The New Yorker

  The Adversary

Is Iran’s nuclear negotiator, Javad Zarif, for real?

BY ROBIN WRIGHT         

 On  September 4th of last year, shortly after Javad Zarif was named Iran’s foreign minister, a new Twitter account with the handle @JZarif posted its first tweet:

                       Hope to be able to #interact & stay in touch.

Several hours later, a second tweet appeared:
                       Happy Rosh Hashanah,

The tweets drew widespread attention, and some skepticism. Iran’s new President, Hassan Rouhani, had taken office a month earlier, but his predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, had challenged Israel’s right to exist, urged Jews to return to the countries they came from, and questioned the occurrence of the Holocaust. Moreover, most social media had long been cut off in the Islamic Republic. Among the skeptical responses was one from @sfpelosi:

Thanks. The New Year would be even sweeter if you would end Iran’s Holocaust denial, sir.

     @sfpelosi is Christine Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi’s daughter and a former chief of staff for Representative John Tierney, of Massachusetts. She is now a Democratic Party activist in San Francisco. She is Catholic, but her husband is Jewish and her daughter attends a Jewish preschool. “I came across his tweet and thought, Was it real?” she told me. “I thought Iran didn’t have social media. Then I thought, What the heck, it’s Twitter! Let’s see if this is real or a P.R. stunt by one of his consultants or friends outside Iran.”

Within an hour, @JZarif responded:

@sfpelosi Iran never denied it. The man who was perceived to be denying it is now gone. Happy New Year.

The tweeter was indeed Zarif. (The Foreign Ministry is exempted from the country’s social-media censorship.) By e-mail, I asked Zarif if he knew that his interlocutor was the daughter of a prominent American politician. “Yes, ma’am,” he wrote back.

The exchange foreshadowed the most ambitious diplomatic opening since Iran’s revolution. Three weeks later, on September 26th, Zarif met with Secretary of State John Kerry at the United Nations to discuss resuming negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program. The next day, President Rouhani, who was in New York to attend the General Assembly, took a telephone call from President Obama. It lasted fifteen minutes, and was the first conversation between Iranian and American leaders since the Shah’s ouster, in 1979.

Since then, there have been monthly diplomatic talks, at various levels, in Geneva and Vienna. Zarif, who prepped Rouhani for the Obama call, is now the broker between his volatile government and the world’s six mightiest powers—Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia, and the United States. The goal is a comprehensive deal to insure that Tehran does not seek or obtain a nuclear weapon. An interim, six-month agreement was reached in November and went into effect in January. Iran agreed to gradually suspend or convert controversial aspects of its nuclear program. In exchange, Tehran is receiving, also in phases, relief from economic sanctions amounting to between six and seven billion dollars. More than half is Iran’s own oil income, trapped in foreign banks. Iran and the six powers began drafting terms last week. The deadline for a final agreement is July 20th. The talks could be extended, but all sides want—and need—to make the date.

Zarif and Kerry have now met four times, and call each other John and Javad. “That’s one of the first things you Americans do,” Zarif told me. “Had I not been in the U.S. for such a long time, I would have been astonished for the Secretary of State of the adversary to start calling me by my first name.” They have each other’s phone number and e-mail address and have used them. Their staffs are in touch more often.

Yet, even at this stage, Pelosi’s question lingers over the process: Is it real? And can it prevent Iran from eventually getting a bomb?

Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a block-long building of beige brick, was erected in the nineteen-thirties, by Iran’s last dynasty. Its cavernous reception hall is majestic; the walls are mirrored mosaics. A dazzling chandelier, with several tiers of little bulbs bouncing light off the mirrors, hangs from a domed ceiling. Zarif’s office is wood-panelled and plain, unadorned with personal mementos. We sat on brocade furniture clustered at one end of the room.

Zarif is an affable man, with a disarmingly unrevolutionary grin, a quick wit, and the steely tenacity of a debater. He has snowy white hair and, since taking office, has grown his signature goatee into a short beard—a response to hard-liners who thought that his politics, as well as his clean-shaven cheeks, were too Western. The nuclear diplomacy has made Zarif both popular and vulnerable. On the Persian New Year, in March, two public-opinion polls named him newsmaker of the year; Rouhani trailed far behind. Yet Tehran’s squabbling politicos, whom Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini once compared to scorpions, dissect every utterance. Critics in parliament have already urged his impeachment. Earlier this month, Zarif survived a challenge by seventy-five members of parliament, who wanted to censure him for publicly denouncing hard-line positions and asserting that the Holocaust was a “horrifying tragedy.” Hard-liners also held a “We’re Worried” conference at the former American Embassy, to warn against concessions. The conference was billed as “the great gathering of critics of a weak deal.” A woman in a black chador carried a placard stating, “Our nuclear rights are not for sale.”

For many Iranians, a nuclear deal is about a lot more than nukes. It would remove the threat of regime change, by securing the Islamic government as the legitimate representative of the Iranian people. But it might also open Iran to the outside world in ways that affect the internal balance of power.

“I’m still waiting for the real battle to be fought in Tehran,” a leading Western diplomat told me. “My best guess is that it will be fought after the nuclear deal.”

Zarif straddles Iranian and American culture to a greater extent than any senior official since the revolution. He greeted me at the door, but did not shake my hand, according to Muslim custom. He did not wear a tie, choosing a small standup collar, following revolutionary custom. Yet he speaks English with an American accent and with American idioms, the legacy of twenty years in San Francisco, New York, and Denver. He has two children—a daughter who is an interior decorator, a son who is a marketing consultant—and both were born in the United States.

He may be the only person in the world who can telephone both Senator Dianne Feinstein and the Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah. Feinstein met Zarif in 2006, and carried a proposal by him to the Bush Administration. (The Bush people never responded, she said.) She kept in touch and met Zarif again in New York in September.

“He doesn’t play games,” she told me. “He doesn’t produce incendiary sentences. He is thoughtful. He is real. He wants to help his people and lead them in a different direction. That’s important to me in my measurement of a person.”

As Iran’s Ambassador to the United Nations from 2002 until 2007, Zarif met with Vice-President Joseph Biden and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel during their Senate days. In 2007, the Bush Administration allowed a rare exemption from the twenty-five-mile travel limit on Iranian diplomats in New York, so that he could give farewell speeches in Washington and pay a courtesy call on Capitol Hill. “Zarif is a tough advocate, but he’s also pragmatic, not dogmatic,” Biden told me then. “He can play an important role in helping to resolve our significant differences with Iran peacefully.” At a luncheon hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations, Martin Indyk, the former U.S. Ambassador to Israel, told Zarif, “We’re going to miss you.”

Yet in January Zarif met Nasrallah in Lebanon, and laid a wreath of showy white flowers at the grave of Imad Mughniyeh, the Hezbollah military commander. Mughniyeh was linked to the 1983 bombings of the U.S. Embassy and the Marine barracks in Beirut, which killed two hundred and forty-one peacekeepers. Zarif then travelled to Damascus, for talks with Syria’s President, Bashar al-Assad, now in the fourth year of a war against his own people.

“In order to practice dialogue, you need to be able to set aside your assumptions and try to listen more than you want to talk,” Zarif told me. “It’s not always politically correct to be able to do that, but it can give you a better sense of the reality. I have benefitted from the knowledge and the information that all these people have been able to provide to me. I have disagreements with some and more agreements with others. But that doesn’t mean I cannot listen to those I disagree with.”

Some American critics don’t buy it. “There are worse Islamic revolutionaries out there, but, make no mistake, he’s an Islamic revolutionary,” Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former C.I.A. officer and now a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told me. “He understands the Islamic revolution as being incompatible with the United States. Only in the Byzantine world of revolutionary politics do the differences between Zarif and what some call hard-liners gain importance.”

The son of an affluent merchant who wanted him to be an engineer, Zarif grew up without television or newspapers. The family was conservative and devout, but his father did not support the revolution. Shiites have historically been so-called quietists—passive politically and opposed to the clergy’s involvement in politics. The return to the ideal Islamic state, they believed, should wait for the reappearance of the Mahdi, the Muslim messiah. So the revolution was as distressing for some of the faithful as it was for the Shah’s supporters, and left deep fissures within the Zarif family. When I noted that dinner-table discussions must have been interesting, Zarif replied, “Out of respect to my father, I usually listened.”

At seventeen, Zarif left Tehran to attend a prep school in San Francisco, before enrolling at San Francisco State University. During the fourteen months of the revolution, Iranian students at California colleges clustered around the Muslim Students Association in Berkeley. So many of them rushed home to enlist in the new Islamic Republic that they were known as the Berkeley mafia. Zarif stayed behind, to continue his studies, and became the Berkeley group’s representative to Iran’s San Francisco consulate, assigned to insure that it did not deviate from the new political creed. When he started graduate school, in New York, at Columbia, the revolution’s Ambassador to the United Nations hired him.

“At the time, anybody who prayed and knew English was a rare commodity,” Zarif recalled. As the mission purged monarchists, he did everything from visa work to writing letters to the Secretary-General about the Iran-Iraq War. “Nobody else in the mission either knew how to do it or was trusted to do it,” he said.

After a year at Columbia, Zarif left to earn his doctorate at the University of Denver’s School of International Studies, where he had some of the same professors who had taught Condoleezza Rice. “One of my professors once told me, ‘In Denver, we produce liberals like Javad Zarif, not conservatives like Condi Rice,’ ” Zarif said, smiling.

“Condi and Javad had many common traits,” Ved Nanda, who taught both and was on Zarif’s dissertation committee, recalled. “They were both good in the classroom. At that time, I would not have thought of her as Secretary of State, though I would have told you that she would go places. But him—I thought he’d play an important part in his country’s life.”

Zarif’s dissertation, written during the Iran-Iraq War, was about using force in violation of international law. Its themes echoed Iranian-American relations, before and after the revolution. “No political, military or economic justification can be advanced to explain with legal validity a unilateral resort to force in the absence of prior armed attack,” he wrote. Intervention to restore law and order in foreign lands “can find no legal grounds in universally accepted norms of law.”

Nanda particularly remembered Zarif’s bitterness about American support for Saddam Hussein, who had invaded Iran in 1980. As U.S. officials later admitted, the Reagan Administration provided satellite intelligence to Baghdad about Iranian troop movements which was used for some of Iraq’s chemical-weapons attacks. The C.I.A. once estimated that Iran suffered at least fifty thousand casualties, including thousands of deaths—the largest loss of life from toxic nerve and mustard gases since the First World War.

Since leaving Denver, in 1988, Zarif has been at the center of Iran’s diplomatic pivots. Jan Eliasson, a Swede who is now the United Nations Deputy Secretary-General, led negotiations to end the Iran-Iraq War. Zarif was the youngest diplomat in the Iranian delegation, Eliasson recalled, but he worked the hardest to talk to the Iraqis, even between sessions. The former U.N. hostage negotiator Giandomenico Picco, an Italian, detailed, in his memoir, Zarif’s “invaluable” role, between 1989 and 1991, in freeing Western hostages held by Iran’s allies in Lebanon. One had been held for almost seven years. Picco called his work with Zarif over a period of some two decades the closest professional relationship of his career. “The proof is the hundred and twenty-three lives that we brought back to their families and homes,” Picco told me. “He’s a craftsman.”

In testimony before Congress, James Dobbins, currently the State Department’s Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, credited Zarif with help on Afghanistan. At the 2001 International Conference, in Bonn, the Afghan opposition balked over terms for a new government. At two in the morning, after pressure from American, Russian, German, Indian, and U.N. diplomats proved futile, Zarif took the Afghan representative aside and whispered for a few moments in his ear. It worked. “Zarif had achieved the final breakthrough without which the Karzai government might never have been formed,” Dobbins said.

In 2002, Zarif became Iran’s U.N. envoy. The next year, he wrote the final draft of a master statement—nicknamed “the grand bargain”—that sought to resolve all outstanding issues with the U.S. Like earlier attempts, it never took off. After hard-liners gained control under Ahmadinejad, Zarif was squeezed out of the foreign service, in 2007. “I don’t think that the West interpreted our openings and accommodations the way they should have,” he told me then. “Since it was misinterpreted, the reaction was disappointing, and in fact only heightened tension and increased mistrust.” He said that he would return home from the U.N. seen as “a stupid idealist who has not achieved anything in his diplomatic life after giving one-sided concessions.”

He retired from government service at the age of forty-seven. Afterward, he taught, played with architectural plans—a hobby of his—and kept a low profile during six months of protests following the disputed 2009 Presidential elections. The uprising was quashed, but simmering discontent produced Rouhani’s stunning election, last year. The political tide had turned. Three of the six Presidential candidates asked Zarif to be their foreign minister, and a popular news Web site has since posited him as a future Presidential candidate. “Not a chance! Don’t even say that,” he replied, when I asked about his prospects. “I’m not a politician!”

“I hope you have some exciting video to show me.

Zarif has reason to be wary. Iran has a noisy and mischievous right wing At Zarif’s confirmation hearing, in August, the lawmaker Nasrollah Pejmanfar warned parliament, “Our enemies have set their greedy eyes on Zarif, and Americans have called him an ‘olive branch.’ Therefore, Zarif has to clearly announce that we don’t want to have relations with the United States.”

In early October, a front-page story in Tehran’s most hard-line paper, Kayhan, reported that Zarif had told a parliamentary committee that the phone call between Obama and Rouhani was inappropriate. The Foreign Ministry denied it, and Zarif complained on his Facebook page that the fabricated story, and political tensions, had caused him physical injury.

“I developed pain in the back and foot after seeing the newspaper’s headline this morning,” he wrote, to four hundred and fifty thousand followers. “I could not even walk or sit. I left the Foreign Ministry in the afternoon for the hospital. . . . It was due to being nervous, and the muscular spasms.”

A week later, after acupuncture, he flew to the first round of the nuclear negotiations on an airplane bed. Iranian media posted pictures of him under a blanket, with a laptop on his chest. He was rolled into the talks in a wheelchair. His entrance broke the ice. An American official who briefed reporters recalled, “Everyone had a back story for him, books they thought he should read, things he might try, because we all have suffered.”

Shortly after Zarif accepted the interim nuclear deal, President Obama told an audience at the Brookings Institution that the new diplomacy with Iran had only a fifty-fifty shot. Even those odds may be high. For the past quarter century, American Presidents have failed to prevent unfriendly or unstable countries from getting the bomb. Ronald Reagan pledged that Pakistan would not get a nuclear weapon, but it did, from a clandestine program built up in the nineteen-eighties. Bill Clinton vowed that North Korea would not get the bomb, but it developed secret capabilities in the nineties and tested its first nuclear device in 2006.

George W. Bush promised that Iran would not go nuclear. Both sides were clumsy, repeatedly missing diplomatic opportunities. Meanwhile, Tehran made a big leap in technology. It jumped from fewer than two hundred centrifuges—spinning tubes that enrich uranium by separating its isotopes at supersonic speed—to around five thousand by the time Bush left office.

Iran now has nineteen thousand centrifuges. The majority are at a well-guarded site near Natanz, an area famous for its pears. After an opposition group exposed the facility, in 2002, Iran said that it was not obliged to make a declaration to the U.N. watchdog agency until the plant was within six months of receiving nuclear material. A second site is at Fordo, buried deep in mountains less vulnerable to air strikes, near Qom, Iran’s center of religious learning. Tehran declared the site in 2009, by which point the United States already had it under surveillance.

Enriched uranium can fuel energy for domestic uses or for weaponry. A nuclear bomb requires roughly twenty-five kilograms—fifty-five pounds—of uranium that is highly enriched, to ninety-per-cent purity. Using all its centrifuges and all the uranium enriched so far, Iran, if it wished, could produce the fuel for a bomb in about two months, Robert Einhorn, a former member of the U.S. negotiating team, told me. Other steps are required, including fitting the fuel into a warhead and developing a delivery system. But the so-called “breakout time”—the time it takes for a country to produce enough enriched uranium for a bomb—is key.

“Once a country can produce bomb-grade material, the game is up,” Colin Kahl, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, explained. The fuel can be moved to a less conspicuous site, safe from military action. At that point, air strikes on Natanz or Fordo might not stop Iran from making a bomb.

Only fifteen countries currently enrich uranium. Only nine have the bomb. Five are now at the negotiating table trying to persuade Iran, through Zarif, not to make one of its own.

Zarif has not actually been to any of Iran’s facilities. “I haven’t had the chance,” he told me. “And I don’t think I need to. It would be nice, in terms of national pride, to be able to look at them, and to visit them. But I wouldn’t understand much, because I’m not a nuclear physicist. I’m a negotiator.”

The Islamic Republic has always claimed that its nuclear program is intended only for energy and medical research. The U.S. has long acknowledged Tehran’s need for both. In the mid-seventies, before the revolution, the Ford Administration approved the Shah’s plan to buy more than twenty nuclear power plants. The decision was supported by Dick Cheney, Ford’s chief of staff, and his Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. The calculation was that the deal would be good for American business. It would deepen strategic relations, and it would help Iran provide energy for a modernizing economy, while extending the life of its oil reserves for export to Western industrialized nations. “I don’t think the issue of proliferation came up,” Ford’s Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, recalled, in 2005, to the Washington Post.

A 1978 State Department memo noted, “We have been encouraged by Iran’s efforts to broaden and diversify its non-oil energy base.”

Iran needs nuclear energy now far more than it did under the Shah. After the revolution, the ruling clerics called on women to breed an Islamic generation. Within a decade, the population increased by more than fifty per cent. The Government of God soon realized its earthly limits, however. It could not feed, house, educate, or employ the growing numbers, so it initiated a family-planning program; most birth control, including vasectomies, was subsidized. More than thirty thousand women were recruited to go door to door promoting a two-child policy. Clerics preached family planning on United Nations World Population Day; some even escorted anxious males to vasectomy clinics. Engaged couples were required to go through a surprisingly graphic family-planning course. By 2002, births were down to two children per family.

The birth boom triggered an oil-consumption surge that went up an average of ten per cent a year during the revolution’s first three decades—until 2010, according to an Iranian Web site. Within ten years, Iran could become a net importer of oil, with devastating economic consequences. Before the introduction of sanctions, petroleum sales had accounted for sixty per cent of fiscal revenues. “If the trend continues,” the Web site acknowledged, “the situation could turn catastrophic.”

Oil consumption also presented an existential problem. Six of Iran’s major cities are chronically polluted. Tehran closes down periodically because of thick brown smog. Billboards flash pollution levels. On the worst days, children, the infirm, and the elderly are warned to stay indoors; some people resort to wearing surgical face masks. The government reports that approximately eighty thousand Iranians die every year—more than two hundred a day—from diseases linked to dirty air.

So Iran needs clean nuclear energy. Still, almost four decades after its deal for more than twenty nuclear power plants, the country has only one, at Bushehr, on its southern Persian Gulf coast. It was started by the Germans before the revolution; the Russians took it over in the mid-nineties, and, after many technical glitches, it joined the national grid in 2012.

But the Bushehr plant only adds to Iran’s credibility problem, because none of the centrifuges at Natanz or Fordo are used for it. Russia provides all the enriched uranium—and takes away all the spent fuel. What’s more, Tehran is at least a generation away from building its own nuclear power plants. And, as the country has developed all these fuel capabilities, the question for the outside world remains: Why, if not to make fuel for a bomb?

“Quarterly indictments exceeded Wall Street expectations.”

Zarif says that Iran has no intention of producing either weapons or weapons-grade fissile material. “We do not consider that to be in our interests, or within our security doctrine,” he says. The country’s one research reactor, supplied by the United States in 1967, is used to produce medical isotopes. In 1968, Iran signed the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons; it claims the use of nuclear energy as its right.

The government also says it needs its own reactors and fuel so that it won’t be held hostage to the politics of suppliers. “If you look at it from the perspective of any other country that has access to all sorts of available fuel in the international market, available medical isotopes in the international market, then you’ll find it very difficult to even justify this from a financial perspective,” Zarif said. “It’s much cheaper to buy most of this stuff on the open market than to produce it. We understand that. But that becomes irrelevant when you do not have access to open markets.” Iran is believed to have spent a hundred billion dollars so far to develop independent nuclear technology.

Iran’s ultimate argument is religion. The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has renounced the bomb at least four times since 2003. “We consider developing nuclear weapons as unlawful,” he told nuclear scientists in 2012. “We consider using such weapons a big sin. We also believe that keeping such weapons is futile and dangerous, and we will never go after them. . . . We want to prove to the world that nuclear weapons do not bring about power.”

Despite Iran’s growing capabilities, the Worldwide Threat Assessment report, which reflects consensus among America’s sixteen intelligence agencies, concluded earlier this year that Iran’s rulers had not resolved whether to build a bomb. “We do not know if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons,” James R. Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, said.

Last fall, President Obama predicted that Iran was still “a year or more away” from having all the pieces and skills needed for the final product. That estimate has not changed.

At a farewell party shortly before leaving the U.N., in 2007, Zarif was given a copy of Henry Kissinger’s book “Diplomacy,” a gift arranged by a mutual friend. During Zarif’s five years in New York, he and Kissinger had met, talked, and dined together. “He was intelligent, courteous, disciplined, interesting to talk to,” Kissinger recalled of one dinner. “I conducted the conversation to educate myself, so I did not try to persuade him of any particular approach, except my basic theme was that, on the basis of national interests, there is no conflict between Iran and the United States. Everything beyond that is ideological.”

Kissinger wrote in Zarif’s copy of his book, “To a respected adversary.” The inscription came up at his confirmation hearing, as a retort to criticism of his American ties: “Is it bad if an experienced eighty-year-old diplomat calls a forty-something-year-old child of this revolution a ‘worthy adversary’?”

Any nuclear deal—to defer the Iranian decision to actually make a bomb, to alter the timetable of a breakout, and to insure that the terms stick—will depend as much on Iran’s strategic calculus as on its technical coöperation. Iran now has the requisite scientific knowledge. That knowledge can’t be bombed. A deal that limits centrifuges, cuts back enrichment, converts facilities, curtails research, and increases inspections can go only so far in preventing Iran from eventually developing a weapon. Tehran will ultimately have to decide, Kissinger has noted, whether the Islamic Republic is a country or a cause.

I asked Zarif if he had become a realist, in the Kissinger vein. “Far from it!” he said. “I have very serious theoretical problems with realism.” He went on to acknowledge, however, that his thinking had evolved. “All governments are rational beings—that’s the first premise of realist theory, and I don’t disagree with that,” he told me. “Of course, that doesn’t mean that all government actors, all government officials, are rational beings. . . . But I believe we have gone through a learning process in Iran. We have been exposed to realities, and I’ve learned to adapt to those realities. But it doesn’t mean we have moved away from our principles.”

He went on, “Let’s put it in Kissinger’s terms. More and more people see Iran’s interests are best served if we can find a way that Iran as a cause and Iran as a nation-state will be complementary, rather than in conflict, so that we won’t have to choose.”

Zarif made Iran’s case in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs:

Iran has no interest in nuclear weapons and is convinced that such weapons would not enhance its security. Iran does not have the means to engage in nuclear deterrence—directly or through proxies—against its adversaries. Furthermore, the Iranian government believes that even a perception that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons is detrimental to the country’s security and to its regional role, since attempts by Iran to gain strategic superiority in the Persian Gulf would inevitably provoke responses that would diminish Iran’s conventional military advantage.

Iran might appear to be negotiating from strength. Its armed forces number half a million, although a good bit of their equipment dates back to the Shah. Tehran has also built a network of surrogates, through the Revolutionary Guards’ élite Quds Force, which has been linked to operations on five continents. Tehran has armed, aided, and abetted some of the region’s most notorious militias (as well as a used-car salesman from Corpus Christi, Texas, who was convicted, last year, of a bizarre plot to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador in Washington). After 2001, the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq also bolstered Iran’s position, by ousting two rival regimes on its eastern and western borders. In 2004, Jordan’s King Abdullah fretted about a new Shiite “crescent” radiating from Tehran through Baghdad and Damascus to Beirut.

Yet the most striking impression Iran gives today is its sense of strategic loneliness. The vulnerability is partly a holdover from the Iran-Iraq War, the bloodiest Middle East conflict in modern times and still an obsession more than a quarter century after it ended. Billboards are devoted to portraits of the war dead. Disabled veterans are still dying from exposure to mustard gas. Other veterans are among Iran’s most hard-line politicians.

Iran has a minority mentality, too. Most Iranians are Shiites, a fraction of the Islamic world. Most are ethnic minorities distinct from their neighbors. Iranians have historically viewed themselves as exceptional in the region. In the early sixteenth century, the Safavid dynasty converted the country, en masse, from Sunni to Shiite Islam, in order to keep Persians distinct from the neighboring Ottomans. It was a political, not a religious, decision. Iran’s modern revolution has made it an ideological exception as well. Iran is the world’s only constitutional theocracy, and the only place in Islam’s fourteen centuries where clerics have ruled a state. For the past thirty-five years, Iranians have also felt exceptional—and exempt from international norms—because of the country’s claim to sacredness.

This sentiment is ingrained in Iran’s current policies. “Iran is not in any sort of routine groupings,” Zarif said. “It’s not an Arab country. It’s not part of the Indian subcontinent. So it’s in a neighborhood where it has some unique characteristics. We are a country which embraced Islam, learned Arabic, but didn’t change its language or its culture. . . . That’s what keeps us unique.”

As a result, Iran’s relationships are largely tactical—enemies of enemies are friends, despite differences. Syria, the region’s most secular state, is at the top of that list. Apart from Lebanon’s Shiites, a relationship dating to Persia’s Shiite conversion, Iran’s ties with many regional players shift with time and circumstances.

“Iran is a lonely country and a lone country,” Abbas Maleki, the deputy director of the Center for Strategic Research, a think tank led by Rouhani before he became President, told me. “We have no strategic alliances.”

President Obama has spent more time thinking about Iran than about any other foreign-policy issue. In both 2008 and 2012, Obama campaigned on attempting diplomacy with Tehran. He has written to its Supreme Leader and to its President. And, last year, he authorized a secret channel, in Oman, that seeded the current public talks. “It’s as big a priority as we have in our foreign policy,” his deputy national-security adviser, Ben Rhodes, told me.

Iran has been the bane of all six American Presidents since the revolution. But Obama believes that dealing with Tehran is a historic opportunity and a necessity. “A nuclear deal does so many things at once,” Rhodes explained, in his windowless office, in the West Wing of the White House. “It would likely assure that this is the first Administration since the Cold War that didn’t see a new nuclear-weapons state emerge. It would be the most significant non-proliferation event in many years. It would prevent a military conflict. And it could potentially open the door to a different type of relationship between the United States and Iran that, in our view, could be very healthy for the region.”

Obama believes that, for the first time since the revolution, Washington and Tehran are both willing to try—at the same time. Iran is feeling the pressure of economic sanctions, imposed in four U.N. resolutions since 2006, and more harshly by the United States and the European Union since 2012. Its oil sales have plummeted by sixty per cent in the past three years; so has the value of its currency. Separate banking restrictions have cut many Iranian financial institutions—and a lot of domestic commerce—off from global trade. Tehran can’t get access to more than a hundred billion dollars of its oil revenues, which are stranded abroad.

Ahmadinejad’s gross mismanagement of the economy exacerbated the crisis. Billions were poured into housing projects that proved unlivable. Two hundred thousand units ended up without water, gas, or access to a sewage system. The government ordered loans to be granted at interest rates below inflation. Cash payouts designed to compensate the poor for increasing fuel and food prices backfired; subsidies were doled out to almost everyone, and the government ended up paying out more than it gained from higher prices. The Western diplomat called it “voodoo economics.” During Ahmadinejad’s last year in office, inflation exceeded forty per cent, and his government was charged by the country’s judiciary with the worst corruption since the revolution. The Islamic Republic is now widely perceived to have failed the mostazafin, the oppressed and disinherited in whose name the revolution was carried out. “When a system implodes from inside, no bomb can save it,” Amir Mohebbian, a conservative Tehran columnist, told me.

Anger and alienation created diplomatic opportunity. “We have an actual mandate for Rouhani to govern in a different way and to conduct foreign policy in a different way,” Rhodes said. “There is a constituency that now has some degree of power in the Iranian system, that really wants to climb out of this isolation, and is willing to do things that they didn’t previously do.” He added, “We believe that it is real. . . . We are willing to take the risks to get a deal.”

But he also said, “We don’t know how far this can go—both on the nuclear issue and on the broader relationship. . . . They’ve got to decide whether we’re the Great Satan or whether we are their ticket into the community of nations.”

If a nuclear deal is the centerpiece of Obama’s strategy, just as important, long-term, Rhodes said, is the mere act of diplomacy—learning how to talk to Iran again. “There’s nothing inherent in Iran that suggests that they need to be seen as part of the Axis of Evil,” he said, referring to George W. Bush’s lumping Iran with Iraq and North Korea, in 2002. “There are attributes to the Iranian people that suggest that they could have a better relationship with us, that there is a sophistication to the Iranian people that is more evident in Rouhani and Zarif than in some of the other—well, than Ahmadinejad, to put it one way.”

Most of the nuclear talks, except for the opening and closing plenaries, are held at Vienna’s Palais Coburg, nicknamed the Spargelburg, or Castle of Asparagus, for its leggy neoclassical columns. The delegations meet in a gilded ballroom; they sit around three sides of a square. Baroness Catherine Ashton, the European Union’s foreign-policy chief, sits at the top. The lead negotiators from the six major powers sit on one side, the Iranian delegation on the other.

The six major powers are nominally equal partners, but the Americans have more sway, since they introduced and effectively control most of the sanctions. So the pivotal exchanges are bilateral meetings between the Americans and the Iranians in hallways or staff suites.

“It is professional. It is respectful. It is quite substantive,” said Wendy Sherman, the State Department’s Under-Secretary for Political Affairs, who is the lead American negotiator. “I believe the intent is there.”

The six major powers dine together, with wine. The Iranians hold themselves apart, taking meals, without wine, in the room next door. Yet a familiarity has evolved since the first Zarif-Kerry meeting, last fall. Sherman was pleasantly surprised when an Iranian envoy congratulated her on becoming a first-time grandparent. She now knows about impending weddings in families of the Iranian mediators. In March, Zarif brought his wife, Maryam, and introduced her to Sherman and Ashton.

“Anytime one can understand that the person sitting across from you—besides being, perhaps, at times an adversary and at times a negotiator—is also a person is useful,” Sherman told me. “So we do call each other by our first names. We do know about each other’s families.” In between the monthly sessions, she said, they are often in contact by e-mail or telephone. “What happens now, which is useful, is when there is a concern it gets raised up pretty quickly, doesn’t have to wait for the next round,” she said. “We try to resolve it.”

The gaps are still huge. No progress was made in talks last week, all sides conceded. On Friday, the State Department’s deputy spokesperson, Marie Harf, told me, from Vienna, “It’s a tough moment, but we knew there would be tough moments.” Among many things, Iran has demanded the right to enrich uranium, with at least fifty thousand centrifuges, and it wants the sanctions lifted. The United States, among its many demands, wants to limit enrichment and to convert or close Iran’s nuclear sites, with intrusive inspections that will extend for years, even decades. Sherman compared finding creative compromises to solving a Rubik’s Cube. “This is not all linear—this is about a package,” she explained. “There are two objectives for this negotiation. One, that Iran cannot obtain a nuclear weapon. And, two, that the international community has the assurance it needs that any nuclear program Iran has is exclusively peaceful. There are many paths to that.” She added, “But no deal is better than a bad deal.”

Skeptics aren’t convinced. “It’s a game,” Gerecht, the former intelligence officer, said. “American officials are being sucker-punched by Mr. Zarif.”

The toughest critics are in Congress, which may have the final word if a deal requires revoking sanctions legislation. “In my view, the Iranians are negotiating in bad faith, as we have seen them do in the past,” Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, who chairs the Foreign Relations Committee, told the Senate in February. “Iran’s strategy, consistent with their past approaches that have brought them to a nuclear threshold state, is to use these negotiations to mothball its nuclear infrastructure program just long enough to undo the international sanctions regime.” Menendez co-sponsored a bill, with Republican Mark Kirk, of Illinois, that would introduce new sanctions in the midst of diplomacy to increase pressure on Iran. It ultimately had fifty-nine co-sponsors.

To persuade critics, Obama will have to insure that the breakout time for Iran to produce sufficient nuclear material for a single bomb is pushed back from two months to a year or more, Gary Samore, who served as the White House Coördinator for Arms Control and Weapons of Mass Destruction during Obama’s first term, said. Samore is now the president of United Against Nuclear Iran. The United States has to build in enough time to detect, and respond, should Tehran secretly weaponize its knowledge. Even then, he added, Iran could covertly build a new facility.

The politics of engagement are even more suspect, Samore said. He pointed out that Iran’s new President was the country’s national-security adviser for sixteen years, when Iran made the greatest progress in its nuclear program. “Rouhani—like Iran’s political élite—has bought into and pursued the creation of a nuclear option for twenty-five years. He’s not a ban-the-bomb kind of guy,” Samore said. “If you look at the history of Iran, betting on the reformers is not a good bet. Historically, they have not done well.”

In any case, Ayatollah Khamenei has the last word. Iran also has a deep state among intelligence and security forces that have steadily amassed political and economic power in the past quarter century, partly as payback for fighting the gruesome war with Iraq. Hard-liners do not want a deal, for fear of losing their political edge and, in turn, their economic perks, said Hamidreza Jalaeipour, whose six independent newspapers were shut down by the hard-line judiciary. “If this nuclear deal is made, there will be no place for those hard-liners,” he told me. “They know a deal will bring moderates to power.” Khamenei is also wary of any agreement involving the United States, for fear that it will trigger perestroika-like openings that ultimately unravel the Islamic Republic. The 2009 uprising was a close call.

I asked Zarif what role Khamenei is playing in Iran’s internal debate over nuclear diplomacy. “We give him as honest an opinion and as honest a description of what’s happening as possible,” he told me. “Sometimes he believes it is not necessary for him to intervene in every detail. And sometimes he has shown that he is prepared to spend a lot of time on very small details.

“It’s interesting if you look at the way the Supreme Leader operates,” he continued. “He tries to reflect what he sees as the consensus emerging within the political élite, as well as within the general society. Not the noise. He can differentiate. I mean, if he was going to be moved by the noise, I would have been dead a long time ago!”

The nuclear negotiations have already benefitted Iran. Since the interim deal, in November, Zarif has hosted delegations from Greece, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Britain, Ireland, Mexico, Austria, Poland, Singapore, and other countries. In November, France delayed the interim deal with new language at the eleventh hour, surprising the five other major powers and Iran. But France was also the first Western country to send a delegation, in February, of more than a hundred businesspeople—from energy, automobile, telecommunications, and engineering companies—to discuss future investment. Lady Ashton visited Tehran in March to talk about improving relations with the European Union. Other visits are booked.

None of these countries can legally do deals until sanctions are eased, and without jeopardizing business with the United States. But, as the Western diplomat told me, “Iran is one of the last gold mines on earth. Everyone wants to get back in here.”

Zarif is leaning as far out on a ledge as possible without falling, the diplomat explained. “Zarif faces serious limits. He is too brilliant for the system. He’s dealing with foreigners in English. The hard-liners spent their youth at the war front; Zarif never went to the front. He was studying in the United States. So he’s someone who will never be trusted one hundred per cent, even if he does have the ear of the Supreme Leader. Which I think he does.”

I asked Zarif what a nuclear deal might mean for the two countries in which he has divided his life. “The United States—as President Obama very rightly said—has tried all other options which were on the table or off the table,” he answered. “And the only option that’s left is to try to reach an understanding, which was probably the most sensible option to begin with. But there is a saying—that we diplomats always choose the right approach after we have tried all the wrong ones.” The new diplomacy, he said, is now “the only game in town. And I think, if we play it right, it will change the course of Iran’s relations with the West.”

The nuclear diplomacy has “broken the ice,” he said. “We have broken the vicious cycle of trying to hurt one another, which was the case for the past ten years.” But he also said that he did not see a future in which the two countries would again be “buddies,” pillars of each other’s policy. Iran is more likely to develop relations with Europe on issues of mutual concern. “In the longer perspective,” he said, he foresaw “probably managed differences with the United States, and the possibility for greater understanding.”

He stopped himself. “I gotta be careful,” he said. “I want to take one step at a time. I don’t want to predict a future that, in and of itself, becomes an impediment to achieving it.” ♦

Singing Amy Winehouse in Tehran

The New Yorker May 25, 2014

For decades, both before and after his 1979 revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini railed against “Westoxication”—the poisoning of Iran’s Islamic society by Western culture. The new theocracy banned everything from music and dancing to modern art. Tehran’s National Museum of Contemporary Art crated away Picassos, Pollocks, Warhols, and Mirós worth billions. Even chess, a game with local roots, was banned. In the early nineteen-eighties, I watched a customs official tear up an entire deck of playing cards, one at a time.

The Islamic Republic has been consumed ever since with its own clash of cultures. Themes of religion and revolution in art, theatre, cinema, and literature have increasingly struggled to retain an audience in a society that has grown demographically younger and more integrated into a globalizing world. The government has been forced, erratically, into easing restrictions. After Khomeini died, in 1989, Tehran hosted concerts again. In the late nineties, shortly after a Farsi translation of “Les Misérables” finished a six-month run, I saw a Molière farce.

Movies and plays still require government approval of their scripts to gain access to performance halls or equipment. Male and female film actors must never touch on screen. The culture clash was evident at the Cannes Film Festival this month. Leila Hatami, the star of “A Separation,” which won the 2012 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, was invited to be a juror. Iran’s deputy culture minister publicly rebuked her for un-Islamic behavior there, apparently because of her dress (a frumpy gray number that showed a bit of ankle) and what Variety called “a simple peck on the cheek” of Gilles Jacob, the retiring Cannes president. Also this month, six young Iranians were detained after they posted to YouTube a video of themselves dancing to Pharrell Williams’s “Happy.” They were released after apologizing on state television. The video’s director was reportedly imprisoned, and the six may still face formal charges—despite a tweet from President Hassan Rouhani’s quasi-official Twitter account vowing, “#Happiness is our people’s right. We shouldn’t be too hard on behaviors caused by joy.” (The President does not control Iran’s judiciary.)

Female singers have faced the toughest taboos. “Women’s voices should not be heard by men other than members of their own families,” Khomeini decreed. But when I was in Tehran this spring to work on a Profile of the nuclear negotiator Javad Zarif for The New Yorker, a woman finally sang in Iran—and Western pop songs, no less. To cheers and whistles in Tehran’s elegant opera house, Ghazal Shakeri belted out “Back to Black,” a provocative Amy Winehouse song. The lyrics had to be modified, but only a bit. Instead of “kept his dick with,” Shakeri sang “kept his lips with.”

The performance was one of a dozen Western numbers incorporated into “The Last Days of Esfand,” an Iranian musical about a female psychiatrist treating a troubled young criminal. The two leads, Shakeri and a man named Ashkan Khatibi, sang several duets, including Abba’s rousing “The Winner Takes It All,” a poignant version of “Autumn Leaves,” and a spirited “Those Were the Days, My Friend,” which includes lines about raising “a glass or two” and singing and dancing forever. They were accompanied by three female backup singers.

The staging, in Khomeini’s Islamic Republic, was as striking as the songs. During musical numbers, a rear screen displayed video montages. As the male lead crooned “Dance with Me,” the screen flashed images of the Beatles, Elvis (thin Elvis), Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra, Simon and Garfunkel, the Bee Gees, and Neil Diamond. The spoken banter included references to “Hotel California” and “Like a Rolling Stone.” The ringtone on the psychiatrist’s prop phone was the first few notes of “Smile.”

Shakeri is a former child star who abandoned acting for interior design. (Artistic fame can be a burden in Iran.) In 2011, she returned to film, in the movie “Facing Mirrors,” in which she played a traditional wife forced to drive a cab to help pay off the embezzling debts that sent her husband to prison. The plot centered on her helping a passenger, a pre-op female-to-male transsexual fleeing an arranged marriage. In 2012, the film won awards from the Paris Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, the San Francisco L.G.B.T. Film Festival, and the Seattle Transgender Film Festival, among others. Homosexuality is a crime in Iran, but the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance approved the “Facing Mirrors” script, Shakeri told me, because an Iranian had once appealed to Ayatollah Khomeini for permission to undergo gender-reassignment surgery. “The man said his body was male, but his soul was female,” Shakeri recalled. “Khomeini ruled that his soul was more important than his body.” The decision, in which Khomeini granted approval, is well known across the country.

For Shakeri, singing in public, especially Western pop, was riskier than starring in a film with transgender themes. “A year ago, you couldn’t do this show,” she told me backstage. “I couldn’t sing.”

Khatibi, the male lead, said it took eighteen months to get script clearance—and he didn’t submit the songs. That night, he wore tight jeans and a long ponytail, but Shakeri was dressed in the required modest Islamic costume, including a dark-red scarf and an oversized coat that bulked up her small frame. Officials who attended one performance instructed her not to sing quite so loud in the next one, she told me. Nevertheless, the show played a three-week run to packed audiences.

The arts are no longer mere propaganda; culture is less toxic. In cinema, satirists are even taking digs at religious tradition. During my last trip to Iran, in March, a comedy called “The Sensitive Layer” was in theatres. It plays off gender segregation and the local practice of burying people on top of one another, with a thick layer of earth in between. A husband becomes obsessed with the possible relationship in heaven between his deceased wife and the man buried above her. Reza Saeedipour, the managing director of the opera house, urged me to see it. “I like to go see it and laugh,” he said. “I like to laugh a lot.”

Iran’s art world has opened up, too. Some of the Picassos, Pollocks, Warhols, and Mirós—including pieces acquired by Iran’s last Empress, during the oil boom of the nineteen-seventies—have gone back on display. I visited an exhibit, arranged along the circular floors of the Museum of Contemporary Art, of the most noted Iranian artists from the Shah’s era. The government seems less ashamed—or less fearful—of the country’s dynastic past.

The biggest change, however, is in Tehran’s street art. For decades, buildings and billboards were plastered with anti-American graffiti and giant portraits of martyrs from the bloody war with Iraq in the nineteen-eighties, usually adorned with a tulip, the symbol of martyrdom. Today, the city is being transformed by whimsical murals in bold colors, painted on the sides of otherwise dreary high-rises. More than a hundred are the work of Mehdi Ghadyanloo and his team of young painters in the Blue Sky Painters Company. The murals have surreal themes: a flying human with giant butterfly wings, a line of people walking upside down across a ceiling, cars driving in the air above futuristic buildings, an apartment block that seems to fold like an accordion, a nature-trail illusion through the middle of a high-rise, and a train chugging through the sky. One apartment building was painted to resemble a six-story aquarium with giant fish.

Like scripts, Ghadyanloo’s urbanscapes require government approval. More than a hundred of his designs have been rejected. “They believe some of my murals make the city more visually polluted,” he said. “Some of my work is very crowded, with a lot of people.” Tehran teems with some eight million inhabitants, but the approved works are often striking for their visual loneliness—a single child holding balloons as he drifts in the sky, or a lone young man cycling down the side of building. A new work, “Silence,” seems like an aerial view of a small amphitheatre; a man sits alone on the top row, a second man walks away.

Ghadyanloo’s father was a farmer and his mother was a carpet weaver. He grew up in a world of colors, and describes himself as an aspiring Banksy. “I see surreal visions when I sleep,” he told me. “I translate my dreams onto walls.”

Could Iran finally be awakening from its revolutionary reverie?

Javad Zarif on Iran's Nuclear Negotiations

The New Yorker May 22, 2014

I first met Mohammad Javad Zarif, the Iranian foreign minister, in the nineteen-eighties, when he was a junior member of the Iranian delegation at the United Nations. This week’s issue of The New Yorker includes a Profile based on twenty-five years of conversations with him, including four in Tehran and New York since last September. Zarif is now the pivotal broker in nuclear talks between his government and six world powers—Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia, and the United States. After eight months of diplomacy, the serious drafting of terms for a long-term deal to insure that Iran does not acquire a nuclear weapon began last week, in Vienna. The deadline for reaching an agreement is July 20th.

A nuclear deal would almost certainly affect Iran’s political future. “If we can ascertain and show to our people that the West is ready to deal with Iran on the basis of mutual respect and mutual interests and equal footing, then it will have an impact on almost every aspect of Iran’s foreign policy behavior—and some aspects of Iran’s domestic policy,” Zarif said.

Iran and the six powers must address points of contention on virtually every aspect of a nuclear deal, from the future of suspect facilities to accounting for past programs, but Zarif has been noticeably upbeat about prospects for a breakthrough. I asked him how difficult it would be to reach an agreement. The red lines—particularly between Washington and Tehran—often seem insurmountable.

“It’s going to be both hard and easy,” he said. “Easy, because ostensibly we have a convergence of views on the objectives. We don’t want nuclear weapons, and they say the objective is to insure Iran does not have nuclear weapons. So, if that is the objective, in my view it’s already achieved. We just have to find mechanisms for agreeing on the process.”

But the details “may be cumbersome,” Zarif added. “More so because those who do not want to see an agreement, those who seek their interests in greater mistrust and conflict, are hard at work. And they do their best to prevent.” He presumably meant opponents in the United States and Israel, as well as in Iran. But he predicted that they were regrouping to prepare for what comes next if a deal is struck.

“Now they have had time to collect themselves and to come up with probably new tactics,” he said. “I still believe that they’ll lose. But they are going to make life a bit tougher for those who want to do something positive.”

* * *

For Iran, the singular theme in negotiations with the six major powers is respect. “Respect for Iran’s rights,” as Zarif put it, is a euphemism for the right to enrich uranium, a process that can be used both for peaceful nuclear energy and for weapons. Tehran believes that enrichment is necessary for building alternative energy sources. Within a generation, because of soaring domestic oil consumption, Iran could run out of oil for export—the country’s main source of revenue. Iran also wants to restore Persia’s historic standing in the annals of science, and it sees nuclear energy as crucial to modern development. It feels the West wants to block any such advancement.

“Nuclear talks are not about nuclear capability.” Zarif told me. “They are about Iranian integrity and dignity.” He went on, “If the other side understands the importance of dignity and integrity to the Iranian people, and grasps the fact that various Iranians—who may never have seen [facilities at] Natanz or Arak or Fordo—believe that dignity is not up for sale, that their technology and development is not up for sale … then they will be able to reach an understanding with us.”

* * *

Iran’s nuclear debate is technically the domain of the Supreme National Security Council, which advises Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. He will have the last word. But there is a smaller committee—including Iran’s new President, Hassan Rouhani—that has worked out specific terms for the nuclear talks.

“It’s a debate,” Zarif said of discussions within the Iranian government. “And debate is healthy, heated or otherwise. It’s a very, very serious subject and it has important implications, and that is why it is a difficult decision. And a lot of mistrust is there, of the West. So every step is taken, I hope, with a lot of prudence, and consideration.”

When I was in Tehran in March, I asked Zarif how much a nuclear deal depended on him. “I don’t know,” he said. An aide, sitting nearby, chimed in quickly, “Ninety per cent! The outcome depends ninety per cent on him.”

“I hope that’s not true,” Zarif said.

* * *

President Rouhani is a striking change from his predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, even in Iran’s controlled political environment—particularly when it comes to foreign policy.

“We have a different perspective of the world,” Zarif said of the stance that he and Rouhani have taken. “We don’t necessarily see the world in terms of black and white. We believe there is the possibility for engagement and interaction. We believe we do not necessarily need to agree with somebody to be able to talk to them or to engage with them or to reach an understanding.”

But, he went on, “at the end of the day, we are actually much more self-confident. So we believe we can negotiate and achieve our goals, because we have the ability to make our point logically and to convince our negotiating partners that they can have a deal with us.”

Even so, there is nothing to prevent the Islamic Republic from returning to hard-line positions. “The electorate can send us back home,” he said. “I retired at the early age of forty-seven”—when Ahmadinejad squeezed him out of the Foreign Service—“so I can retire again. And I think people have every right to make that choice.”

Zarif ascribed Ahmadinejad’s election as President, in 2005, to the West’s failure to respond to diplomatic outreach during the reform period under his predecessor, Mohammad Khatami. “Iran adopted an open, engaging policy,” Zarif said. But the West’s reaction was “based on illusions—and, unfortunately, a bunch of people sitting in the White House who had extremely limited knowledge and grasp of world realities. The reaction to this openness was arrogant, wishful, and delusional. And the Iranian people believed that their dignity had been compromised, that the openness of our administration had been confronted with hostility and excessive demands. So they elected someone diametrically opposed to that approach.”

A sense of victimization permeates Iranian thinking. “Every statement that comes out of Washington that is not respectful and is trying to intimidate the Iranian people—is trying to put pressure on the Iranian people—strikes that very, very sensitive chord in the Iranian psyche, and they immediately react,” Zarif said.

I mentioned that the anti-American rhetoric—notably, things I’d heard while attending a Friday-prayers service—was more provocative than anything said by Americans. From the women’s section, I heard shouts of “Death to America” three times. I asked Zarif why Iranians are not sensitive to the things that they want Americans to be sensitive about.

“We’re talking about something done by the public versus something by the President of the United States,” Zarif said, a reference to statements, made by both Obama and George W. Bush, that military strikes against Iran remain an option. “The people of Iran respond to intimidation and pressure negatively; almost they are allergic to it… . It produces resentment among the Iranian people, and the chanting that you see in the Friday prayers.”

He went on, “I assure you, these people are the same people who went out of their way after 9/11 presenting their condolences to the Americans, even walking in the streets with candles, commemorating and expressing their sympathy and unity of purpose, actually, with the Americans. And, in two consecutive weeks, there was no slogan [at Friday Prayers]. But what changed it? Statements by Don Rumsfeld and Condi Rice humiliating the Iranian people.”

America should have learned better over the past thirty-five years, Zarif said. Iranians “respond very positively to respect. Try it. It won’t kill you.”

Zarif told me, “There are two futures. One future will be greater conflict, greater tension, greater mistrust—basically, more of the same as we had in the past. But more of the same may not be easily manageable. And it may even get worse, and more dangerous. So that’s one option, which I hope will not be before us.”

I asked him if that outcome included another Middle East war. The United States and Israel have both warned that if diplomacy fails the military option remains on the table.

“I’m not that worried about war,” Zarif said. “Insecurity is the word I would use—insecurity and tension and conflict. I thought civilized people had abandoned wars.” But then he added, “Sometimes people don’t make rational decisions.”

The second, more hopeful future, he said, is one in which, despite differences, the world powers “can work together on serious issues of mutual concern and try to address them. And these issues include problems of instability, extremism, and terrorism in the Middle East and Afghanistan, and a whole range of other possibilities, including Iran being a reliable source of energy for Europe.”

* * *

For decades, Iran was one of two pillars of American foreign policy in the Middle East. Israel was the other. I asked Zarif if the United States and Iran had any common interests thirty-five years after their diplomatic split.

“Did I say there were common interests?” Zarif, who is known for his wry humor, replied. “Iran has a national-security interest in nonproliferation, so, if the United States is interested in nonproliferation, that is one issue. Iran has a national-security interest in freedom of navigation in the Persian Gulf. We have a national-security interest in stability in this region. We have a national-security interest in fighting terrorism in Afghanistan, instability in Afghanistan.” He continued, “We have a national-security interest in stability and in maintaining stable governments in the region. We have a national-security interest in in putting an end to the bloodshed in Syria.” In sum, he said, “If I take what the United States says at face value, there should be convergence.”

Iran Still Haunted By Chemical Weapons Attacks

TIME   January 20, 2014

Hassan Hassani Sa’di has been dying from chemical weapons for almost 30 years. The Iranian still remembers the moment he realized Iraqi warplanes were dropping more than regular bombs. “I knew,” he says, “because of the smell of garlic.” It was the pungent and telltale aroma of mustard gas.

Death from mustard gas is gruesome; so is survival. It hideously disfigures skin, sears lungs and mucus membranes, and often blinds. Unlike nerve gas, there’s no antidote. Sa’di, then an 18-year-old fighting in the Middle East’s grisliest modern war — the 8-year conflict between Iran and Iraq — survived the Iraqi attack on the strategic Fao Peninsula in 1985. Within hours, his body was badly blistered, and he had gone blind. “The last thing I remember is vomiting green,” he says, during an interview at the Tehran Peace Museum, a facility dedicated to education and the documentation of weapons of mass destruction.

Iran is today the world’s largest laboratory for the study of the effects of chemical weapons, in part because of the sheer numbers of Iranian victims, but also because of a little-studied phenomenon called low-dose exposure. In 1991, a declassified CIA report estimated that Iran suffered more than 50,000 casualties from Iraq’s repeated use of nerve agents and toxic gases in the 1980s. Mustard gas — in dusty, liquid and vapor forms — was used the most during the war. It was packed into bombs and artillery shells, then fired at frontlines and beyond, including at hospitals.

Years after the war, however, Iranian doctors noticed that respiratory diseases with unusual side-symptoms — corneal disintegration, rotting teeth and dementia, a combination synonymous with mustard gas — had started killing off veterans who had not always been on the frontlines. Civilians were also dying.

So in 2000, the government launched a media campaign urging people who had been in certain areas during the war to report for check-ups. The ads didn’t specify why.

The troubling pattern was soon diagnosed as secondary contamination to mustard gas. “We may only have seen the tip of the iceberg. We may not yet have seen the majority of victims,” Dr. Farhad Hashemnezhad told me in 2002. “At least 20 percent of the current patients are civilians who didn’t think they were close enough to be exposed.”

Numbers have since soared from the lingering, and unanticipated, effects of mustard gas. Dr. Shahriar Khateri, Iran’s leading expert on chemical weapons victims, now says 70,000 are registered, many from low-dose exposure that is now killing them.

“We now know that the latency period can be 40 years,” says Khateri, who is unsure of his own fate. Khateri volunteered to fight at age 15 after his brother was killed in the war. He was gassed in 1987 during the battle for southern port of Khorramshahr. After the war, he went to medical school and co-founded the Society for Chemical Weapons Victims Support.

Iranian doctors say the final toll of Iraq’s chemical weapons could ultimately rival the 90,000 who died from toxic gases in World War I.

In the meantime, Iran has struggled to tend to victims. Sa’di has had 8 surgeries to transplant or repair both corneas, but still has to hold his watch to his face, and sunlight is painful. He takes multiple medications to help breathe, but has a hacking cough. He does not work — the state gives him disability allowance — although he volunteers as an occasional docent at the Tehran Peace Museum to tell his story.

In Tehran, chemical weapons victims often end up at Sasan Hospital, a grim facility that had been the American Hospital of Tehran before the 1979 revolution. Abolfazl Afazali is one of 22 patients struggling for life at Sasan when I visit in December. “One of my wishes,” he says, “is to be able to take a deep breath.”

U.S. sanctions have complicated treatment, Iranian doctors say. Humanitarian goods are technically exempt, but international banks have often been unwilling to conduct financial transactions with Iran, even when legal, for fear of repercussions.

Ahmad Zangiabadi represented Iranian victims at the 2013 conference of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which won the Nobel Peace Prize last year. He is no longer mobile, however. He sleeps sitting upright on the floor of his small apartment because the exertion of lying down and getting up is too much for his lungs. He is kept alive on an Airsep New Life Alert oxygen machine, which pushes oxygen into his lungs and makes a thudding sound with every breath. But he has had increasing trouble getting inhalers made by Spiriva and Glaxo Smith Kline. “Life has become a prison the past four months,” he says.

The lingering impact of a war that ended in a 1988 truce, at a cost of an estimated 1 million Iranian and Iraqi casualties, still defines Iran’s worldview. It has been as important as economic sanctions in pushing Tehran to the negotiating table with the world’s six major powers on its nuclear program. As a result of the war, Iran suffers from “strategic loneliness,” explained Nasser Hadian, a University of Tehran political scientist.

The primary lesson learned, he said, was that Iran had no allies even when it was a victim of weapons banned since World War I by international norms.Tehran felt a sense of isolation and betrayal after the United Nations verified Iraq’s repeated use chemical weapons, but the outside world still almost unanimously sided with Saddam Hussein. Iran’s neighbors aided him. Europeans and Russians sold him arms.

The United States was complicit too. Washington provided Baghdad with intelligence on Iran’s equipment and troops strengths to help Iraq retake the Fao Peninsula in 1988. Iraq made widespread use of chemical weapons to win it back.

The final tally of the war may still not be known for years, Khateri says. “Most of the men exposed to chemical weapons were not registered casualties at the time,” he says. “So almost every day there are new cases — 30 years after the war.”

Exclusive: Iran's Foreign Minister Says New Sanctions Would Kill Nuclear Deal

TIME  December 9, 2013

In a wide-ranging interview with TIME in Tehran on Dec. 7, Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif spoke to writer and Iran expert Robin Wright about how the Geneva nuclear deal came together, how the government has to appeal to Iran’s own parliament not to undermine the interim pact, and how any new sanctions passed by the United  States Congress would kill the deal. The agreement, reached between Iran and six world powers in November, calls for a freeze on parts of Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for an easing of sanctions. It is meant to pave the way for a final settlement between Iran and the international community on Iran’s nuclear program. Iran says the program is for civilian purposes only; world powers fear that it has a military component. Speaking in the ornate Foreign Ministry building, Zarif also indicated that Iran might not be wedded to Syria’s President Bashar Assad, a long-time ally, and he said that Iran hoped for a “duly monitored” democratic election in Syria. Iran’s most high-profile cabinet official warned that the deepening sectarianism playing out in Syria does not recognize borders and has implications “on the streets of Europe and America.”

Q: What are biggest differences between Iran and the six major powers in making a permanent agreement? The biggest issues and obstacles?

There are a number of issues. One is the removal of all sanctions – both U.N. Security Council sanctions as well as national and multilateral sanctions outside the U.N. – and second is the issue of Iran having an enrichment program.

These are the two elements of the final deal that are going to be there. How we shape the final deal to include all these elements will be a matter for discussion. The two other members, Russia and China, may also have concerns but they are more confident about the peaceful nature of our nuclear program.

Q: But what are the obstacles then?

A: Why do we even need Arak? Because we need to produce radio isotopes for medical purposes and even Arak alone is not enough for us. This was the technology that was available to us. Some people believe that we chose this technology because it provided other options. They’re badly mistaken.

You see you have to look at Iran’s nuclear program from the perspective of denial, the fact that Iran was denied access to technology. And we used or we tried to get access to whatever was available to us and this technology was available to us. Other technologies were not. And we made a lot investment both in terms of human capital as well as in terms of material resources and we have reached almost the end game of getting this research reactor into actual operation. So it’s too late in the game for somebody to come and tell us that we have concerns that cannot be addressed. We have to find solutions. We believe there are scientific solutions for this and we are open to discussing them but that will be one of the more difficult issues.

Q: Are you willing to accept a level of enrichment that is only for facilities that Iran has constructed?

A:.We are going to accept measures that would ensure that our program will remain exclusively peaceful but the rest will have to be decided in the negotiations in good faith. We have no intention of producing weapons or fissile material programs. We do not consider that to be in our interests or within our security doctrine.

Q: What are the prospects that Iran will be part of the Geneva talks on Syria?

A: If Iran is invited without preconditions Iran will be a part of the talks. I think people will decide to invite Iran if they are interested in having a helpful hand in finding a resolution to the Syrian tragedy and they will decide not to invite Iran to their own detriment. Iran believes that what is happening in Syria can have a huge impact on the future of our region and the future beyond the region. Because we believe that if the sectarian divide that some people are trying to fan in Syria becomes a major issue it will not recognize any boundaries. It will go beyond the boundaries of Syria. It will go beyond the boundaries of this region. You will find implications of this on the streets of Europe and America.

Q: Did you or any other Iranian diplomats discuss Iran’s position on Syria with American diplomats?

A: No, we didn’t except for a very, very brief sort of reference en passé in my first meeting with John Kerry.

Q: Do you think it’s possible that the many different sides of the Syrian conflict and the outside parties to that conflict can find common ground?

A: It’s up to the Syrians to decide; we can only help. We can only facilitate. And I think Iran will not be an impediment to a political settlement in Syria. We have every interest in helping the process in a peaceful direction. We are satisfied, totally satisfied, convinced that there is no military solution in Syria and that there is a need to find a political solution in Syria. If you want to prevent a void, the types of consequences that we are talking about, I mean if you want to avoid extremism in this region, if you want to prevent a Syria becoming a breeding ground for extremists who will use Syria basically as a staging ground to attack other countries – be it Lebanon, be it Iraq, be it Jordan,  Saudi Arabia, even Turkey – these countries are going to be susceptible to a wave of extremism that will find its origins in Syria and the continuation of this tragedy in Syria can only provide the best breeding ground for extremists who use this basically as a justification, as a recruiting climate in order to wage the same type of activity in other parts of this region.

Q: Is Iran going to stick at the side of Bashar Assad?

A: We will stick to the side of stability and resolution to Syria. But at the end of the day, we are not going to decide who will rule Syria. It should be the Syrian people to decide. We’re proposing that we should not give ourselves the role that the Syrian people should play.

Q: We’re hearing that you’re still facing tough opposition in the Gulf and that Saudi Arabia doesn’t even want to see you yet.

A: I was well received by every country in the Persian Gulf that I visited [on a recent trip]. I had extremely positive discussions both on regional issues, the fact that all of them welcomed the  Geneva agreement, the fact that all of them considered that as a positive development for security and cooperation in our region, the fact that everyone expected a new chapter in relations between Iran and countries on the southern shore of the Persian Gulf. And that was very encouraging for me.

As for Saudi Arabia, I indicated to them that I was prepared to go to Saudi Arabia. Meetings were arranged. But there was a problem with the meetings. We could not arrange all of the meetings that should have been arranged. We decided to go at a time that was more convenient. It doesn’t mean a political problem between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Now we have differences. In every family you have differences of views, even between brothers and sisters. And we all have our differences. There are issues on which we have different opinions, different approaches, different strategies, different tactics. It wasn’t that they were not prepared to see me.                 

Q: But you did mention the deepening sectarian gap in the region personified by the differences between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

A: We both have members of both sects among our population and it’s in our interest to avoid this, to have a cordial and brotherly relations between various Islamic sects. So for Iran and Saudi Arabia, it is important and very significant to reach a common understanding on how to avoid this and not to personify such a sectarian difference.

Q: What opposition are you facing at home to the Geneva deal? And what are you doing about it?

A: The most opposition here emanates from the lack of trust because we do not have a past on which we can build. It’s a psychological barrier to interaction that we need to overcome. The fundamental reason for opposition: they believe the West and particularly the United States are not sincere, are not interested about reaching an agreement. They believe that they will try to use the mechanism of negotiations in order to derail the process, in order to find new excuses. And some of the statements out of Washington give them every reason to be concerned. Now we know that Washington is catering to various constituencies and is trying to address these various constituencies. We read their statements in the light of their domestic constituency process. But not everybody in Iran does that. We believe that the U.S. government should stick to its words, should remain committed to what it stated in Geneva, both on the paper as well as in the discussions leading to the plan of action.

Q: After all these negotiations, do you see the prospect for working together with the United States on other subjects, including Afghanistan.

A: We have to wait and see whether the behavior that will be exhibited in the course of negotiations and implementation of our agreements on the nuclear issue creates the necessary confidence for us to move to other areas.

Q: Is there anything different now between Iran and the United States after the talks in Geneva after the process that’s been launched?

A: In terms of using these talks to foster confidence, I don’t think we have been very successful in that process. Because the talks have been followed by public statements that have not differed that significantly from statements that used to be made before the talks.  Basically in this day and age, you don’t have secret negotiations, everything is done is out in the open. You cannot pick and choose your audience. And that is one of the beauties of globalization and one of the hazards of globalization whichever way you want to say it. When Secretary Kerry talks to the U.S. Congress, the most conservative constituencies in Iran also hear him andinterpret his remarks. So it’s important for everyone to be careful what they say to their constituencies because others are listening and others are drawing their own conclusions.

Q: What happens if Congress imposes new sanctions, even if they don’t go into effect for six months?

A: The entire deal is dead. We do not like to negotiate under duress. And if Congress adopts sanctions, it shows lack of seriousness and lack of a desire to achieve a resolution on the part of the United States. I know the domestic complications and various issues inside the United States, but for me that is no justification. I have a parliament. My parliament can also adopt various legislation that can go into effect if negotiations fail. But if we start doing that, I don’t think that we will be getting anywhere. Now we have tried to ask our members of parliament to avoid that. We may not succeed. The U.S. government may not succeed. If we don’t try, then we can’t expect the other side to accept that we are serious about the process. 

Q: What can you tell us about the back channel that began last March?

A: I can tell you that we started discussing this issue on the sidelines of the P5+1 with various countries but with all the countries that were involved we have normal diplomatic relations. It may become more interesting when it involves the United States. That started a long time ago – probably three years ago. Our nuclear negotiator at that time, Dr. [Saeed] Jalili, met with [Undersecretary of State] Bill Burns on the sidelines of Geneva. And since then, there have been back and forth discussions between Iran and the U.S. inside and on the sidelines of P5+1. So that has taken place and I think with some positive outcome.

Q: Did it make possible, did it facilitate Geneva?

A: I think had it not been for bilateral discussions between Iran and various members of P5+1 we would not have had a positive outcome. Formal meetings of Iran plus six countries and [Senior E.U. foreign policy official] Cathy Ashton usually remain very formal. If you want to reach agreement you need to talk to all of these individually as well as collectively. So we did talk to all members of the P5+1 individually. But as it was not a big deal for us to talk to France or Russia or even the U.K. For the U.S., it was a different issue. And our discussions with the U.S. on the sidelines of P5+1 became a story in themselves.

Q: How alive is that channel now?

A:When my colleagues go to Vienna, probably they’ll have side discussions with the U.S. and that’s a very important channel. The U.S. is probably the most important player because it has the largest amount of sanctions against Iran, most of them or all of them illegal in our view. But nevertheless it has a lot of sanctions. It imposes a lot of sanctions on various countries that do business with Iran and that is why it has to do the most. In the resolution, it had a lot to do in the creation of the trouble so it has a lot to do in the resolution of the trouble. So that requires Iran and the U.S. to have a lot of discussions on the sides.

Q: Would you have had Geneva without that back channel with the United States?

A: Well, hypothetical questions: we would not have been able to reach an agreement without having discussed all various issues on the sidelines of P5+1 with various members, particularly the United States.

TIME

THE IRAN DEAL: 

The significance of the accord goes far beyond the nuclear issue.

In 1981, I stood at the foot of the plane that flew the 52 Americans held hostage 444 days in Iran to freedom in Algiers. They were all pasty-faced and captive-weary as they disembarked into the cold January night. It was after midnight. Tehran had delayed their departure until after Jimmy Carter was out of office, one final slap at the president who had propped up the last shah until the end and later welcomed him into the United States.

Weeks of tough negotiations in Algiers to free the hostages had been complicated because Iranians and Americans did not meet face-to-face. They mediated (in three languages) through the Algerians.

So the recent talks in Geneva between Iran and the world’s six major powers produced far more than a long-elusive deal to restrict Iran’s nuclear program. The new diplomacy also produced real human contact. U.S. and Iranian diplomats have spent more time together over the past three months than in the entire three decades since the American Embassy takeover. They are learning how to talk to each other all over again—often in the same language. Geneva laid the cornerstone to defuse 34 years of both overt and covert confrontation over a host of other issues too. The interaction may even help end the Iran jinx that has tainted or tormented all six American presidents since the 1979 revolution.

The hostage crisis cost Jimmy Carter a second term. The Reagan administration was shamed by clumsy secret diplomacy during the Iran-Contra scandal, which was initiated to free a new set of American hostages in Beirut but which ended up with the indictment or dismissal of top White House officials. The first Bush administration’s stab at Arab-Israeli diplomacy, centered on the 1991 Madrid peace conference, was matched by deepening ties between Iran and Palestinian rejectionists.

The Clinton administration considered military retaliation against Iran after the 1996 attack on a U.S. Air Force facility in Khobar, Saudi Arabia killed 19 Americans and injured another 350. A Shiite group with Iran ties was suspected. The second Bush administration’s “axis of evil” language sabotaged collaboration in Afghanistan after the Taliban’s ouster in 2001, while the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions inadvertently strengthened Tehran’s hand by toppling its two biggest regional rivals.

In contrast, Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif were photographed laughing together across the negotiating table in Geneva. In the wee hours of November 24, they shook hands—more than just politely—after signing an agreement opening the way for six months of even more intensive contact. No one noted that Kerry wore a (bright red) tie, but Zarif didn’t, in deference to the revolutionary dress code banning ties as symbols of Western influence—the kind of colorful anecdote once trotted out to underscore deep differences.

Debate will rage from Capitol Hill to the Persian Gulf over specifics of the interim deal. Many both at home and abroad are dissatisfied. Some may try to scuttle it. The volume will almost certainly go up as diplomacy intensifies.

But the reality is that Iran’s nuclear program is now too advanced to either bomb or sanction totally out of business. A deal should have happened a decade ago when Iran had less than 200 centrifuges to enrich uranium, the fuel for both peaceful nuclear energy and the world’s deadliest weapon. Now it has near 19,000. Both sides were too stubborn back then.

The conventional wisdom claims Iran came to the negotiating table under pressure from unparalleled economic sanctions. True. But the unacknowledged truth is that the outside world also went into diplomacy under pressure from Iran’s growing capabilities. Otherwise, the world’s six major powers could have just kept squeezing the Islamic Republic. Tehran also now has nuclear knowledge that can’t be bombed out of existence.

So, ultimately, even a military strike would require diplomacy to prevent Tehran from rebuilding. The core issue is as much Iran’s long-term calculations as its capabilities.

Diplomacy is not only about preventing war. It’s also about healing. President Nixon’s diplomacy ended 30 years of deadly tensions with China, which included Beijing’s arming, aiding and sending troops to North Vietnam. President Clinton resumed relations with a reunited Vietnam 20 years after the United States lost more than 58,000 lives in a war to keep the Communists from consuming the south.

The sprawling American Embassy compound in Tehran is not likely to reopen anytime soon. But in pushing for a nuclear deal, Geneva started the long and painful healing that could eventually alter Tehran’s calculations—not only about its nuclear program.

Charlie Rose Show

       A conversation on how the Syrian and Iraq wars are merging, how alliances are fraying, and what it means for both the Middle East and the outside world. Appearing with Dexter Filkins of The New Yorker, David Ignatius of The Washington Post and Foud Ajami of Stanford University.