Sweating Out the Truth in Iran By MAZIAR BAHARI
Tehran, Iran
WORKING as a journalist in Iran embodies the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again without getting any results. That's how I felt at the height of the conflict in Lebanon, when I asked officials about Iran's relations with Hezbollah, bearing in mind that posing such questions can be a futile, dangerous and sometimes even lethal exercise.
How was Iran helping Hezbollah? Did Iran really start the war to divert attention from its uranium enrichment program (which it vowed this week to continue)? Was Iran, as Hezbollah's ally, if not patron, willing to put its money where its mouth was and enter the conflict?
Questions, questions. Of course no one answered.
So as a good Iranian, I indulged in fantasy. Fantasizing has become something of a national sport here. Our president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, predicted that the national soccer team would finish third or fourth in the World Cup. He also thinks we can become a nuclear powerhouse, even though we have a hard time manufacturing safety matches or making light bulbs with life expectancies of more than two weeks. By the way, the soccer team didn't make it out of the first round.
The setting of my dream was a sauna, where I questioned an imaginary official for five minutes (alas, even our dreams have boundaries here). Why a sauna? For some reason, Iranian officials love going to saunas. Some of the most important decisions in our recent history have been made in saunas. I'm serious.
I politely approach the high-ranking official and give him the impression that he is actually as important as he thinks he is. A bearded man in his early 50's, he usually wears a navy-blue suit and a collarless white shirt buttoned to the neck. (You can imagine how he would look in a sauna yourself. Hint: lots of hair). He is friendly and polite at first, but then his munificent smile turns to an agitated frown.
Q. How do you support the Lebanese resistance?
A. The Israeli regime has shown it has no concern for human rights and international law. It kills infants and pregnant women.
Q. How do you support the Lebanese resistance?
A. Americans have double standards. There is one for Israel and another one for the rest of the world. If it were not for America, Israel would never dare to kill innocent Lebanese citizens with such impunity.
Q. How do you support the Lebanese resistance?
A. I just answered you.
Q. No. You didn't. You just repeated the slogans I heard people were chanting in the Palestine Square demonstration yesterday morning and at Friday prayers two days before that. How does Iran support Hezbollah? Financially? Militarily? Spiritually? How?
The official gets annoyed and looks to his bodyguards to take him away. He wipes the sweat off his face, adjusts his towel and leaves.
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It is a silly fantasy, I admit. But the Iranian regime has reached a crossroads in its relationship with the rest of the world, and no one in the government is willing to give the public a straight answer.
There is a vague logic in the absurdity of the events here. But the people in the government tend not to share the obscure reasons behind their decisions with the public during crises. Officials usually leave it to pundits to interpret the government's behavior as they wish (they must enjoy the French film critics who divine philosophical gesticulations in Iranian films in which absolutely nothing happens).
Using Hezbollah as a threat has always helped Iran in its negotiations with the West. Iran would like to keep it that way. Helping Hezbollah overtly, however, would lead to a direct confrontation with Israel and the United States, while officially staying out of Lebanese affairs means betraying revolutionary ideals the regime pretends to hold dear to its heart. For the moment, Iran is sticking to bombastic rhetoric while doing nothing, to the chagrin of many of its hard-line supporters.
Iran helped create Hezbollah in the early 1980's, it is Hezbollah's most vocal supporter, and before the war it sent the group millions of dollars of cash, medicine, arms and of course posters of Ayatollahs Ruhollah Khomeini and Ali Khamenei, which accompanied every aid package and arms shipment.
Does this Iranian aid make Hezbollah Iran's puppet? From all evidence, Hezbollah, to a great extent, makes decisions independently of Iran. Hezbollah is an indigenous Lebanese armed resistance group that owes its popularity to Israeli atrocities, biased American policies and corrupt Lebanese politicians. When the United States and Israel try to portray Hezbollah as an Iranian proxy, they are pointing the finger in the wrong direction.
But Iran definitely uses the threat of its influence over Hezbollah to further its objectives. And its prime objective is the survival of the Islamic regime at any price. The clerics and non-clerics (they are now mostly non-clerics) in power in Iran are not the old revolutionary zealots the Americans tend to imagine. They are pragmatic men who have enjoyed the fruits of power for 27 years and don't want to lose them. In the aftermath of Sept. 11, Iranian statesmen were so scared of American retaliation that for the first time since the revolution, no one chanted "Death to America" in Iran for 10 days.
The regime's rhetoric about the United States and Israel is a remnant of the time when seizing embassies and staging revolutions were in vogue. But now the Islamic Republic has one of the world's younger populations. Most young Iranians I know don't care for their fathers' ideals. They prefer the better things in life, like plasma TV's on which to watch Britney Spears and the exiled Iranian pop diva Googoosh on illegal satellite channels. (No, Mr. Cheney, they don't want the United States to invade their country.) The government spends much of its $60 billion in annual oil revenue to import goods and keep its youth happy.
The paradoxes of the regime have exposed its hypocrisies. On one hand, the fiery slogans are the raison d'être of the Islamic Republic, and on the other, acting openly on those slogans would spell its demise. The most expedient thing to do has been nothing, while continuing to chant.
Up until the start of the war in Lebanon, that was just fine. Iran benefited from a series of victories without doing much. First the Americans got rid of the Taliban, Iran's enemy to the east. Then the Americans got rid of Iran's archenemy to the west, Saddam Hussein. Finally, with Americans mired in both countries, the price of oil went through the roof, and Iran started enriching uranium again, knowing that the West could do nothing. The regime was intoxicated with oil money and regional influence.
But the war in Lebanon has made it impossible for the Islamic Republic to enjoy the same calm. Hezbollah has become a liability for Iran. Weakened, it now needs Iran's petrodollars and rockets to regain its strength. At the same time, Israel and the United States are scrutinizing the transfer of arms and money from Iran to Hezbollah more closely than ever. The next shipment of arms from Iran to Hezbollah may result in direct confrontation with Israel and the United States.
The bearded men in the saunas must be sweating more than usual, even though in public they toast Hezbollah's "victory" with glasses of pomegranate juice. The Islamic Republic is coming to the point where it has to choose: destroy itself by repeating the same old slogans, or come up with new definitions for itself, its friends and foes.
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Maziar Bahari is a journalist and documentary film maker.