By SALLY BUZBEE, Associated Press Writer Sat Jan 27, 2:33 PM ET
Shahryar Eivazzadeh runs a small software startup in Tehran, spends his spare time blogging and feels little affection for Iran's current regime. But when tensions with the U.S. are mentioned, he comes to his country's defense.
The West has a wrong image of Iran, he says — "It's a very black-and-white, a very simplistic view," the 31-year-old said Saturday.
He and other young Iranians warned at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland that the growing U.S.-Iranian standoff and fears of U.S. military strikes could strengthen the hard-liners who now control their government.
Almost all made clear their discomfort with hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and said average Iranians crave more openness with the West. But they also stressed the strong role that national pride, and desire for Western respect, play in Iran.
For that reason, Western pressure will not create impetus for change as the U.S. administration may hope, but instead could coalesce support around continued hardline policies, they warned.
"Even the prospect of an attack on Iran can unite the most radical reformists" with the hardline government, said Mohammedreza Jalaeipour, an Iranian student at Oxford University in Britain.
The U.S. has accused the Islamic regime of seeking a nuclear bomb, and the tense standoff over the nuclear program led the U.N. Security Council to impose targeted sanctions last year. Iran says its program is for energy only.
The rising tensions also have been fueled by Ahmadinejad's harsh rhetoric, especially his questioning of the Holocaust and attacks on Israel's right to exist.
But Vali Nasr, a scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations in the United States, said most Iranians do not hold such views. Ahmadinejad won the presidency because of a populist backlash against domestic economic woes, not support for his hardline politics, he said.
Many of those here said they felt that the key issue was for the United States and Iran to talk directly — something they have rarely done since breaking diplomatic relations after the 1979 Islamic Revolution and the U.S. hostage crisis.
The U.S. and Iran made overtures during the years when reformist former President Mohammad Khatami was in power in the late 1990s, but they came to nothing.
Jalaeipour expressed the frustration many Iranians now feel, telling one U.S. official here that the United States "helped create Ahmadinejad, by not honoring Khatami."
Khatami, now a frequent Western speaker, lamented the "wall" between the U.S. and Iran during separate talks at the Davos session. But he also pointed to the issue of pride, saying his country can only agree to "just, equal talks" without preconditions. The U.S. wants Iran to suspend uranium enrichment before any talks.
The nuclear issue is inextricably tied up with national pride, many speakers here said — a symbol of the country's rising scientific and technological know-how.
But they stressed that their country is more complex than the West believes, more diverse politically and more democratic.
Sixty-five percent of Iranians are younger than 25 and thus were born after the Islamic revolution, noted Mohammad Hossein Adeli, a former Khatami adviser and ambassador who now heads a think tank.
"You're facing a new generation that would like to engage with the world," he said.
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