The Iran dream

By: Jacob Levin Several days ago, I had a conversation with the friend of a friend about politics within Iran. This person, an Iranian student studying in the U.S., was explaining what he thought to be the citizenry’s majority view of president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the leaders above him. He explained that rule in Iran was often harsh, and that a lot of Iranians actually liked and respected Bush for dealing with Saddam Hussein. Many Iranians, he said, wished Bush would help them get free of Ahmadinejad.

It sounds like an ad for hawk politics, but this Iranian student identified strongly with the Republican party and wished for a more interventionist role of the U.S. In a bizarre position, I tried to console him, since war with Iran, for good or for bad, doesn’t seem a realistic possibility. I said that there’s a relationship between economic success and demand for personal liberty, and spoke of the normalizing influence of stable nearby states, but all of it seemed to fall flat. The core of what he emphasized was that Iranians wish for the sort of freedom that America stands for, but they may never get it.

As an American, this is something you rarely hear. After the Iraq War turned sour in the public eye, I more or less resigned myself to the fact that our international image would suffer and that our own citizens were growing weary. Indeed, when one speaks of the government in any capacity, to any person, the default position seems to be annoyance. It’s considered polite to bleakly, yet noncommittally, reflect that we have more or less lost our way. To say anything else reeks of blind optimism and invites our suspicion that the speaker does not get his or her news sources from reputable journals of opinion.

It’s all the rage to speak of America’s decline. The credit crunch and a military spread thin cause despair in many people who are used to a nation marked both by success in absolute terms and in terms of growth, and people who when confronted with anything less immediately proclaim that the sky is about to fall.

But we’ve been getting distracted. And I like to think that what made America successful in the years after WWII wasn’t an arbitrary combination of factors but rather the result of our identity. Beyond any other country we based ourselves on the principle of personal liberty. It made us successful — the truth is that nothing creates greater wealth than a free society — but that isn’t the point. What makes America great isn’t its economic and military success, but rather the ideas that allowed these things to form. And even when we can’t brag about the growth of our economy or our unblemished record of conflict, hearing this Iranian speak about how much he appreciated the freedom he had here made all those things seem irrelevant. As long as we stand for freedom in a world increasingly marked by its suppression, Americans will have plenty to be optimistic about.