The history of my own family is a perfect illustration of this. For my grandfather, Islam was everything. The first son of a farmer from northern Iran, he enrolled in the religious seminaries in the Shi'ite holy city of Najaf, immersing himself in a lifelong study of Islamic law and theology. He banned music in his household and considered Christians and Jews unclean.

His youngest brother, however, was transformed in a different way. Hussein Agha had opened up an office for the family textile business in Italy, and by the time he returned to Iran he had traded in his fez and prayer beads for an Italian suit, a phonograph and a stack of American orchestra favorites. A generation later, my grandfather's eldest son, Ahmad Agha, turned to tradition like his father before him. Even as our family's large pharmaceuticals corporation grew up around him in the 1970s, he shunned calculators and continued to do the company accounting on a traditional wood-carved abacus. My father and his brother Muhammad, the youngest of their generation, would swing the pendulum back again, against tradition. They both settled in the West, far from the Muslim heartland, with my father taking an American bride of Jewish-Christian descent born in the Bronx.

These are not atypical family anecdotes. Such diversity -- religious, cultural, political -- is found not only within countless Iranian families but within the country itself. Unfortunately, too few Americans have come to know this Iran, and the prevailing environment of hostility between the two nations has only contributed to this ignorance. Over the last 20 years, the bearded zealot has been the dominant face of Iran in the American imagination. After all, who can forget those searing images of enraged crowds shouting "death to America" and parading blindfolded embassy hostages? But we Americans forget our own history when we say we don't understand the fanaticism of Iran. We forget the hostile crowds of our own Revolutionary War, burning effigies of King George and denouncing him as the incarnation of Satan. We forget our own revolutionary leaders firing American imaginations by associating revolt with the second coming of Christ and the establishment of God's kingdom on earth. Iran is not so different from what America once was.

Times have changed in Iran since the Islamic revolution. There are still angry crowds on the streets of Tehran, but their rage has not been directed at America -- at least, not until Bush's speech -- but at Iran's repressive religious regime. They chant "Down with the mullahs!" and "We love America!" They hold spontaneous moments of silence in packed soccer stadiums for those killed in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Most of the people in those crowds have no memory of the revolution, the autocratic Shah or his American patrons. They are the two-thirds of Iran's nearly 70 million people who are under 25 and have grown up almost entirely under theocratic rule. Unlike the foot soldiers of past American and Iranian revolutions, these people do not color their revolt with religious imagery. They do not threaten to export Islamic revolution. Instead, they crave Western freedoms. They have more in common with the global youth of the MTV generation than they do with the stern clerics who govern them. They are the future faces of Iran.

But aren't the Iranian people powerless, as in so many Middle Eastern nations? Don't they cower under the yoke of one-party states such as Egypt or Syria, or brutal military tyrants like those of Iraq and Algeria? No. The Bush administration's efforts to lump Iran together with dictatorships across the Middle East flies in the face of the fact -- acknowledged by all serious students of the region -- that it is one of the most democratic nations in the region. Voter turnout for Iran's free and fair presidential and parliamentary elections regularly dwarfs percentages for their American counterparts. And the last several elections in Iran have been dominated by a young, brash constituency that has returned reformists, led by president Mohammad Khatami, to power through landslide victories. Khatami's platform: reinvigorating Iranian civil society and enhancing the rule of law while engaging in what he calls a "Dialogue Among Civilizations" with the Western world. Unlike other states in the region that have flirted with democracy by establishing hollow, top-down institutions with no real authority, Iranian democracy has roots that reach deep down to the local level. In February 1999 voters in 730 cities and 40,000 villages elected about 200,000 local council members across the country, including more than 500 women.

Nevertheless, President Khatami and his supporters are indeed locked in a power struggle with an "un-elected few" -- the conservative clerics, led by Iran's spiritual leader, Ali Khamenei, who control the armed forces, the judiciary and the intelligence services. A Guardian council screens all candidates for elections and blocks legislation considered "un-Islamic." Reformist newspapers are shut down for expressing dissent and calling for change. Intellectuals are hunted and murdered for their views; dissidents are subjected to closed and dubious trials. Religious minorities are persecuted. Large religious foundations with ties to the government and billions in petro-dollar resources fund terrorist groups around the world. The conservative mullahs of Iran regularly denounce American and Israeli imperialism and seek weapons of mass destruction.

But time is not on the side of Iran's conservative mullahs. To understand why, one must look at Iran's recent history.

They say that revolutions eat their children, and in the beginning, the Islamic revolution in Iran proved this maxim. An unlikely coalition of secular leftists, students, workers, urbanized peasants, traditional merchants and religious classes, all with very different conceptions of what Iran would look like upon victory, united to oppose the Shah. After the Pahlavi regime fell, the mullahs were able to impose their vision of Islamic rule on the fractured political landscape. Fighting a devastating eight-year war with Iraq in the 1980s (a war in which the United States provided arms to Saddam Hussein's Iraq), the ruling clerics threw family planning out the window and encouraged Iranians to breed them an army. Iran's population nearly doubled in the 20 years following the revolution, and the younger generation that is trying to reshape the political system was born. In the end, the children of Iran may, in fact, eat the revolution -- but they will need our help.

The question is how best to help Iran's new generation of democrats and accelerate the demise of its authoritarians. Unfortunately, America's prevailing policy over the past 20 years has only hindered Iran's new generation while indirectly helping the ruling regime maintain power. America has been in a state of enmity with Iran since the aftermath of the '79 revolution, when it broke ties and imposed economic sanctions on it with the intention of punishing Iran for its extremism, reducing the resources it could devote to terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, isolating it from the world and perhaps motivating its people to overthrow the clerical regime.

This initial move was understandable, but America -- clinging to a policy of "dual containment" that treated Iran and Iraq as equal international pariahs -- has failed to adapt to Iran's new realities. The heavy-handed Iran and Libya Sanctions Act of 1996, which imposed unilateral secondary sanctions against companies that invested in energy development in Iran or Libya, has alienated our trading partners, portrayed us as an arrogant nation imposing its will on the rest of the world and completely failed to dislodge the hard-line mullahs. The world community, including our staunchest allies, has not joined the American embargo against Iran. Our sanctions regime, far from isolating the Islamic Republic, seems to have only isolated us. It is seen as unfairly punishing everyday Iranians for the misdeeds of their government.

Most important, the current American containment policy gives the conservative mullahs of Iran exactly what they want. It keeps Iranian civil society, primed and ready for change, more insulated from global interaction and off-balance. It allows the clerics to blame America, instead of government mismanagement and corruption, for Iran's economic problems. It promotes a paranoid siege mentality among the mullahs that will make Iran more, not less, reluctant to moderate its nuclear aspirations. Far from forcing productive change upon Iran, American policy has inhibited it. Bush's recent speech, as reported in Salon and the New York Times -- whose Feb. 8 headline noted "Bush's comments bolster old guard in Tehran" -- has only made matters worse.

Even if American sanctions were effective, the Iranian government -- which has $20 billion in annual oil revenues -- would still have more than enough resources to suppress internal dissent, support anti-Israel terror and fund a nuclear weapons program. The current American policy gives us no leverage over the Iranian regime and does little to hurt it. Which is why the most positive initial step America could take would be to unilaterally drop the economic sanctions against Iran.

Iran is ripe for change. A clear constituency within the Iranian government, backed by a clear majority of the Iranian population, believes in democratic reform and wants to re-engage with America. But Iranians are not waiting to be "liberated" from the mullahs by America, as Safire wants us to believe. The last time America "liberated" Iran was through a CIA-backed coup d'itat in 1953 that replaced the elected government of Muhammad Mossadegh -- whose crime was nationalizing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, now known as British Petroleum -- with the autocratic Muhammad Reza Shah. The Shah's brutally repressive policies, indecisiveness and reliance on his American patrons contributed to a violent backlash 26 years later in the Islamic revolution. Iran's reformers want to see their nation evolve within their current political system, as they showed by their overwhelming participation in the recent elections. We have little to lose by fostering dialogue with this group.

Defenders of America's enmity towards Iran argue that if we were to warm up to Iran we would lend legitimacy to an authoritarian group of clerics and give them an excuse to crack down further on the burgeoning reform movement. Reactionaries in Iran might claim that reformists have become American stooges, like the Shah of the old Iran. But this slander has been used so many times in the political squabbles of the last 20 years in Iran that it has become a hollow charge. Moreover, there is no real rage anymore among the Iranian people toward America to back it up. Anti-American demonstrations have become affairs staged by conservative groups and their lackeys. They do not enjoy support from the broader population.

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