terway between the two countries that set off the war.

Describing himself as a retired shep-herd, Mahmoud pointed to the many damaged or destroyed houses across the road, including his own. He, too, was glad that the Americans deposed Saddam Hussein, he said, and thought they should stay in Iraq and follow through on their plan with little inter-national help.

Iranians have diverse and nuanced opinions about America and its invasion of Iraq.

A few hundred kilometers south on the Gulf coast is the port city of Bushehr, which like Khorramshahr suffered heavy damage in the war. There I met Khosrow Warrast, the middle-aged head waiter at Malvan Hotel and Restaurant. America is doing to Iraq what Iraq did to Iran during the war, he said approvingly. But now, he said, the longer the U.S. troops stay, the morę the Iraqi people will tum against them. He advised the United States to withdraw its troops as soon as possible.

Farther from the Iraqi border, memories of the war are less raw — and a sense of kinship with the Iraqi Shiites is stronger. This is especially true in Qum, in central Iran just south of Tehran, the country’s religious Capital and the site of its largest theological college. “Iranians and Iraqis are the same people — Shiites,” said Muhammad Javad Islami, 60, a caretaker. (He was apparently un-aware that 40 percent of Iraqis are not Shiites.)

Qum is also the base of Grand Ayatollah Kadhem al-Husseini al-Haeri, an el-derly Iraqi-bom cleric who came to the holy city for religious studies in 1973 and never retumed home. A protegć of Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Sadr, who was executed by Saddairis govem-ment in 1980, Haeri belongs to the inter-ventionist school of Shiite Islam, which advocates clerical participation in poli-tics. He is vehemently opposed to the U.S. military presence in Iraq.

On April 7, 2003, Haeri dęcia red that Moktada al-Sadr, a relative of the man Saddam killed in 1980 and the radical cleric whose so-called Mahdi Army is battling U.S. forces in Najaf, “is our deputy and representative in all fatwa affairs," or religious matters. “His position is my position,” he said.

Ovemight, Haeri’s declaration strengthened the religious standing of Sadr, who is not an ayatollah and thus does not have the authority to issue religious edicts, or fatwas. This enabled him to set up a network that covered the Shiite community throughout Iraq and laid the foundation for his army. Yet there is little doubt that it is Haeri who decides what position Sadr should take regarding the U.S. troops and the interim Iraqi government they are support-ing.

Haeri’s followers in Iran include both Iraqi exiles and Iranians. They stress their common Shiite affiliation rather than their different languages and his-tories. Abdul Karim Assadi, a middle-aged Iranian cleric at Haeri’s headquar-ters in Qum, said that sińce the Iraqi and Iranian people are the same, their govemments will have to work together. It was up to him and other Shiites, he said, to pressure their govemments to cooperate.

Elsewhere, especially among the young, opinion was morę upbeat. One 22-year-old merchant who sold impor-ted watches in Tehran’s grand bazaar said that if the Americans stayed in Iraq and enacted democratic reforms, then it might also affect Iranian politics, bene-fiting both countries. Azim Habibi, the young owner of a new pizza and coffee shop that plays Iranian pop musie, said that he hoped U.S. investment in the region would help create jobs.

Habibi's view, of course, is not uni-versal — but then, neither is Assadi’s. What is striking about this nation of nearly 70 million people is how its opinion of America remains open. One way Washington might turn Iranian minds morę toward America is to stop constantly threatening Tehran and start engaging Iran in meaningful dia-logue.

Dilip Hiro is the author of“Secrets and Lies: Operation Iraqi Freedom and After” and "Neighbors, Not Friends: Iraq and Iran After the Gulf Wars.”