The view from Tehran

Iranians are fed up with the high price of tomatoes and their provocative president. But it would be dangerous for Bush and the West to overlook their national pride.

By Hooman Majd

Read more: George W. Bush, Iran, United Nations, Israel, Middle East, Bush, Iraq, Nuclear Weapons, Opinion, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Feb. 21, 2007 | TEHRAN, Iran -- At the local greengrocer on the corner of Hedayat and Safi Alishah, in the decidedly unchic downtown section of Tehran where I'm staying, the fruits and vegetables are stacked high in perfectly formed pyramids. A dilapidated pickup truck parked in front and loaded with fruit stacked in boxes serves as a billboard for passing motorists as well as extra square footage for the store. Oranges are most visible, a plentiful and cheap winter fruit, but tomatoes, a virtual staple in Persian cooking, are practically out of sight. Tomatoes, it seems, have become a valuable commodity in Iran these days, much to the dismay of everyone, including those in the corridors of power, for whom a kebab, salad or stew without tomatoes is an affront to the palate.

I was born in Tehran and speak fluent Farsi, though I largely grew up in Europe and the United States. I have been traveling to Iran over the past three years, returning again in mid-January for six weeks to continue researching a book I'm writing on Iran and Iranians.

Much has been made in the media of growing discontent inside Iran with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and in Tehran sentiments are indeed openly expressed against him and his administration in many quarters, including some of his own. It may be tempting, therefore, to imagine that the "Iranian people," those to whom President Bush often refers as aspiring to the very same thing we do, i.e., "freedom," are becoming as dissatisfied with their political system as they are with their president. However, it would be dangerous -- and all the more so if the imagining is done by the White House -- to make such a presumption.

Iran's rather unique notion of democracy may not jibe with Western notions, but there are remarkable similarities that are often overlooked by analysts sitting at their desks a few thousand miles away. Iranians, like Americans, vote for their president and fully expect him, perhaps as naively as we do, to deliver on his campaign promises. As Bill Clinton's campaign slogan once went -- "It's the economy, stupid" -- so it goes in Iran. Foreign policy -- what we are most concerned with when it comes to Iran and its unusual leader -- is relevant to the Iranian masses only inasmuch as it affects their pocketbooks and, of course, their broader sense of security.

And in Iran the economy is reeling. Bread and dairy prices are fixed by the government, but fruit prices are not, and as inflation has been particularly bad recently, Iranians have focused on tomatoes, found in practically every Iranian dish. Food price increases and astronomical home prices are making it difficult for the already squeezed working classes -- who were promised a share of Iranian oil wealth by Ahmadinejad -- to make a living. The unemployment rate, officially put at around 12 percent, is in reality 20 percent, or even higher, according to experts.

Every day when I try to hail a cab on Tehran's streets, private cars stop and offer me and others standing nearby a cheap ride. The drivers do not fit the profile of gypsy cab operators in cities such as New York; they are in many cases college graduates for whom there simply is no other work. Recently, I asked one licensed cabbie if he resented the competition, and he merely shrugged. "Why should I?" he asked. "Everybody's suffering, and if they could find better work they wouldn't be doing this." The blame for the economic woes of ordinary Iranians is laid squarely at the feet of the government -- and to Iranians that government is President Ahmadinejad.

As for security, the massive buildup of U.S. naval forces in the Gulf has not gone unnoticed by the Iranian masses, who need only pause by a newsstand for a few moments a day and read the headlines of some 40 dailies neatly laid out on the sidewalk. Ahmadinejad's promises (both prior to and during his presidency) to alleviate Iran's economic woes have fallen short, and the style (but not necessarily the substance) of his foreign policy is widely viewed as having exacerbated the economic crunch and contributed to the sense of insecurity.

The United Nations Security Council resolution of December 2006 imposing sanctions on Iran for its refusal to suspend uranium enrichment is viewed here as an Iranian foreign policy failure. This is not because Iranians disagree with Ahmadinejad's sometimes belligerent and always defiant insistence that Iran will not give up its rights under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty -- but because the result of that resolution is that tomatoes have, since the passage of the resolution, become unaffordable to the Iranian masses. The Holocaust conference in Tehran that preceded the U.N. vote is not derided so much because of its preposterous premise but because of the perception that it unfavorably swayed the U.N. vote, which has in turn resulted in tomatoes becoming unaffordable.

The current Iranian administration's goading of President Bush and the U.S. government -- whether on Iraq, Lebanon, the Palestinian question or basic issues of Iranian and American power -- is not viewed as illegitimate. But it is seen as having resulted in unilateral U.S. economic sanctions (and undue U.S. pressure on European and Asian allies), which mean foreign letters of credit are essentially now unavailable to Iranian businesses. This will cause them to downsize, especially if sanctions continue or even expand, and will exacerbate Iran's already unenviable unemployment rate.

Bush's speech on Jan. 10 was keenly watched and read in Iran, and its emphasis on aggressive confrontation with Iran, along with the subsequent raid on Iran's "consulate" in Irbil, Iraq, is viewed partly as a reaction to Ahmadinejad's foreign policy (and also, fatalistically, as evidence of unending U.S. hostility toward Iran). The muted European response to the seizure of Iranian "diplomats" in Iraq, however, is viewed as evidence of Ahmadinejad's unpopularity abroad, an unpopularity that has resulted in European banks agreeing to American demands that they curtail their dealings with Iran. (This is emphasized more than the threat to European banks' U.S. operations if they don't cooperate with U.S. policy.)

Iranians here are neither shy nor fearful in expressing their dissatisfaction with their president. And as much as the White House wills it to be, Iran is neither a police state nor does it resemble a dictatorship along the lines of Saddam Hussein's Iraq or Kim Jong Il's North Korea, despite periodic crackdowns on journalistic freedom and free speech. Few people here feel the kind of oppressive air often heard about in the West. It's remarkable how freely people speak out, and drink liquor and smoke dope and have unmarried sex, without fear of a secret police. Depending on where one is in the country, Iran can feel like a modern southern European state or a peaceful and modernizing third-world country.

And in terms of public opinion, a sense of President Ahmadinejad's stature in Iran is not unlike the sense of President Bush's stature one might now find in New York, or even in the Midwest. Since Ahmadinejad's popularity started falling precipitously at the end of 2006, the newspapers have been filled with extremely harsh criticisms of him and his government. If Ahmadinejad's honeymoon with both Iranian voters and the Iranian media has been even shorter-lived than Bush's (which was extended by the events of 9/11, as it was), it does not mean that he is politically doomed, nor does it even mean that he cannot regain his popularity. In the minds of Iranians, foreign policy is in some sense inextricably linked to the price of tomatoes. But it is by no means certain that Iranians, who seem to prefer that their president project a more benign image abroad, are willing to forgo what they believe to be nuclear independence in order to buy cheaper tomatoes.

Next page: Bush had better realize that a prideful Shiite Iran will choose martyrdom over humiliation any day of the week