Hooman Majd - SBCC Presentation October 2013

We're very excited to have our distinguished speaker today, Mr. Hooman Majd. This has been a production for several years. We've been hoping to achieve this, and finally the moment is here, and it's going by so fast, it's We're running fast to just keep in place. A few remarks before we begin. I'm Dr. Eskandari. I'm the chair of the Political Science Department, the director of the Middle East Studies Program, and one of the advisors of Phi Theta Kappa, together with my colleague Felisa Eisentraut and Mark Sanders. The three of us are the advisors of the honor society. The Middle East Studies Club and the honor society are putting this talk together. And as I said, we've been very excited for this to actually happen. Another few housekeeping items. I also want to thank the Santa Barbara City College Foundation and in particular the Pedotti Fund for sponsoring this event and making it possible for us to invite our distinguished speaker. I would also like to acknowledge my colleagues from the various departments on campus who support our program and are here today. Thank you very much for your support. And I also would like to especially thank the sponsors of the Middle East Studies Program itself, who with their support have made the program possible and made a more vibrant program with their endowed scholarships. In particular, I would like to thank my dear friends Margaretha and Fred Jamna, who are here, who have endowed a permanent scholarship in the program. and Madeline and Peter Jacobson, who cannot be here today but who are also friends of the program and have given a very prestigious scholarship as well to the Middle East Studies Program. Before asking these wonderful 3 people here to give their introductory remarks, I'd also like to extend a warm welcome to our distinguished speaker, President Dr. Laurie Gaskin, and from our deans, Dr. Alice Sharper and Both of them unfortunately could not be here. They're at a conference furthering the mission of our college that's on the wall now to nurture and educate the next generation of leaders, but they wish you the warmest welcome and thank you for being here. Now without further ado, I'd like to hand the microphone. This is no time for me to go on.

Hello everybody, my name is Holly Heifel. I'm the past president of the Santa Barbara City College Honors Program, and I am this year's vice president of our chapter of Phi Theta Kappa. It is a pleasure to introduce to you our distinguished guest speaker, Mr. Hooman Majd. Hooman Majd is an internationally renowned author and journalist based in New York. Mr. Majd represents the best of old Iran and the best of the Iran to come. He is the grandson of one of the most prominent ayatollahs of Iran, and he is also the son of a diplomat. In addition, he's a cousin by marriage of the former reformist Iran, Mr. Mohammad Khatami. Given this background, Mr. Majd brings a perspective and insight to contemporary Iranian politics that few are able to have and convey with the kind of verve and style he does. Mr. Majd has written 3 books on Iranian politics: The Ayatollah Begs to Differ, The Ayatollah's Democracy, and his latest book, The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay, which will be out next month. Hooman Majd's advice and insight has been sought in some of the most popular network programs in the U.S. From CNN's GPS with Fareed Zakaria to Jon Stewart's The Daily Show. His most recent article published in The New York Times on September 23rd titled "Give Iran a Chance." Please help me welcome our distinguished guest speaker, Hooman Majd.

I want to play something, so I'll do that. And then, yeah. Hi. Hello. Everyone is much, much too kind, so thank you very much. Distinguished. I don't know if I'm a distinguished speaker. I don't think I am. And I'm actually— I think you are the distinguished people here. If I was going to this college and somebody was speaking at 2:30 in the afternoon, I'd be at the beach. So I don't know what you're all doing here. But thank you for coming. I very much appreciate it. [Speaker:Hooman Majd] Appreciate it. In terms of expertise or scholarship, I've always maintained that there are no such thing— there is no such thing as an Iran expert because all of us who claim to be experts and those of us who are called experts by the media have been wrong more often than we've been right. Iran is a very difficult place to explain, a very difficult country, a very difficult political system. And the Iranian people are very difficult to explain to a foreign audience. And certainly because in the last 30 years there's been very little contact between the U.S. and Iran, that makes it even more difficult, whether it's for journalists who have a hard time getting to Iran and have a hard time getting around Iran once they're in Iran, or ordinary citizens who don't have the opportunity to go. So I'm going to start by going back 50 years to a phone call that President Johnson had with the previous ruler of Iran, who was Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and I will explain why I'm playing this phone call, which was recently released by the LBJ Library. Hopefully this will work. I'm not very good technically, but— It's not working, is it?

Hello? Your Majesty, how are you?

I'm so glad to hear you.

Sorry.

It's wonderful to hear your voice. We're so happy.

It is on speaker.

Okay, just then you need to put it where I think the sound is coming from.

No, that's where the sound comes from there, right? Or where does this— Sorry, guys.

It's an iPhone. It comes in.

This shows you what happens when you get old and technology catches up with you. He's on 9-3.

Hello?

Hello?

Your Majesty, how are you?

Mr. President, I'm so glad to hear you.

Well, it's wonderful to hear your voice and we're so happy to have you and the Empress back in our country again, even if it's very brief.

Yes, unfortunately we could not pay you our respects.

Oh, I would like so much to see you. I was oh so relieved though that you escaped the recent attempt. And you know from your own role at the time President Kennedy's what a shock such an experience is.

Yes, it was rather close this time.

Well, we were so pleased that you were so well received in Brazil and Argentina.

They have been very nice to us. And I hope that this is a new era between our part of the world and this continent of South America.

I sure hope so. Did you pick up any interesting reactions to our handling of the Dominican crisis or Vietnam?

Oh, well, I think that all of them in their inner heart, they were all in favor of it. Some dared to say so openly and some others refrained to. But I suppose they all agreed in their inner heart.

Well, we certainly are grateful to you for your Dominican and Vietnamese position. I'm very concerned that the Afro-Asian Conference in Algiers next month will degenerate. I'm afraid it will be an anti-U.S. operation unless some responsible delegation like Iran stands up against these steamrollers.

Yes, we shall do our duty, and we are grateful to you to have taken this attitude, Mr. President.

Well, we have to take this when liberty is at stake. I'm going to be anxious to have Governor Hooman report his talk with you. And if you have any suggestions for me, let me know. And please give Mrs. Johnson's high regards to the Empress and yourself. And we look forward to seeing you before too long.

Well, thank you very much. Would you please be kind enough as to give Mrs. Johnson our best regards?

We enjoyed our visit in your home so much. You don't know how much it meant to both of us and how close we feel to both of you.

Well, we have the best of recollections, really, of your visit. Everyone tells me you are a very You've just made phenomenal progress. Yes, we have been very lucky.

Well, no, you've been very courageous, that's what. And the very best of everything to you.

Thank you, Mr. President. I wish you all the success.

You tell Governor Harriman I want him to report to me on— you all talk confidentially every problem we have so I can get a full report.

All right, thank you very much.

And I look forward to you— you help us out in Algiers now and you get on top of that.

All right, thank you very much.

Now, I can't do a— sorry, this is— how do I stop this? Okay. I can't do an LBJ accent, which is so lovely to hear after all these years, but now you get on top of this. That's the President of the United States telling the leader of Iran, a country that was 2,500 years old, telling him to get on top of this and do America's bidding. So when we wonder why the Iranians had a revolution— is this sound okay? Is it okay? People hear me? Why they had a revolution, you can go back to that. Obviously, that conversation was not public 50 years ago, but Iranians understood what their role was vis-à-vis the United States. They understood that they played the servant to their master, the United States. The Shah understood it. He understood it in 1953 when he was brought back to power by the coup instigated by the CIA and the British MI6. And he did his duty, and he said he was going to do his duty. He was doing his duty in South America at the time. He was doing his duty supporting the U.S. position on Vietnam. And in this particular case, it was a conversation in 1960 1965 on the Dominican crisis at the time. So that, even though we didn't have these tapes and we didn't know how the President of the United States spoke to the President of Iran, Iranians knew full well what the relationship was between Iran and the United States and what the relationship had been between Iran and greater powers, whether it was the U.S., before that Great Britain, and before that, or at the same time, a greater power such as Russia. Iran, as a proud nation, has wanted to break away from that and today still wants to break away from that, still does not want to be dictated to. And it's not just the government, it's the people of Iran. You listen to that tape, you listen to the attitude that the American government had in President Johnson towards the leader of a country, a sovereign nation in the Middle East, a very proud nation that, as I said, had a 2,500-year history as a nation-state, a multiethnic nation-state, President of the United States telling him what to do, and him quite happily accepting his role as being someone who is there to do the bidding for the United States. You see that today in the way that the U.S.— the way the Iranians see the U.S. treating the current Islamic Republic regime. And you see the reaction of the Iranian people today the same way you would see the reaction of the Iranian people 34 years ago when they had a revolution against the Shah because they did not want— not because they necessarily wanted an Islamic Republic, not necessarily because they wanted a secular republic and no monarchy, because they wanted to be free, and they wanted to be free from a greater power's influence, undue influence, in their affairs, and they want to be treated with respect. Today, just last week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel gave an interview to BBC Persian, to an Iranian language network run by the BBC, where he said that the Iranian people want to be free. They want to wear blue jeans, and they want to listen to Western music. The reaction by the Iranian people who definitely want to be free but already wear blue jeans and already listen to Western music was vicious in social media. On Facebook, young Iranians who are not necessarily pro-regime, are not necessarily for the Islamic Republic, took great offense at this statement because it has the same implication that a phone call from President Johnson had to the Shah of Iran. The implication is that you want to be like us, you have to listen to us in order to be like us, and we can tell you what you need to do and what you want. And that is just anathema to Iranians, whether they're pro-Islamic Republic, anti-Islamic Republic, whether they live here or whether they live in Iran. It's been all over Facebook, as I said, all over Twitter, people showing pictures of themselves wearing jeans, women in full hijab wearing jeans, pictures of the Supreme Leader meeting kids who are wearing jeans, showing how misguided a foreign leader is by telling the Iranian people what they should or shouldn't do or how they should behave. Apart from the fact that it was offensive in terms of him not knowing how Iranians dress or how free they are or aren't, also the idea that Iranians want to be free and listen to Western music is offensive in and of itself because that implies that Iranian music is not quite as good as Western music and what the world really wants is MTV. And I'm dating myself by saying that. Nobody wants MTV now, but when I was your age, everybody wanted MTV. And that attitude is still there, whether it's from the Prime Minister of Israel or whether it's from the United States. The attitude is this. Is still there, and the Iranian people don't want to see that. Again, as I said, whether they're for the Islamic Republic, whether they voted for Mousavi in 2009, or whether they voted for Rouhani, or whether they voted for Ahmadinejad, and whether they voted for one of Rouhani's opponents in this election, the Iranian people, and I won't presume to say that I know everything. I'm just a writer, and I'm an observer of the seen. I'm fortunate enough to be able to go to Iran often enough, whether it's for a journalistic purpose or whether it's to write a book or whether it's just to go and visit and see some family and see some sights. And as someone who's fortunate and has a background, a cultural background in both the American culture and in the Iranian culture, because my parents are Iranian, were Iranian, I'm fortunate enough to be able to see things that a lot of other people may not be able to see and understand things that a lot of other people are perhaps not able to see at first glance, and that includes a lot of my journalist friends, American journalist friends who have been to Iran, don't quite get to see the culture the way that an Iranian does. And this is not bragging, it's just pure luck because I'm Iranian and because I have family there and because I know people there. It's easier for me to see things. So I just observe and I report what I observe, whether it's reporting journalistically or whether it's writing a book. I try not to bring my own personal biases into my reporting. In my books, I feel free to be biased, as biased as I want to be, and I am biased, and I believe that Iran, there is hope in Iran for a more democratic future. There's hope for, the youth of Iran who wants a lot of things including, as Netanyahu said, to be free, however you define that word free. But being free does not necessarily mean wearing jeans and listening to Western music. Freedom means a lot more things to the Iranian people, and it is offensive to suggest otherwise, that if you can just impose Western culture on Iran, then everything is going to be hunky-dory. That's not the case, not the case for Iranians who are very sophisticated, very, educated and very world-wise. They understand the world. They're very connected. It has— Iran has a young population, probably the most connected— or not probably, it is the most connected to the internet in the region. There are 17 million Iranian Facebook users inside Iran where Facebook is actually filtered. It's censored on the internet, but people have ways of getting around that. Everybody does, and everybody uses social media, so you have a very vibrant culture in Iran that knows everything that's going on in the world. But what they don't want, what they don't want is to be dictated to. What they don't want is for people on the outside of Iran, whether they're Iranians outside of Iran or even people like me, telling them what they should or shouldn't do, what they should or shouldn't have, what kind of political system they should have. In 2009, everyone's probably aware in this room, if you've been interested enough to come and listen to me talk, I'm sure you're aware that there was such a thing as the Green Movement, which was a protest movement that arose out of the election of 2009, which was viewed to be fraudulent by a large number of Iranians, particularly young Iranians who had voted for change but felt that their voice wasn't heard. And they felt that the government or the regime had rigged the election to ensure that the hardline president Ahmadinejad remained in power for another 4 years. Even then with the Green Movement, the protest movement that happened, the repression that followed, the beatings, the jailing of political activists, the jailing of ordinary protesters who just had gone out to ask, you know, for their votes to be counted, even then, Iranians did not ask for Western interference or Western— any kind of Western intervention to bring about a change in the regime, any kind of change, whether it was a gradual change or whether it was an overhaul of the system altogether. So even then, Iranians living in Iran didn't want Western interference because what they believe on the whole, and this has been my experience in talking to people in Iran, what they believe is Once you ask for Western interference or Western intervention on their behalf, then you're going to ask for Western influence on their government, whatever their government is. And that's something that Iranians don't want anymore. They didn't want it in 1953. We forced it on them. They don't want it now, as that tape recording showed. It's the last thing Iranians want is for an American American government to tell them what to do. And as young people yourselves, you can imagine, put yourselves in the shoes of an Iranian, put yourselves in the shoes of not being a citizen of the most powerful nation on Earth and being able to go around, throw our weight around the world and tell people what they should or shouldn't have. If someone else, if the Prime Minister of Canada was telling us what to do, if the Prime Minister of Canada told us we have to have free healthcare in this country, We'd be far more offended than when our own president tells us we should have better healthcare in this country. We don't like— no human being likes to be told what to do by someone who's not in their tribe. And I don't want to make it a tribal issue, but nationalism plays a big part. It plays a big part in the way we live and the way our ideology, and it plays a big part in Iran as well. People are proud to be Iranians. You could argue that they don't necessarily need to be proud to be Iranians. We should just be proud to be humans and good humans. But unfortunately, that's the human condition. We are proud. We constantly say we're proud to be Americans. We're proud to have been born in America. And the Iranians are no less proud to be born in Iran and to be Iranian. After the 2009 elections, Iran was a very dark place. There was the repression and the jailing of dissidents continued. Civil rights were completely crushed. And what happened in 2013, this year, was that there was a very dark mood before the election, presidential election in June. The mood was that, well, last time around, we didn't really get our choice because we really wanted someone else. We wanted a change. We asked for change. This is among the people who obviously were protesting, because I'll also get to the other side of the equation. There was a lot of apathy in terms of, you know, what kind of change they could expect with a new election, knowing that Ahmadinejad had— his two terms were up and he had to leave office, and there had to be some form of change. And I was there right around— I was there once before the election and then I was there after the election briefly. The mood wasn't very optimistic. But the Iranian election campaign is limited by law to 1 month, 30 days. They're allowed to campaign for actually 28 days, 4 weeks. And so nothing really happens very much, unlike here where we start campaigning now for the next election. I think Hillary's already started. In Iran, you don't even know who's running for office until a couple of months before. You can announce that you're running for office, but the actual registration of candidates doesn't begin until about— the registration is about 6 weeks before the election, and then the actual campaigning is a month before the elections. So in that period, initially, there was just like, well, they're all the same, they're all going to be the same, and anyway, it doesn't matter because who whoever the supreme leader wants or whoever the regime wants to be president is going to be called president regardless of our votes. But then in the last 10 days of the election with the televised debates, where all— initially 8, but then down to 6, 2 of the candidates dropped down— dropped out, 6 candidates were televised and people saw there was a change, there was a difference between the candidates, and they really did have an opportunity to express themselves. Again this time and hope, fingers crossed, that the regime would respect their views, people got excited about the election. And towards the end, the last few days, they got very excited about the election because it became clearer and clearer over a period of— that period of 4 weeks that what President Rouhani, now President Rouhani, but the candidate Rouhani represented was very, very different from what some of the other candidates represented. There was a very clear choice there for the Iranian people, and they made that choice. They made it very clearly and very loudly, and the regime respected it. It was— no analyst and no so-called expert believed that President Rouhani was the first choice of the military establishment, the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower talked about here 60 or 70 years ago as this exists in Iran, too. There's a military-industrial complex there, and certainly that military-industrial complex did not support Rouhani in the election. They supported one of their own men, and their man came in fourth in the election. So there was a tremendous amount of excitement that among the people who voted for Rouhani that they could put 2009 to bed. That was an anomaly. And now they can move forward. Now they can have the change that they wanted. They understand that change isn't going to come overnight. They understand that change can't be instant, and all the changes that people want are not going to happen anyway, regardless of who's president in Iran. But looking around the region for Iranians, looking at what happened in 2009, the Iranian people, and again, particularly the youth, who are the most politically active in Iran, what they see is not very promising. The kind of changes, the kinds of changes that the Arab Spring have brought to the region, the kinds of changes that have happened in Syria, for example, or Egypt, are not the kind of changes the Iranians want by and large. Of course, there's always going to be people who want a radical overthrow of the system. There's always going to be an element in society both inside and outside the country who want to completely get rid of the system, say, "Well, this system doesn't work. We don't believe in theocracy. There should be human rights for all. It should be a secular republic. Everybody should be free, and there should be a Western-style liberal democracy in Iran." Those people exist, but they are not the majority in Iran. The majority of people who live in Iran want to see change. From the people who are actually supporters of the hardliners in Iran, even they want change. The people who are supporters of the hardliners who believe in a very strict theocracy, believe in a very religious government, they still want to see change. The change they want to see is different from the change that the liberals want to see. The change they want to see is an economic change. They want to see a betterment for their lives. They want to see more interaction with the world. Even the hardliners want to see more interaction with the world because they understand that affects the economy. Hardliners have kids. They want to see their kids educated. They want to see their kids have a successful life beyond what they can have now, which means they need better employment figures. They need better industry. All of that involves better relations with the outside world. Iran does not want to be— nobody in Iran wants to be a hermit kingdom or a hermit country like North Korea, for example, and eliminate any kind of connection to the outside world. So change— what people want to see in terms of change is different depending on who you ask. And Iranian society is somewhat polarized in the same way that our society is. We have red states, blue states. We have people who are very— we have people who are Tea Party people, and then we have people who are extremely progressive and think that President Obama is a fascist, right-wing fascist. So, we have all kinds of people, but the polarization is really a red state, blue state polarization, a Republican-Democrat nowadays polarization, and we see that in Congress and we see that with the government shutdown and everything where there's just no agreement and these people are just clashing all the time. The same is true in Iran. There's polarization. There's people who are still quite supportive, and I'm going back to what I was saying earlier, despite what we may have heard in the West about the 2009 Green Movement and the elections there and the protest movements, Even then, there were still a lot of supporters for President Ahmadinejad. There were a lot of supporters of the Supreme Leader. There were a lot of supporters of the hardline politicians. It's hard to say because polling isn't very accurate in Iran, so we can't really say that, you know, 30% of the people or 60% of the people support this or support that, but anecdotal evidence is that the support was quite high for Ahmadinejad and for— certainly more than 25%. Which is still a huge number for a country where the population is some 80 million people. But all those people, after 8 years of the Ahmadinejad administration, have been looking for change. Even the ones who supported Ahmadinejad, they understand that things were not— things are not working in Iran, not in terms of civil rights, which we care about here, not in terms of women's rights, which we care about here, not in terms of religious freedom or freedom of speech or of political freedoms, but also in terms of what really matters most to everybody at the end of the day, and that's their pocketbook. It matters most here, it matters most in Iran, the economy. It ends up being about the economy for most people. People who grow up and live in Iran live in a system that we find difficult to understand, and we can't imagine ourselves living in a system, we can't imagine not being able to dress the way everyone here is dressed, boy or girl. We can't imagine not being able to have a beer, you know. You guys are probably too young to have a beer. I don't know what the state law is here, 21, but anyway. In Iran, you could be 45 and you can't have a beer. So, we can't imagine not being able to do that. We can't imagine not being able to— free to hold hands with our girlfriend or to be able to live with our girlfriend if we want to. But Iranians inside Iran, those issues are important issues to them, and they are working to change that. And reform the system so that it allows for many of those things to be changed. But at the same time, those aren't necessarily always their top priority. The hijab is something that we always talk about in the West as a symbol of repression of women in Iran, and we know about the Taliban and how they treated women in Afghanistan and the niqab that the Saudis wear and some of the people in the Gulf states wear. And in Iran, we see the chador and we see it as being a very repressive thing and taking away of women's rights. In Iran, when you speak to female women activists, feminists, people who are working to better the condition of the social condition of women, when you ask them about the hijab, it's the last thing on their list. They always just kind of dismiss it. Oh, the hijab, we're used to that. That's not a big deal. What we really care about are women's rights when it comes to divorce, when it comes to when it comes to being able to be a judge, when it comes to being able to run for president. Those are the rights that Iranians are fighting for, not the right necessarily to not wear a hijab. To us, on the surface, that stuff looks very important, but we don't really analyze what does it mean. If women were free to wear whatever they want, if they could dress like you do, and you saw that on television, you might think, oh, Iran's a pretty modern, liberal place. Women can do whatever they want. But if all the same laws were still in place, Iranian women would not be satisfied. If they told them tomorrow that you don't have to wear a hijab, and you can have a boyfriend, and you can do anything you want, but you still can't be a judge, and you still can't have the right to divorce— well, in Iran, they do have a right to divorce, but it's much more difficult for a woman than it is for a man. You can't inherit as much as your brother can, and you can't run for president. That we might not see. On the outside. We would only see the images of Iranian women frolicking in the streets and think, oh, it's a free country. But for Iranians, those issues are much, much more important than what's on the surface, and we always see what's on the surface. Now, that applies to everything. It doesn't apply just to women and doesn't just apply to the hijab. It applies to every aspect of Iranian society. Nobody has the time, including myself, to read every article, read every book, see every report on television about Iran. And there aren't that many to begin with, but even if we're interested in Iran, it's very hard to get a clear picture of Iran unless you go there. And even if you go there as a foreigner, you're still not going to see— get a clear picture. I live in New York, and tourists come to New York all the time, American tourists, and they go to Manhattan, and they go to Times Square, and they see a few things, and they think they've seen New York, or they hope that they've seen New York. And, you know, people in New York are going, well, you— you don't really know New York at all. And it's the same is true of going anywhere. I'm a tourist right now in Santa Barbara. I'm sure you guys could tell me a million things that I don't know about Santa Barbara even though it seems to me like a beautiful place to live. But other than that, everywhere that you go, you can't really get into the culture of the place by just visiting. You kind of have to live there. Now, it's not incumbent upon every person to really know a country, to really understand a country. And it's not only not incumbent upon them, it's impossible.

There are—

how many countries are there in the world? Over 200 sovereign nations. The ones that matter to us most are the ones that are in the news all the time, the ones that we consider enemies, the ones that we potentially could go to war for. That's what matters to us. We always think about countries more that are— we think about— we think more about countries that we are in conflict with, and right now Iran is a country that we're in serious conflict with and we could potentially go to war with, or at least attack militarily, which would in effect be war with Iran. And so that's why Iran is important. That's why it's important for us, I think, to understand a little bit more about Iran and what the Iranians want. So, with that little background there and what the Iranians— I mean, as I said, I can't speak for all the Iranian people. I can only talk about my observations. But the wants of the Iranian people are very related to the things I've been speaking about. The wants, they want very much the same thing that most other human beings on the planet want. They want to be able to get good jobs. They want a good life for their kids. They want to be able to study like you study, have access to the internet like we have access to the internet. They want to listen to Western music. They want to wear jeans, but they do that. They also want to listen to Iranian music and they want to wear Iranian clothes and they also want to watch Iranian films, and those things are popular in Iran too. And Iranian films are actually quite popular here as well. So, they want to preserve their own culture. They also want to be free. The freedoms that they want are similar to the freedoms that we want, but what they don't want is hegemony. They don't want cultural hegemony and they don't want political hegemony over their country by anybody, and they will not tolerate that. That brings us to the nuclear issue, the single most important issue for Americans and what we see and what we read about. We're told constantly that the Iranians are building a nuclear weapon. If they get nuclear weapons, they're going to wipe Israel off the map. If they wipe Israel off the map, next step is they're going to wipe America off the map. They hate capitalism. They hate liberal democracies. They're going to come and attack us, and once those Persians have those bombs, nothing's going to stop them. I, you know, that was probably true 2,500 years ago, but when the Persians really did want to have their empire encompass the entire planet, and they got pretty close to it. If it wasn't for the Macedonians, it probably would have happened. So, or at least they would have gone all the way to most of Europe, and then they got partly to Europe. But that's really not true anymore. Times have changed. Iran doesn't have that kind of— it has global ambitions. As a country, as a regime, and as a country, it has ambitions to be powerful, independent, and to have influence in its immediate region and then, of course, influence throughout the world. But it doesn't have an ambition to overthrow the United States even though some people in Iran will talk about that, you know, down with the USA or down with the U.S. government or death to America. All that means, like, you know, we want to see the end of the American empire, even though some people will talk about that, actually within the regime there's certainly no ambition to do that. What they do want is to be an independent country. They do want to be respected. They constantly, the Iranian regime constantly, leaders from the regime constantly bring up this question of respect. And just a couple of weeks ago at the UN, President Rouhani brought it up again, that he wanted Iran to be treated with respect. And as long as Iran was treated with respect, that they could make a deal on the nuclear issue. That was the primary— it is the primary goal for the Iranians, to get America to acknowledge that they have to be respectful to the Iranians, to not have a repetition of, you know, Lyndon B. Johnson telling the Iranian president what to do. And all other factors when it comes to the nuclear issue are basically on the table. All other issues are on the table. Iran claims it doesn't want to build a nuclear weapon. America is skeptical about that because it's developing the capacity to build nuclear weapons. But as far as Iran is concerned, it cannot be told, and this is why the nuclear program in Iran is popular among the population. And every poll that has been conducted, independent polls outside of Iran, inside of Iran, shows that the popularity of the nuclear program is still sky high. It's over 80%. Over 80% of the people support They support the Iranian nuclear program completely and they support the Iranian government's position on the nuclear program. And I have spoken to people inside Iran who are anti-regime as they come, who want to see a complete overhaul of the system. They want a secular republic to replace the Islamic Republic. They're fed up with the mullahs, as they say, and they support not only the nuclear program, some of them even support Iran having a nuclear weapon. And it goes back to that pride and that nationalism that exists among Iranians. And they look around the region and they say, well, Pakistan has nuclear weapons, nobody cares about that. Israel has nuclear weapons, nobody cares about that. Why us? Why are we the ones who aren't allowed to not only not have nuclear weapons but not even to have an indigenous nuclear program where we have to buy the fuel from you guys because you won't let us make our own fuel for the nuclear reactors we want? So that issue is very important for the Iranians, but it really boils down to respect. If the United States countries can respect Iran, and it's not going to be easy. It was very difficult under Ahmadinejad for the United States or for any foreign country to respect a president like him when he was talking about the Holocaust not existing, about there being no gays in Iran, or wanting to wipe Israel off the map, which was mistranslated, but nonetheless, that's the impression that people had, that Ahmadinejad was going to build nukes and he was going to drop them on Israel first and then he was going to to kill all the homosexuals and then he was going to move forward from there. It was difficult to respect someone who didn't even— wasn't even willing to acknowledge that there had been genocide in World War II. That's different now. Now the Iranians are saying, well, that's the past. The Iranian people have said that in their election of Rouhani. Rouhani himself has said that. His foreign minister is saying that. The administration in Iran is saying that. If that's the past, this is now. We want to be treated with respect as we always have been, as we've always wanted to be treated with respect. So acknowledge that we're a sovereign country. Acknowledge that we have rights as a sovereign country. Acknowledge that there cannot be dual standards. One country can't be favored over another country. As a sovereign member of the— a founding member of the United Nations, we have the rights that every other country does. And if you acknowledge that, We can do everything to put your mind at ease that we are actually not going to build a nuclear weapon. And of course, it's up to us to say whether we're willing to acknowledge that or not. Right now, we're saying we're not willing to acknowledge that. Right now, we're saying we're not even willing to have the respect for Iran that a couple of weeks ago it seemed that we were getting close to. When Rouhani was in New York, the Iranian delegation was ecstatic, the people around him and the foreign minister and people from the foreign ministry, the president's office, they were ecstatic at the reception that he had received in New York from Americans, from the foreign minister's meeting with John Kerry, unprecedented half an hour one-on-one meeting between the Iranian foreign minister and the U.S. Secretary of State, very positive. I was there at the UN They came out of the room and in front of reporters they were both being very optimistic about the future and respectful of each other. Iran was being respectful of the United States. The United States was being respectful of Iran. Then it was capped by President Obama's phone call to President Rouhani, which made Iranians inside Iran just like, you know, also ecstatic. The Iranian media went wild. Iranian people went wild. Wow, you know, after 34 years, finally the President of the United States acknowledges, the Islamic Republic acknowledges that our president is someone worthy of talking to, and they have a 15-minute phone call. Wow, I mean, what could they have talked about other than the weather and the traffic, which apparently Obama brought up, not realizing that the traffic in Tehran is much worse than the traffic in New York City. But maybe if Obama ever goes to Tehran, he'll experience that firsthand. But so, there was a lot of hope, a lot of optimism that, oh, there is respect, maybe the U.S. Can respect Iran, and for the Iranians who had voted in big numbers, huge numbers, for President Rouhani. 51% of the people voted for him, which doesn't sound great when you consider it, but when you consider there were 6 other— 5 other candidates, it's a clear majority, and the turnout was over 70%. Our turnout in our elections is always around 50% if we're lucky. So, huge numbers voted for this guy, man, and now they have the President of the United States, a country that Iranians by and large admire, and they admire Americans, and they do admire American culture, and they like American culture, and they watch our movies, and they listen to our music, and they definitely buy our jeans. We know that for a fact now from all the pictures on Facebook about how many jeans they buy. One woman had her closet, and there must have been 150 pairs of jeans jeans in that closet. I don't think I've ever seen that many jeans in one person's closet in Tehran of all places. But the happiness about that phone call, the happiness about the idea that the U.S. could respect Iran dissipated very quickly because on the Monday— this happened on a Friday— weekend everyone's happy, Iranians are happy, the president's coming back to Iran. He was greeted by a lot of There were a few people who protested his phone call and threw eggs at his motorcade, but they were a small minority compared to the people who were very happy about the progress in U.S.-Iranian relations. And the fact that in 34 years, nobody had— no President of the United States had ever spoken to a President of Iran. In 34 years, no Secretary of State had ever spoken to an Iranian Foreign Minister. These were groundbreaking facts. These were groundbreaking things that happened in New York. But then on Monday, President Obama had a meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, and then after the meeting said that, you know, of course we're going to be skeptical, we're going to pursue this line of diplomacy, but all options remain on the table for dealing with the Iranian nuclear issue, which of course means that, you know, we could still use the military option. And that was, for the Iranians, a big letdown, not just for the regime, but also for many of the people who at this point are supportive of their president, if not supportive of the regime as a whole. Why? Because, again, you're talking with a different— you know, the rhetoric is the same rhetoric as it was before. You do this or else we're going to bomb you. And that's incredibly offensive to the average Iranian, particularly when it's a government that they voted for and that they believe in and that was by their own standards and even by some standards outside of Iran was a fair election. And so, their— in their belief, their democratically elected president goes to New York, extends an open hand in their minds, And Obama reciprocates by making a phone call, by giving a good speech at the UN, and then 2 days later says, "Yeah, but if you don't do what we tell you to do, we can still bomb you." So that's a fundamental problem that's not going away anytime soon. I don't know, I'm not privy to White House discussions or the National Security Council discussions, discussions with President Obama about Iran or the State Department discussions about Iran. I don't think very many people are. So I have no idea what's going on in the minds of the administration personnel in terms of how they're going to deal with Iran. But one way to ensure that a deal doesn't happen, a nuclear deal doesn't happen, is to continue on this path of insisting that Iran does something that they don't want to do. They don't want to give up rights, what they call are their sovereign rights, and that is something that the Iranians are willing to put up with a lot of hardship. The sanctions that we've imposed on Iran are very draconian. People have died because of the sanctions. Innocent people have died. People have died because they can't get certain medicines, particularly cancer medicines. People are suffering because of the inflation that the sanctions have caused. Iran has no access to the international banking system. It cannot pay for things that it buys, that it needs to buy internationally. It can't even buy wheat, and right now Iran needs wheat. It needs it for feed. It needs it for domestic purposes, for foodstuffs, and it can buy wheat. It can go and say, go to Russia, I need 10 million tons of wheat, and the Russians say, fine, it's going to cost you $200 million. And they say, well, how do we pay you? And they say, we don't know. Figure it out. And the Iranians have no way of paying them because there's no bank will do the transaction. All the money that Iran has received for its oil over the last few years has been just sitting in banks frozen. They have billions of dollars sitting in foreign banks that they can't touch, the Iranian government, I mean. There are Iranian citizens who have money that's frozen. So there's a lot of hardship in Iran. But despite that hardship, they're still not willing to give up their rights. They're still not willing to, in exchange for having a better life, in exchange for the economy being opened up, in exchange for a nuclear deal, to have a president of the United States tell their president what to do and to tell him to, you know, do his job. They're just not willing to go there. This is a population that has suffered before. It has suffered actually more before. Although some of the people in Iran who are young and are your age are too young to remember it, but the Iran-Iraq War, 8 years of war they had, a very brutal World War I style trench warfare where, you know, close to a million people lost their lives on both sides, more on the Iranian side because they had young volunteers as young as 11 and 10 years old, volunteers going out and jumping in front of tanks and jumping on mines. So, Iran still is wounded, a wounded nation from that war. The leadership of Iran, the people who are in power today, not only remember the conversations that the American presidents would have that I just played for you because they were young adults at the time, and they're the ones who then had a revolution to make Iran independent. Not only that, but they also were in during the war. They were either fought during the war or they, if they didn't fight, they lived in Iran during the war. They lived in Iran when Scuds missiles were falling on Tehran, when people had to evacuate, when there was food rationing. So they put up with that. It's not likely that they will not put up with, and that was to not be dictated to by a foreign power. In that case, it was the United States. With Saddam Hussein and the West that was supporting Saddam Hussein in the war. They will definitely put up with sanctions and they will put up with harsher sanctions if it means that that's the only way they're going to get their rights respected by the West. So, it's a very complicated issue for America and for Americans. It's like, what do we want to do? What do we want to accomplish with Iran? Do we want to trust them? No, I don't think any nation trusts another nation automatically just because the words they say are nicer now than the words they were saying a year ago. I think it's a question of accepting that our role, the United States' role in the world is not what it was in the past and that we cannot dictate to other countries what they should or shouldn't do or what they can or cannot have. I think we've learned that lesson, you know, a number of times. We learned it in Vietnam, or we thought we learned it in Vietnam. We thought we learned it in Afghanistan. We thought we learned it in Iraq. And we constantly make the same mistake of thinking that other countries want what we have, and not only do they want what we have, but they are willing to give up a lot, in other words, their own self-respect, in order to have what we have. And that's just not true. It's not true with Iran. It's not true with any— virtually any country. I mean, look at the Cubans. It's hard with Cuba to gauge again whether the population is happy. It's probably not happy under Castro or now Raul Castro. Overall, it's not happy, but probably not for the reasons we think that they're not happy. We think they're not happy because— some of us think they're not happy because they can't wear blue jeans, and they actually do have a hard time getting blue jeans in Cuba, or they can't afford it. But if for Cubans, and I don't know Cuba well enough, I've been there but I don't know it well enough to be able to say with any kind of certainty, but I imagine that today for Cubans, if in order for them to have a better life, in order for them to change their system, if they had to become once again a servant of the United States or to have that kind of relationship with the United States, I would be willing to I bet that most Cubans would say they don't want that. And I think that's true in virtually every country, and it's not unique to the Iranians. Iranians are unique in the sense that, you know, we tend to be prouder than some other countries. We tend to be more nationalistic than some other countries' populations. We tend to be a little bit snobbish about being Iranian. We have this idea that we're, you know, better than most only because of our history and because of what we've been told as growing up. Oh, you know, we had the best poetry, we invented algebra, we did this, we did that. And, you know, it's pounded into children from a very young age. And that all plays into the nationalism that Iran is great, you know, we're different from the other countries in the region, we're not tribal, we're not Arabs, we didn't live in the desert, we, you know, and we can even be racist racist about the Arabs. We not just can be, we are racist about the Arabs, as a population I mean, and we live in that neighborhood. So, Iran may be a special case in that it's even more difficult to get to a point where Iran and the U.S. can have relations where they fully respect each other because the Iranian demands for respect are so high, and— but it's not impossible. It's not impossible. So I think that moving forward, the Iranians are going to be looking for some signal that we as a government, as an administration, are willing to give them respect. Because if we don't, what's going to happen in Iran, and if these nuclear talks, which are actually next week in Geneva, the first round is in Geneva next week, if these don't end in some form of success where people can walk away from the talks like they did walking away from the UN meetings, saying that we had what we think is a successful start to having a new relationship with Iran. If we don't have that next week, what's going to happen is the Rouhani administration is going to be greatly weakened in Iran, and the hardliners will have been proven right. Right now, they're licking their wounds from the election, and they're licking their wounds from the fact that the Supreme Leader has supported the election results and has supported supporting the Rouhani administration, to the hardliners, an anathema. I mean, you know, the idea that there would be someone, a president of Iran saying that, oh, Facebook and Twitter should not be censored, the fact that women shouldn't be told what to wear, I mean, that's just, you know, unbelievable for the Iranian hardliners who are very strict about their ideology. But right now he has the support, and they are now saying, already saying, don't trust the Americans. You know, don't trust them, they're not going to give us respect, they're still talking about bombing us, they really are after regime change, they want to see this regime overthrown, they've never accepted the Islamic Republic as a valid sovereign nation, a system of government, and that's really the motivation. The motivation is to change the Islamic Republic and to put a client state government, a client government in power in Iran. And if Rouhani is unsuccessful in the first 6 months or the first year, of trying to get a resolution to the nuclear issue that gets him the respect so he can say and the administration, the Iranian administration can say, you know, we approached it with a different language. We approached it by having respect for the West. We approached this international relations by having respect for Jews, by wishing them Happy New Year on Twitter, by saying yes, the Holocaust did happen. It was a horrible thing. Genocide. We're showing respect to the world, to the outside world, and if they don't get the respect in return, the hardliners will say, see, we told you, you shouldn't have never even gone there. You should never even made yourself, you know, look like you're being— you're too eager for relations because look what they did. Look what America did in return. They increased the sanctions. Right now, there are some congressmen who want to put a bill— put forward a bill to increase the sanctions. This is before they even started talking. To increase the sanctions on Iran. And they're going to say, well, look, look what happened. The U.S. is never honest. It's never going to be respectful of this regime. So let's go back to that hardline position. Let's go back to that position where we just tell the U.S. to go screw itself, and you know what, we'll survive. They won't dare attack us, and if they do, we'll make life miserable for them. And we can do that. We've got all the power to do that. That's not a position I think we want to be in. That's what happened with former President Khatami. Every step that he took, on a social level for Iranians, it was a good time in Iran. And when you talk to Iranians now who lived during that period, they all say, they all look back at it with a certain fondness, like, oh yeah, life was so much more free then. The press was much more free. There was a lot more freedom to do things. The morality police weren't harassing women all the time, or men and women all the time. And it was just a more open, free society. Far fewer websites were blocked. The censorship of the internet wasn't as severe. And he was also reaching out to the world. Khatami was— the dialogue among civilizations was his signature legacy, and trying to have dialogue with the world instead of harsh rhetoric, and trying to come to understanding with other countries. And relations with Europe got much better. Relations with America didn't get much better. But he was unsuccessful as far as Iranians were concerned in bringing about the full change that they wanted, but he was unsuccessful as far as the hardliners were concerned because all the attempts he made, under him the Iranians suspended enrichment for 2 years. They abided by the additional protocol of the NPT, and this sounds a little too inside baseball, and I don't want to go into all the details of the Nonproliferation Treaty and all that, but what Iran did was It did what America and the Europeans wanted it to do in 2003. It suspended uranium enrichment. It abided by the Additional Protocol, which is a protocol which allows for much more intrusive and snap inspections of the Iranian nuclear facilities. And 2 years later, right when President Khatami's term of office was up, the U.S. and the Europeans came back with the offer that took them 2 years to, to come up with, and the Iranians were waiting for this to figure out what they were going to do with their nuclear program. And the offer was basically, well, you've suspended enrichment, so now make that permanent, and don't build any more centrifuges, and don't build any more nuclear facilities, and what we will do in return is we're going to let you join the World Trade Organization, and maybe we'll let you buy some spare parts for airplanes. Well, for the Iranians, it was like, what, 2 years? We suspended enrichment for 2 years. We followed what the Americans wanted us to do. We listened to them. We said, we trust you. Okay, you're saying suspend enrichment just so that you're not suspicious of our activities anymore. We'll do that just to make you feel comfortable about that. So tell us what you're going to do in return. And that was what they got in return, which led to the hardliners not only winning the election that year, but then taking the attitude that, well, not only are we not going to suspend enrichment anymore, not only is your offer pointless and useless—and the nuclear negotiator at the time compared it to exchanging a pearl for a lollipop, the pearl being the Iranian nuclear program and exchanging it for the lollipop that the U.S. and the West were offering—not only that, we're going to redouble our efforts. We're going to go from, you know, 164 centrifuges—now they're at almost 20,000 centrifuges. We're going to build facilities. We're going to just go full steam ahead, and what are you going to do about it? And here we are 8 years later, and the Iranian program is much, much more advanced than it was in 2005, and it could have been resolved then if the West had shown enough of a certain degree of respect that the Iranians required for their sovereignty, for their national rights. We would have solved that nuclear issue 8 years ago. That would have been so much more beneficial to us because today what the administration is not saying openly but is sort of acknowledging is that we're willing to live with up to 5% enrichment and, you know, maybe 5,000 centrifuges spinning and, you know, their 20% enriched uranium has to be out of the country, which the Iranians We said, "Okay." But at the time, in 2005, they weren't enriching. They didn't know how to enrich 20%. They couldn't build fuel plates for their own reactor. They were asking to buy them, which we refused to sell them. And they had 164 centrifuges spinning. So, we could have probably ended the nuclear program— not ended it, but resolved the nuclear issue with Iran in 2005 with no more than a couple hundred centrifuges spinning and no 20% enrichment and no huge stockpile of enriched uranium that one day could be turned into a bomb as the skeptics are concerned. So, I think I've gone way too long because I was going to take questions and I will still take questions. So, I hope that that hasn't been too boring but trying to just give you an overview of the nuclear issue which is the primary issue for us and the attitude of the Iranians, both the government and the people. So. Thank you. I will take as many questions as—

No, you keep that. Okay. We now have time for questions. I was asked by the— video recorder, my colleague Jeff, to repeat the questions and then Mr. Majd will answer them. So please, if you have any questions, this is the time.

This is the time.

Yes. During the midst of the most recent Syrian crisis or conflict, whatever our media like to label it, Syrian civil war, large-scale proxy, you know, Hezbollah, Iran, and Russia standing firm, the Saudis, Israel, Turkey, and the United States as well. It seemed that the American public vehemently opposed intervention or us entering, which was really going to be the airstrikes, which would be an act of war, but AIPAC lobbyists were also vehemently doing their job in Washington by asking us to listen to the Senate Republicans and listen to the White House and go forward with entering the war there. Where do you see that in the conundrum with Iran as years go on?

Well, it's a very good question. You mean AIPAC's influence or the Israeli lobby's influence?

—until, you know, post the phone call, it seemed like we were looking at some—

Until, yes, yes. Yeah, I mean, it's a very good question. It's a question that's on the minds of the Iranians, not just the government, but even the people sitting in Iran. Partly why their reaction to the jeans comment and the Western music comment of Netanyahu was so strong is because there is a view held in Iran among the population and certainly among the government that AIPAC has an outsized influence and that the Israeli lobby in general has an outsized influence on American foreign policy. And I don't think there's any question in anybody's mind that that lobby in particular does not want to see détente between the U.S. and Iran and does not want to see the nuclear program of Iran to be intact in any way and wants a complete dismantling of that program. Netanyahu said it again yesterday as I— as I mentioned in his interviews. And he's been on a— in advance of these nuclear talks in Geneva, he's been on a PR campaign giving interviews to everyone. Yesterday, he was giving interviews to every European paper, European television, saying, you know, don't trust the Iranians, don't trust them. The only thing that will satisfy us is if there's no nuclear program at all, they shut it all down, ship everything out, and it's done, and then we'll be okay. So sure, that's the position that the Israelis are taking. I'm not sure that President Obama is going to necessarily listen to the— well, I think the lobby has influence. There's no question about it. I think it's sometimes overstated, that influence is overstated. I think Obama, President Obama, particularly as a second-term president who doesn't have to worry too much about the influence of lobbies on his— on future campaigns, any lobby, whether it's the Israeli lobby or the gun lobby or anybody. Has a little bit more freedom to do what he wants to do. He has Congress that he has to deal with, but I think that he can make a deal with Iran that he's satisfied with, and whether the Israeli lobby likes it or not, I think he'll do it. I think he would rather do that than see two things, either Iran become a nuclear power in his second term, which he said he will not allow and would prefer a diplomatic solution to, or for, there to be no deal and just to be this conflict going on between Iran and the U.S., potentially even as a proxy in proxy situations such as Syria. So I think that, you know, it's his second term. He's already a year into his second term. I think he would like to see this resolved, and as much as he's going to listen to Benjamin Netanyahu and he's going to listen to the Saudi king who also doesn't want Iran to have an indigenous nuclear program, and it's going to listen to some of the Gulf states. I think that at the end of the day, he's probably going to make a deal if he thinks the deal is a deal that he can live with. And a deal that he can live with, he'll be able to persuade Americans is a deal that they can live with. And we have to remember, AIPAC doesn't represent American Jews. It's a lobby that represents Israeli interests, and I think Obama feels pretty confident that he's not gonna lose the support of American Jews or the Democrats aren't gonna lose the support of American Jews just because he made a deal with Iran. In fact, every poll shows that— every poll that's been done recently shows that American Jews don't support AIPAC on Iran. So.

I'm just wondering, with the current situation of the government in Iran, the way that you have— Speak up. Partially democratic presidency, but then you have all these tremendously undemocratic institutions like the Guardian Council and the Supreme Leader. Is it possible for Iran to become a true democracy in its current situation, piecemeal, or does it need to have a— Revolution.

Revolution or dramatic change to truly become a democracy? Well, it's a very good question. First of all, it depends on what you mean by democracy. We tend to define democracy as the liberal democracy of the West. Europe, and basically Europe and the United States, is the way we look at democracy in some Asian countries like Japan. We say, well, that's what a democracy is, and unless you have that, you're not a democracy, basically. That is unlikely to happen in Iran anytime soon, with or without revolution, with or without regime change, unless it's imposed on Iran. I think the democracy that Iranians want, by and large, most Iranians who live inside Iran and are going to continue to live inside Iran, 'cause there's definitely an Iranian diaspora, 2 million Iranians outside of Iran. There are people in Iran who want to leave now because they would prefer to live in this democracy than whatever that democracy is in Iran. So, but the majority, the people who live in Iran and want to live in Iran want to see democratic change. The Guardian Council is a good example. In any talk, it's almost impossible to get into the makings of the Islamic Republic's political system because that takes days to talk about, not 45 minutes. The Guardian Council is a body, for those of you who don't know, that decides who can or cannot run for public office, not just the presidency, but also the parliament and so on and so forth. And it's an unelected body, and yes, that's an undemocratic aspect of the system in Iran. Whether that will change, I don't know, but I think that's something that people do want to see changed. It's not necessarily that the Guardian Council has to be eliminated. It's like the Guardian Council should be more open about why a candidate isn't qualified to run. We have laws in this country, if you're under, I think it's 40 years old, you can't run for president. And am I correct on that? 35. Well, it used to be 40, I think. But so we have laws. And you have to be willing to uphold the Constitution of the United States. When you become president, you're going to swear that you're going to uphold the Constitution of the United States. So those laws in Iran, they're similar laws. You've got to be— I think in Iran, it's maybe you have to be over 40 to run for president, and you also have to be willing to uphold the Constitution of the Islamic Republic. When they eliminate a candidate, a lot of people who are pro-democracy in Iran say, well, Even if the Guardian Council exists, they should say why they're eliminating him. It's like, is this person unqualified because he's illiterate? And there are people who are illiterate who register to run for the presidency. Is it because he has, you know, delusions of grandeur? He thinks he's God or he thinks he's, you know, the Prophet Muhammad reincarnated? And there are people like that who decide to run for the president. So, but they never give a reason. They just eliminate people which makes it suspicious and makes it undemocratic. So, it depends on what you define as as democracy. A lot of the elements of democracy that we would like to see are a lot of Iran— are the same things that Iranians would like to see. They'd like to see a free press. They would like to see free speech. They would like to see free protest, free— the freedom to protest, the freedom to publicly gather, all those things which are actually guaranteed in the constitution, surprisingly so to a lot of people. They think that those aren't guaranteed in their constitution. And they would like to see women's rights, equal rights for women. They would like to see equal rights for certain minorities. And I'm specifically talking about the Baha'is because the three Abrahamic religions are supposedly respected, and there are churches and synagogues in Iran as well, and there are Christians and Zoroastrians and Jews. But Baha'is are not considered a valid religion freedom of religion. So, people would like to see freedom of religion, those kinds of things, but that doesn't mean that it's going to look exactly like our democracy. It doesn't mean that the liberal democracy is going to look the same. There are certain Islamic values, Shia, Iranian Shia Islamic values that people would still probably as a whole, as a population, would like to see in Iran. That doesn't mean that they want, you know, everybody wants segregation of the sexes, and so on and so forth, but Iran, compared to some of the other countries in the Middle East, certainly the Arab countries like Saudi Arabia, is far, far less repressive than those countries. But an interesting thing, you know, when I was in Iran in 2011, something struck me. There was a young Iranian college graduate who was interviewed there by the Financial Times, actually, by an English newspaper, and she said that she had the Islamic Republic the system, the Islamic Revolution, to thank for her education. And the reporter asked, well, why? She said, well, because if there hadn't been an Islamic Revolution, my father would never have allowed me to go to college. And because in the culture that she lived under the Shah, her father would have considered it too dangerous to send his daughter to college because she wouldn't have been segregated, she would have been in a dorm where potentially she could have a boyfriend, potentially she would be subject to the temptations of sex and so on and so forth. And he would never have allowed her to go to college. So she said she owed her education. Those are things that, you know, it sounds crazy, and it still doesn't mean that women should be segregated. It still doesn't mean that women should have to wear the hijab and they shouldn't be able to have boyfriends. But we should bear that in mind in terms of what the population thinks of as a democracy. That woman, for example, who was interviewed by the Financial Times, probably wants all the freedoms that you're talking about, but probably also wants a certain Islamic culture to be adhered to by society, if not by the government, by society, and perhaps not imposed, but society should be cautious about the way— one of the problems with the Shah, for example, for religious people, one of the reasons Khomeini and the religious religious leaders were able to convince the population to rise up against the Shah was that there was a belief that not only was he a servant of the West, but— and not only was it a very politically repressive place and there was, you know, political parties were outlawed and you couldn't be an activist of any kind, but he also tried to modernize the country too quickly, that he tried to impose Western culture on Iran too quickly. And for a lot of religious families, that meant keeping their daughters at home, keeping their wives at home because they didn't want to be exposed to this culture. So, for them, the idea of a religious theocracy was like, theocracy was great. So, we have to bear in mind that those elements exist in Iran, and so it's a very long answer to your question, probably not even an answer to your question, but I think it boils down to, you know, what do we mean by democracy? Democratic principles, I think the Iranian people would agree that almost everything that we think of as democratic democratic they would like to see in Iran as well. I'll just— oh, well, you actually had your hand up first, and then I'll go to you. Why do you think the United States government feels so threatened by the idea of Iran having elections? It's a good question, too. I'm not sure that the United States does feel threatened. I think the United States feels— I don't think the United States feels it's a national security issue for the United States. Iran does not have ICBMs. It could never deliver a nuclear weapon to the United States. But we have interests in the region, and I think that the way we see it is from a national security standpoint is that our allies in the region, and it's not just Israel, it's the Gulf States, it's Saudi Arabia, they feel threatened by a more powerful Iran. They don't want a more powerful Iran. And what nuclear weapons does for a country, first of all, it immunizes you against attack. Pretty much, which since we're always saying we could bomb them any time, we don't want that to be taken off the table. Once they have nuclear weapons, we can't say we're going to bomb you. And secondly, it just gives a feeling of, a sense of power that you could push your way around the region. And we already have other issues with Iran. Syria was one thing that you brought up. Hezbollah and Hamas and support for Islamic Jihad. So there's all those issues that I think the United States looks at it and says, well, all of our allies don't want Iran to be that powerful. Yes, it doesn't affect us. It certainly doesn't affect us in Santa Barbara. It would never affect us in Santa Barbara. Well, I shouldn't say never, but the Iranians just don't have the technology to start a war with the United States. But it does affect our regional position. So that's why we don't want them to have it. And of course, then the Israeli question is another question too. If Israel doesn't want us to have— doesn't want Iran to have it, then we don't want them to have it. [Speaker] So my question would be, how do nations go about kind of believing in the fear they have due to past historical experiences, kind of overcoming that fear to have dialogue? [Speaker:Hooman Majd] It's a really good question. I'm not sure I have an answer. I think that— Somebody in the philosophy department should answer that, not me. I don't know. I mean, it's probably why I'm not a politician and I don't have a job, is because I view things as pretty simple. It's like, you know, if people sit down and talk their problems over, they should be able to resolve anything really without resorting to violence. But it seems that that never happens. And in the specific case of Iran, it seems that we have not been willing to sit down and talk to them, or they've not been willing to sit down and talk with us. It's childish behavior that it doesn't matter how old you are, it seems like people still go back to kindergarten and like the sandbox. I think if we eliminate that aspect of international relations, that aspect of I'm bigger than you, I'm tougher than you, And one of the interesting things that America sometimes says— when I say America says that, I mean American leaders say. George Bush said this. His father said it. It was like, we don't apologize. America never has to apologize for anything. Well, what does that mean? I mean, you kill someone, you're not going to apologize? Well, no, we don't have to apologize for that. It was an accident, but we're not going to apologize for it. What, we're not going to apologize for the My Lai Massacre? We're not going to apologize for, you know, wedding parties we've bombed out of existence in Afghanistan? No, we don't apologize. We just pay them off. We just, you know, cash. But the idea that we don't apologize is already a problem, that we have nothing to apologize for. I think the U.S. has a lot to apologize for. I think Iran has a lot to apologize for. Iran has plenty to apologize for. They should apologize for holding 52 American hostages for 444 days against their will for no real reason other than domestic internal politics and also international relations. It should apologize for what it's done to its own people, certainly in the last 4 years, but even over the 34 years. That's a big problem for me, that people just aren't willing to sit down and say, you know what, Cap, sorry I did that. That was wrong. We as people, when 2 people interact, we're usually willing to apologize. Husbands and wives can tell you You hear this all the time. Your parents will probably tell you, you have to apologize sometimes. You have to say I'm sorry. If you don't say you're sorry, you're not going to have dinner that night. And that's true whether you're a kid or whether you're in a marriage or just in a relationship with a girlfriend. So I think that sometimes countries have to be a little bit more human like that and not act like we're just the tough guy on both sides. But so, as I said, I think it's better It's a question better answered by someone in the philosophy department than me, but I think that my view is that it comes from dialogue, it comes from being able to speak to each other. And when you speak to each other, you tend to understand the other side. I mean, if it wasn't me speaking to Santa Barbara City College, if it was President Rouhani saying some of these same things to President Obama in a room in the Oval Office over a cup of coffee, I think that things would be solved much more quickly. Quickly. I'm not saying I know everything, but I'm just saying that I think, you know, he would say many of the things that I've said. I believe he would say that, and President Obama would listen and say, "Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, you didn't like the way you were treated before. Okay, I can see that." [Speaker] Well, the fact that Israel has made it very clear that if Iran gets a bomb, then hard feelings of the past that doesn't eliminate Iran's potential for ever building a bomb is to nuke the place and kill 20 million people. That's the only way you can do it. I mean, people know how to build a bomb and they have the capacity to build the infrastructure even if we bomb it out of existence today, they have the capacity to do that. So what are you gonna do? You're gonna kill every scientist, every nuclear physicist, you're gonna get rid of all their industrial manufacturing base so they can never manufacture a centrifuge How much you get? You know, it's practically impossible. So, I think the Iranians want that capacity. They want to have the ability if they choose to make that decision, but I don't think the decision is soon or on the horizon.

One last question and then remember we have a reception for you downstairs. Yes, please speak up.

I was just going to ask, the advancements in anti-missile technologies, Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I don't know anything about military hardware or I know very little about military hardware. And I don't know what happens if you have an anti-missile system that intercepts a nuclear weapon. Does that mean that the nuclear weapon goes— an ICBM with a nuclear warhead, does that mean that it gets blown up in the sky? And does that mean the ground underneath gets showered with radio— I don't know. I don't know that answer. But if there were a way to— if there was like a Superman who would grab the missile and then throw it out in space, then yeah, I think that would make nuclear weapons pointless at that point. But I don't think we're there yet. And I don't— as I said, I really don't know the answer in terms of whether— Iron Dome is effective against conventional. I don't know if it's effective against— if there's anybody here who has any kind of military knowledge.

It's probably not going to explode midair. Yeah, you're not going to have that.

Okay, so there's your answer. You didn't need to ask me. Probably not. Yeah, probably not. But you hope it doesn't explode midair. Yeah. But I don't think anything— but I don't think there is a failsafe defense system against missiles. I mean, everything— nothing is 100% anyway. Sure, if it were 100%, I'm sure nobody would care if anybody had nuclear weapons. If you could have that, yeah. I'd put one in my house. All right, thank you very much. Thank you.