What does iran think of america

As required by the government, we had arranged for a travel agent to meet us and shepherd us around. He was a nice guy even though he liked to scam our money; we kept being put up in two-star hotels after we paid him for four.

We were repeatedly flirted with or propositioned by women. The desk clerks at our hotel asked our fixer about our long beards, which we had grown out in order to blend in in rural Afghanistan. Along with our beards we had acquired the traditional white robes worn by conservative Afghans. Our fixer suggested we had a unique opportunity to smuggle ourselves into the haram forbidden section of the Imam Reza shrine so we could check out the stunning Timurid architecture.

If anyone talked to us, our fixer advised, pretend not to understand them. Muslims come from all over the world to pray there so we could pretend to speak a different language. Worshipers circled the tomb of the 9th century Shiite martyr Ali al-Ridha seemingly in a trance but, whenever someone spent too long in the center an attendant lightly dipped a pink feather duster strung from a pole onto the offender to ask him to move on.

The clerks repeatedly entreated them to report the loss to the police but the Europeans were understandably hesitant. The next day I encountered the pair in the elevator. We flew from Tehran to Istanbul. At our last security checkpoint in Iran airport security personnel ordered us to remove our baggage from the conveyor belt leading to the X-ray machine. There was always a sense of tension that comes with knowing that law-breaking could come with grave consequences.

For the most part, however, we followed the rules. Most of the people we saw obeyed them too, but just barely. The stakes are quite high, given that the Iranian regime seems resolute now in its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Data shows that Iranians are ambivalent toward their own leadership. On the one hand, the assassination of Soleimani united Iranians at a level not seen in decades.

But after the Iranian government shot down a civilian plane, denied it, then finally admitted so, public protests came out in force against the regime. Following the momentum of the Green Movement, many youth in Iran still desire more internal social reform.

The average Iranian has felt the sting of economic sanctions and worries that the government is taking advantage of the situation through corrupt policies. Mobs were paid, police and soldiers were bribed, and the prime minister was driven from office. The Shah of Iran was reinstated.

Mr Byrne says the Shah "clearly felt he owed his remaining in power to the US", and the Americans in turn felt they now had a loyal partner in the region. Over the years, the US pumped a lot of money into the Shah's regime, and he was promoted in the Western press as a staunch ally.

The Shah even received an honorary degree from Harvard. In what became known as the Nixon doctrine, the US effectively deferred to local allies to contain the Soviets. At the same time, coinciding with increasing oil prices, Iran started importing arms from the US at a massive scale.

There is high inflation, there's a big push from the rural areas into urban areas, there's a lot of dislocation". Those who spoke out were often arrested or tortured. If you were lucky you got out," Mr Khalil says. Through the latter part of the s, opposition to the Shah's rule increased dramatically. Mass protests eventually erupted into a revolution in , and the Shah fled to America.

The American reluctance to return the Shah caused outrage, and led to a hostage situation at the US embassy. Some armed students took 52 diplomats hostage, demanding the return of the Shah, who was undergoing cancer treatment. Mr Byrne says it is hard to overstate the impact of the hostage crisis, which "sent shudders throughout the American public".

The Soviets seem to be taking advantage of all this. During the s, the war between Iran and Iraq isolated Iran from the international community, most of whom were supporting and even arming Iraq. In the s there were attempts on both sides for some form of dialogue, but they didn't amount to much. In , when the September 11 terrorist attack devastated the US, Iran again reached out. Iranians are very keen to highlight that their brand of Islam, Shi'ism, had not unleashed this terror on American soil," Professor Ansari says.

During the Obama administration, a nuclear agreement was reached between Iran and the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, including America. The US has since withdrawn from the Iran nuclear deal , and adopted what Mr Byrne calls a "more confrontational approach". Professor Ansari says "of course there are moderates in Iran" — but a lot of them are in prison. Professor Ehteshami says there were three fundamental reasons for Mr Trump's decision to withdraw from the deal.

The first?