THE CONFLICT to its east has presented Iran with a dilemma: whether and how to get involved in the war on terrorism. The Tehran government does not want to be seen as aiding Washington in its attack against a Muslim state, since anti-Americanism is one of the regime's founding myths, and to suddenly and publicly reverse course could undermine its legitimacy. Simply to sit on the sidelines, however, could leave Tehran with no voice in shaping a post-Taliban Afghanistan. Besides, Taliban-controlled Afghanistan has been a mischievous neighbor, and Iranians regard the Taliban itself--in the words of their supreme religious leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei--as an embarrassment to Islam. The backdrop against which Iran's leaders must confront their choices is fraught with contradictions. Officially, Iran and the United States have no diplomatic relations and haven't for 22 years; yet contacts as high as the foreign minister level exist and are increasing. In its public rhetoric, the regime demonizes the United States, yet many high-placed Iranians see a need for rapprochement. In recent years, a variety of regional issues have occasioned contacts between U.S. and Iranian officials. Some of these are not acknowledged; Europe's Arabic-language press, for example, occasionally reports clandestine meetings between American and Iranian officials to discuss Iraq and the different Iraqi opposition groups the two governments support. Other contacts are matters of public record. The State Department, for instance, has called for greater Iranian involvement in settling the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian-occupied enclave in Azerbaijan. More to the point, Iran and the United States are both members of the "6 + 2 group," made up of Afghanistan's immediate neighbors, plus the United States and Russia. Under the auspices of this group, Iranian foreign minister Kamal Kharrazi is, at this writing, due to meet with Secretary of State Colin Powell in New York on November 12, as he met with Powell's predecessor, Madeleine Albright, in September 2000. Moreover, Iran's representative at the U.N., Hadi Nejad-Hosseinian, dined with members of Congress in Washington in mid October. He and other Iranian officials are often granted permission to travel in the United States--in March he spoke at the University of Montana, and Iranian officials have begun participating in senior executive seminars at Harvard University. (American diplomats, by contrast, cannot so much as set foot in Tehran, let alone travel outside the Iranian capital.) Yet even as these meetings take place, Tehran continues its anti-American patter. Less than two weeks ago, Ayatollah Khamenei, Iran's most powerful official, delivered several anti-American speeches. In one, he called negotiations with the United States "against our national interest today." At Isfahan University on November 3, he told students not to give in to the plots of "world arrogance" and asked, "Should we make peace with the enemy?" The chant "Death to America," which was dropped from public rallies and prayer services for the two weeks immediately following the terrorist attacks in the United States, is back as a regular feature of services across the country. And the government created a website and staged a series of public rallies on November4 to commemorate the seizure of the U.S. embassy in 1979. The former embassy, once a military training facility, is now a museum of America's supposed crimes. More and more Iranians recognize that this sort of behavior is not very productive. Some of the same people who 22 years ago were responsible for the hostage crisis now have expressed their sympathy to the victims of terrorism in the United States. And in a backhanded criticism of political hardliners, some have condemned "religious fundamentalism and Taliban-like Islam." One member of parliament, Behzad Nabavi, said that, while seizing the embassy had been beneficial and had protected the Islamic revolution from a possible U.S.-directed coup, times have changed, and normalized ties with the United States are now in order. Another member of parliament, Yadollah Eslami, wrote in the Tehran daily Noruz on November 6, "The question of talks and ties with America must not turn into a taboo." Other Iranian political figures say the time has come for Tehran to interact officially with Washington. At the end of October, member of parliament Gholam Heidar Ebrahim-Bay-Salami said a special Afghan crisis committee had concluded that talks with the United States were in the national interest. Another member of parliament, Meisam Saidi, said Iran has neither permanent friends nor permanent enemies, and it is time to review the country's policies. This alarms Iran's leaders, especially when such views are expressed in public by members of the political elite. The hardline judiciary chief, Ayatollah Mahmud Hashemi-Shahrudi, threatened to take legal action against people who failed to behave in accordance with the official stance on relations with the United States. And in late October, Tehran started jamming shortwave broadcasts by the Persian Services of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and the Voice of America. This is not the first instance of jamming, but it came on the heels of two weeks of intermittent rioting in at least five major cities, in which Iranians of all ages chanted anti-regime slogans and in some cases demanded the return of the monarchy. As a further precaution, the regime is confiscating the illegal satellite receiver dishes by which Iranians receive Persian-language broadcasts from private U.S. stations. Meanwhile, Tehran takes a dim view of U.S. military action in Afghanistan. Before the airstrikes started, Khamenei told a crowd, "We shall not offer any assistance to America and its allies in their attack on Afghanistan." As the crowd chanted "Death to America," Khamenei asked how the United States could seek Iranian assistance in Afghanistan when Americans "are the ones who have always inflicted blows on Iran's interests." And just after the airstrikes began, the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman said, "These attacks--which have been launched regardless of the world public opinion, especially the Muslim nations, and will damage the innocent and oppressed Afghans--are unacceptable." President Hojatoleslam Mohammad Khatami was equally unequivocal in public statements. On October 11 he called America and the Taliban "two sides of the same coin." He explained that Washington's stance--any country that does not join the anti-terrorism coalition supports terrorism--and the Taliban's stance--attacks against the Taliban are attacks against Islam--both exemplify the "false and arrogant judgments" that are the root causes of "violence and terror." This is not to say that Tehran has any fondness for the Taliban, who have massacred members of Afghanistan's Hazara minority, most of whom practice the Shiite Islam that is Iran's state religion. Moreover, the Taliban killed eight Iranian diplomats in August 1998, the narcotics the Taliban smuggle contribute to the soaring addiction rate in Iran, and the refugee flows they cause swell Iran's estimated 25 percent unemployment. These could be among the reasons why, shortly before the air war started, members of the Khatami administration met with Western diplomats in Tehran and urged them to finish the job and eliminate the Taliban. Tehran also responded favorably to a White House request on October 7 to aid any U.S. military personnel who either are forced to land in Iran or whose survival, evasion, resistance, or escape activities takes them there. In theory, the new circumstances created by September 11 should have given the Iranians a chance to loosen the constraints on their relationship with the United States--most of which constraints are of Tehran's making. President Khatami made a favorable impression when he condemned the suicide attacks the day they occurred and conveyed "deep regret and condolences to the American nation." Tehran could build on this. The White House has repeatedly offered to hold a dialogue with Tehran, while noting that there are issues it would like to discuss--Iran's support for terrorism, its violent opposition to the Middle East peace process, and its pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. But in the past, Iran's leaders have refused to engage in such a dialogue and instead have made demands and set preconditions for talks. Today, the unsettled and hostile political environment in Tehran seems to leave Khatami little room to make a positive gesture toward Washington, even in the unlikely event he wanted to. Despite the turmoil produced by September 11, the possibility of a more productive U.S.-Iranian relationship remains up in the air. A. William Samii is a regional analyst at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. November 19, 2001 - Volume 7, Number 10