How to Promote People Power In Iran
by Stanley A. Weiss

GSTAAD, Switzerland -- I realized that America was missing the main event in Iran when I saw the mullah hailing a taxi. When I had met him days earlier, he wore the unmistakable uniform of the clerics who rule the Islamic Republic. But there on a busy Tehran street he blended with the masses. No turban, no flowing robe. I asked him why. "Because," he answered, "no cab driver would pick me up."

The pivotal battle in Iran is not between "good" and "bad" mullahs. It is between the mullahs and the people. A proverb says: "Do not step on Persian carpets or mullahs, for they will increase in value." Iran's rulers must satisfy both its Persian and its Islamic cultures. But the shah stepped all over the mullahs, which led to the Islamic revolution of 1979. Since then the mullahs have been stepping all over the carpets.

Today's Iranians want a modern, moderate Islamic society which preserves the country's Persian identity.

How best can the outside world encourage those Iranians who want to moderate their society and modernize their economy? A few suggestions:

Don't waste time favoring the reformers. The Battle of the Mullahs is a sideshow. A grassroots reform movement created President Mohammed Khatami, not the other way around. He has a mandate but no power.

It seems that the indecisive struggles of the past five years will continue so long as power - the courts, the Revolutionary Guards, the state radio and television, the Islamic business conglomerates - rests with the "supreme leader," Ayatollah Sayed Ali Khamenei. Only Iranian people power, not Washington, can change that.

Don't play into the hands of the extremists. Confrontation with the Great Satan is all the tired revolutionaries have left. Every time the reformers and the White House start talking about talking, the old guard stirs things up (arresting reformist parliamentarians) to provoke Washington ("axis of evil") and whip Iranians into another anti-American frenzy (the recent state-sponsored demonstrations were the biggest since the revolution).

These are desperate old men taking desperate measures, the last gasps of their dying regime. Engage the real force in Iranian politics. The technocrat-pragmatists and clerics from the upper social classes have been keen to direct the government away from an all-consuming commitment to Islam and toward Iran's national interests, including deeper ties with the West. They are allied to Iran's class of bazaari merchants, with their strong entrepreneurial spirit.

Chief in this camp is Hashemi Rafsanjani, heir to a pistachio family fortune, a former president (1989-1997) and now head of the powerful Expediency Council, which resolves disputes between competing branches of government. The West could do business with the likes of Rafsanjani, who keeps his finger to the wind and has shown an ability to be all things to all people.

Tehran legend holds that he was riding with the president and the prime minister when they came to a junction in the road and the driver asked which way to turn. The president said "right" and the prime minister said "left." Said Rafsanjani, "Signal left but go right."

He has suggested that Tehran and Washington will one day bridge their differences. Nixon opened the door to Red China. Reagan negotiated with the Evil Empire. Bush should reach out to the Islamic Republic. Unleash Ronald Reagan's "forward strategy for freedom." Reagan recognized that trading with the enemy could help tear down walls and unravel totalitarian regimes from within. Bush recognizes that trade "reinforces the habits of liberty that sustain democracy."

If contact and commerce are the thin end of the democratic wedge in China, then why not in Iran? Why veto Iran's application to join the WTO, which the United States did again last month? Secretary of State Colin Powell says it is because "we can talk to China - we have ways of dealing with China in a sensible way; with Iran, no."

Of course, you can't really talk to a nation when you are busy damning it as evil. Instead of tirades, try trade.

The ayatollahs love Washington's trade embargo, which aids and abets their increasingly vulnerable grip on economic power. They have repeatedly shot down reform bills that would have encouraged foreign investment.

A million youngsters join the labor force each year looking for jobs that don't exist. Greater U.S. investment and trade would transform one of the mullahs' main constituencies, the bazaari merchants, into a powerful influence for greater openness and freedom. Winston Churchill once remarked that Americans always do the right thing, after they've tried everything else. Loosening the embargo three years ago to allow import of Iranian caviar, pistachios and carpets was a small step forward. Iran has since become a major customer for American corn.

In contrast, continuing the embargo and secondary sanctions against foreign companies doing business in Iran was a leap backward.

When Vice President Dick Cheney was chief executive of the world's largest oil field service company, he called for an end to the ban on investment by U.S companies in Iran, calling the policy a "mistake."

Not enforcing the secondary sanctions only makes matters worse. European and Asian oil companies invest in Iran with impunity, leaving U.S. companies out in the cold. Even Israel - whose destruction Rafsanjani recently said could be achieved with "one nuclear bomb" - trades with Iran, under European cover. An old lesson is learned anew: Unilateral trade sanctions hurt only America.

It is not too late to do the right thing. While working to keep weapons of mass destruction from falling into Iranian hands, the United States should lift all nonmilitary trade sanctions. A wave of blue jeans and videos could do more to loosen the grip of the extremists than two decades of weak sanctions and strong rhetoric.

Finally, embrace what Bush has called "the Iranian people's hope for freedom," especially that of the young. Sixty-five percent of Iranians are under 25 with no memory of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Iranian youth are more interested in "Made in the USA" than in "Death to America." They wear Michael Jordan T-shirts and Nike sneakers.

A young man I met during my visit said he wanted to go dancing, hold hands with his girlfriend and watch movies. In a nation where the voting age is 16, these young men and women surfing the Internet with one hand and holding their cell phones with the other will decide Iran's fate.

It is time for America to help the Iranians get the mullahs off their back. Time to help free Iran with free trade.

The writer is founder and chairman of Business Executives for National Security. The views he expresses are his own.