In Iran, presidential hopefuls talk of restoring relations with U.S.

Times Leader:

Confetti littered a street throbbing with dance music. It was 10 p.m., and humid young men and women were packed together, shouting, dancing and wandering in unbridled celebration of a victory by the Iranian national soccer team.

Very little of that scene last week was lawful in the Islamic Republic of Iran. But it's campaign season here, and candidates are aiming to please. Even the campaign office for the 70-year-old Muslim cleric and presidential front-runner, Hashemi Rafsanjani, lofted a disco ball above the road and teenage boys break-danced in its rainbow swirls of light.

"Disco Hashemi forever!" a young woman cried from the crowd of spectators.
A generation after Iran's Islamic Revolution enshrined the United States as the "Great Satan," some top Iranian politicians have concluded that their best strategy for Friday's presidential election is not vilifying the West but embracing it. In speeches, posters and even Web logs, would-be presidents of Iran are jockeying not over who can speed up development of nuclear technology but who might restore relations with the United States.

"They know the will and the wishes of the people and they want to make a breakthrough with the United States," said former diplomat Davoud Hermidas Bavand, a professor of international law at Tehran University.

The prospect of restoring a quarter-century of broken ties contrasts sharply with the mounting tension between the United States and Iran over Tehran's nuclear efforts, which the U.S. suspects could be for military use. But the issue of normalizing relations with the United States highlights the widening gap between a young, reform-hungry population and Iran's regime.

Beyond the diplomatic wrangling, a large if uncertain number of Iranians say they would rather live with the United States than struggle against it.

Iranians routinely say they have a national right to develop nuclear technology. But when asked in interviews to make a choice between nuclear power and an economic and political relationship with the United States, many pick the latter.

"In the history of U.S. and Iranian relations, we once had a strong relationship. Iranian businessmen have done very well there," said Hussein Mohammadi, 44, a telecom worker. "The biggest mistake was saying, `Down with America, Down with America."

The Islamic Republic has sought quietly for several years to soften its image, buffing away the impression left by episodes such as the 1979 seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Ordinary Iranians have long had a softer stance toward the West than their leaders; after the Sept. 11 attacks, Iranians held a spontaneous candlelight vigil in Tehran.

The difference today is that some aspiring leaders are changing their rhetoric as well.

With nearly two-thirds of the country's population born after the 1979 revolution, there is growing pressure for change. For many young Iranians, their financial and practical longing to join the world trumps their ideological conviction to stay isolated from it.

The old murals across Tehran denouncing the United States - renderings of the U.S. flag with skulls where stars should be - have all but disappeared, replaced with Calvin Klein ads and salutes to Shiite Muslim icons or Palestinian suicide bombers. Preachers still condemn America during their Friday sermons. But step away from the mosques and it's harder to find that sentiment. It is easier to dig up pirated DVDs of the last season of "Friends." READ MORE

"The United States has interfered in some of Iran's internal affairs, but the hostility toward the U.S. government and people is not very deep and it could improve," said teacher Hassan Rajab, 39, who drove overnight from the western city of Hamadan to visit the sprawling shrine to the late revolutionary icon Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

But talk of warming relations with the United States still riles conservative pillars of Iran's leadership. Most importantly, the West apparently holds no appeal to the nation's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the appointed chief of state who oversees the president and has final say on state policy. In a televised address last month, Khamenei, whom Khomeini chose as his successor, said, "All the crimes committed during (the last 150 years) are a product of the Western experience."

That message is virtually unchanged from the 26-year-old revolutionary pledge to rid Iran of "Westoxication." Whether the next president would have the ability to challenge that position is uncertain as long as the supreme leader and powerful clerics hold veto power over elected officials.

"We have a clash with the United States which is in our ideology," said a prominent conservative editor, Hossein Shariatmadari, whose views closely reflect those of top clerics. "Making a relationship with the U.S. is not in the power of the president."

But by any measure, the presidential candidates evidently have calculated that for today's most vital voters, moderation is the new black.

Iran needs "to think global, since globalization is a reality and not a foreign-made (concept)," Rafsanjani, a political veteran who served as president from 1989 to 1997, told state television last week. "Iran needs a new form of communication with the world."

Rafsanjani's campaign also is broaching the delicate subject of reducing religion's influence on private lives.

"We don't say, `Get religion out of life,'" said Mehdi Hashemi Rafsanjani, the Western-dressed son of and spokesman for the former president. "But (people today) don't want a hard Islam. They want a soft Islam. ... The first thing (for government) is it must not go into private lives."

That is strange talk in a theocracy. And many voters are unconvinced that the front-runner means it any more than it takes to get elected. The elder Rafsanjani is a polarizing figure, a wily insider who many people doubt would really shake a system that has given him so much.

Rafsanjani says he wants relations with the United States but that he won't take the first step until the U.S. unfreezes more than $11 billion in Iranian assets. Privately, his aides say he welcomed the U.S. decision last month to drop its opposition to Iran's membership in the World Trade Organization. Steps like that, they said, boost an Iranian president's credibility to broach at home the sensitive subject of U.S. ties.

Opinion polls suggest Rafsanjani faces a modest challenge from former pilot and police chief Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf , who has papered the capital with billboards of himself in slick Western suits or of scenes of fashionable kids at a soccer match.

The next-strongest contender in the field of eight is the most liberal candidate, a former minister of science, research and technology named Mostafa Moin.

Going one more than Rafsanjani, Moin has said Iran's "ongoing hostility towards the U.S. does not serve (Iran's) national interest," adding that if elected, he would change Iran's stance.

For all the talk of nuclear technology or the standoff with America, on the narrow streets of conservative southern Tehran those debates can feel like a distant drama to those with more mundane concerns, such as unemployment and rising inflation.

"We don't have any problem with the American people," said 42-year-old merchant Bahman Molla-Reza, stopping by his neighborhood mosque for the evening prayer. "But if we normalize with them, maybe their problems will be solved. But our problems won't be solved."