I was dozing in a bus headed down Iran鈥檚 north-south highway one hot spring day in 2016 when our guide suggested I look out the window. The landscape had been flat and dusty for hours, but suddenly I was face-to-face with an enormous, snow-capped mountain.
鈥淲hat鈥檚 that doing here?鈥 I exclaimed.
The answer no doubt lay in the mists of geological time, but our guide 鈥 a former military officer 鈥 knew what this mile-high monstrosity was currently doing here: enriching uranium to weapons-grade quality. We were in Natanz, then Iran鈥檚 leading nuclear weapons lab. The mountain had been hollowed out to conceal the enrichment project and protect it from foreign attack.
I was reminded of Nantaz the other day when U.S. planes dropped 30,000-pound 鈥渂unker buster鈥 bombs on it and two other nuclear weapons research sites. One of those, coincidentally, I鈥檇 visited on another trip: the charming ancient city of Isfahan. For a country that Americans have been conditioned to fear and despise in recent years, Iran is a great place to be a tourist.
Though the three targeted facilities were not destroyed, the attacks marked the largest escalation yet in President Donald Trump鈥檚 campaign to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear-armed power. The bombing also signaled a major deterioration in relations between the two countries that, in another time, would more likely be friends.
Iran has long been itching to join the elite club of nuclear-armed nations, but the country was persuaded by the U.S. and its allies in 2015 to mothball any enrichment efforts and allow international inspections of its nuclear sites. In exchange, long-standing economic sanctions against Iran were lifted and frozen assets abroad were returned.
Then Trump scrapped the agreement in 2018 midway through his first presidential term on grounds that Iran was cheating and that lifting sanctions would advance its plans to be a major sponsor of global terrorism. President Joe Biden tried to revive the deal, but by then the Iranians had lost patience with the U.S.
That鈥檚 a pity, since Iranians are more like us 鈥 and less like the rest of the Muslim world 鈥 than you might think.
At least, that鈥檚 what I鈥檝e concluded after spending some time in the country.
To begin with, Iranians are not Arabs. They鈥檙e Persians, heirs to an ancient civilization that dominated art, culture, science and philosophy for millennia. They are also Muslims, though of the religion鈥檚 relatively open-minded Shiite version, rather than the more hardline Sunni persuasion prevalent in Arab states.
English is widely spoken in Iran, and the locals are generous with suggestions about what to see and where to eat. I never heard or even saw the words 鈥淒eath to America鈥 there, even though the phrase has become a mainstay of Iranian political rallies.
鈥淲e are Persians, not Arabs,鈥 a young Iranian explained to me. 鈥淲e have 5,000 years of art and poetry. They chop people鈥檚 heads off.鈥
Iran is three times the geographical size of France with half-again as many people. Iran also contains 10 percent of the world鈥檚 oil reserves and 15 percent of its natural gas, as well as a large industrial sector and a flourishing cultural scene. My wife has brightened our walls and floors with first-rate, relatively inexpensive Iranian paintings and carpets.
What the country doesn鈥檛 have is democracy. Sure, elections there are largely free, but candidates must be approved by Iran鈥檚 actual rulers: the mullahs, those self-appointed Muslim clerics who led the 1979 overthrow of the authoritarian but highly westernized monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
He was replaced by a de facto theocracy where dissent is suppressed and women are second-class citizens 鈥 though they hold 70 percent of all engineering degrees. Indeed, the country turns out roughly as many college graduates every year as the U.S., adjusted for population.
For nearly a half-century, Iran has had one foot in the future and the other in a bucket of theocratic cement. Young people dream of fleeing, and nearly everybody seems to have a relative in California. That state鈥檚 biggest city is known fondly among Iranians worldwide as 鈥淭ehrangeles.鈥 (See the 2003 Oscar-nominated feature 鈥淗ouse of Sand and Fog鈥 starring Ben Kingsley as the patriarch of a family who fled Iran after the fall of the Shah.)
In a normal world, Iran would be the last Muslim country that the U.S. would likely have a problem with. But in the messianic realm of Ali Khamenei, Iran鈥檚 Supreme Leader since the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989, state power has become conflated with God鈥檚 鈥 and wielded with little restraint. Khamenei has followed his predecessor鈥檚 path of anti-Western mischief across the Middle East, including support for the terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah.
It is difficult to judge Khamenei鈥檚 popularity within Iran, where opinion polls are rare. He鈥檚 not exactly Mr. Charisma, and Iranians have taken to the streets to protest his enforcement of mandatory women鈥檚 head-coverings and diesel-fuel price increases. There is little chance he鈥檒l be overthrown, but at 86, a bad head cold could lead to retirement.
Iran鈥檚 politics are so opaque that the next leader could drag his country even further into the thickets of theocracy and tradition without much pushback. Or a hypothetical successor could launch a new Persian Renaissance of intellectual energy and diplomatic ingenuity 鈥 unlikely but not impossible.
Most experts would probably bet on the former scenario. But my heart longs for an Iran where women are valued, disillusioned youth return home, tour buses are full of astonished Americans and, around every corner, there鈥檚 a snow-capped mountain full of nonnuclear surprises.