In the epic poem The Book of Kings, the 11th-century Iranian bard Ferdowsi warns of how "Unrighteous thought and the turn of days / Combine to seal one's fate." Ferdowsi's verse expresses the ethical injunction, deeply ingrained in Persian culture, to speak truthfully in times of personal and collective crisis. Today, as the clerical regime in Tehran grows ever more repressive at home and defiant abroad, Iranian-Americans have a special responsibility to speak out clearly on the moral stakes at the heart of the U.S.-Iran conflict.
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Unfortunately, the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) -- the most visible organization claiming to represent the community -- has never fulfilled this duty. By cynically exploiting Iranian-Americans' deepest fears and by misrepresenting the community's true aspirations, NIAC promotes an Iran policy agenda that shortchanges both Iranians and Americans.
Consider NIAC research director Reza Marashi's recent Foreign Policy article explaining why Iranian-Americans, in contrast with their Iraqi counterparts, are "so keen on dialogue with the mullahs who rule Iran." The first thing to note about this argument is that it is based on false premises. Reflecting on his own limited personal experiences, Marashi argues that though they "deeply resent the Iranian regime, [Iranian-Americans] prefer U.S. policies that emphasize engagement and de-escalation."
Widely available survey data belie these anecdotal findings. A 2011 Zogby poll commissioned by the Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans (PAAIA), a nonpartisan organization that refrains from taking positions on foreign-policy issues, asked Iranian-Americans to identify their two top priorities for U.S. policy toward Iran. An overwhelming majority (63 percent) chose "promotion of human rights and democracy," while 30 percent chose "promoting regime change." In contrast, only 14 percent identified "preventing an American military strike against Iran" as one of their top two priorities. Yet Marashi and his NIAC colleagues have spent most of the last decade raising funds by instilling anxiety among members about the latter.
Marashi also distorts Iranian-Americans' ultimate vision for their homeland, claiming that they "strongly prefer to use the rule of law to alter … the Iranian government's behavior." Marashi's clever choice of words here masks the reality on the ground in Iran, where there is no rule of law as such to accommodate meaningful reforms. As Marashi himself concedes, opposition figures within the Iranian establishment repeatedly sought, throughout the 1990s and during the 2009 presidential election, to liberalize the regime. They failed. Perhaps that's why the Zogby/PAAIA poll found that 67 percent believe that "Iran should be a secular democracy," while only 6 percent believe that "any form of an 'Islamic Republic' would work well in Iran."
To suppress Iranian-Americans' overwhelming appetite for fundamental change in Iran, Marashi resorts to scaremongering. Evoking "the ghosts of America's neoconservative past," he predicts the rise of a new generation of Ahmed Chalabi-style exile politicians eager to lead "foreign armies into the motherland." Marashi thus frames the hundreds of thousands of Iranian-Americans who prefer a more robust U.S. policy toward the Khomeinist regime as national turncoats and opportunists. These smear tactics reveal Marashi's lack of moral imagination. Rather than pursuing policies that would empower a generation of Iranian (and Iranian-American) Vaclav Havels and Aung San Suu Kyis, he is bent on intimidating the community.
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