What to do about Iran?

Ramazani
Photo by Dan Addison

His more than 50 years as an educator, a thinker, a writer and a trusted advisor have more than earned Ruhi Ramazani his unofficial title of Dean of Iranian foreign policy studies in the United States. This work, and the more than 8,000 students he has sent into the world, has in many ways defined his life.

Ruhi Ramazani’s scholarship has also been the reason for one of his life’s greatest failures. After ten years, he has proven to be nothing but terrible at retirement. With enough accomplishments, awards and publications to fill ten careers, he could easily have ridden off into the spectacular sunsets that play nightly through the windows of the Ivy home he shares with his wife Nesta (who is herself a noted writer and intellectual).

A recent mild January afternoon found Ruhi there, doing what comes naturally … thinking, sharing and teaching. With the rhetoric between the nation of his birth and of his life being ratcheted up daily, there is certainly no shortage of topics and he is still consulted by organizations and publications alike to share his insight.

“The real issue,” he said, “is what do we do about Iranian power and influence? And is it possible to contain, especially with the assumption of the Middle East as monolithic, which is so flawed?”

The dates and situations may change, but to Ruhi, the fundamental disconnects that render them insoluble are ever the same. “I wrote a letter in the 1970’s trying to emphasize that U.S. policy direction is wrong in the sense that the bureaucracy is inclined to compartmentalize Middle East problems. We as a nation have missed a great deal about the rest of the world, and in particular the third world, because we make assumptions about these countries that have nothing really to do with realities.”

He points to President Bush’s latest Middle East journey. “The notion that you go to the Middle East and you line up the Sunni Arabs and Israel against the ‘enemy’ Iran … is full of error in terms of our not being able or willing to empathize, to put ourselves in other people’s shoes for our self interest or enlightened self interest.” Little effort, he says, is put into studying and understanding Iran’s 3,000-5,000 year history and a fierce survival instinct honed by invasion after invasion dating all the way back to the days of Alexander the Great.

“We spent billions of dollars learning about the Soviet Union in an effort to know our enemies, including right here at this university with the creation of a Slavic Studies program. We have done none of that in any part of the Muslim world or in Iran or any one of these countries.”

While billions more dollars will be spent and countless more lives lost in search of answers to the region’s conflicts, Ruhi points out that we are ignoring a highly pedigreed blueprint handed down long ago. “The blindness of this thing, thinking that we can take a Jeffersonian doctrine and apply it across the world…”

One of the first scholars ever to apply Jeffersonian philosophies to the region, his edited book Democratizing The World: Thomas Jefferson’s Separation of Religion and State is due this spring from Palgrave. At a recent talk at Monticello, Ruhi was asked to consider what its original owner might think about the notion of putting military power behind these ideas. “He had the hope that our example of liberty and democracy would become worldwide. But you read him and see that he said that will have to come from within a society, that a society has got to be prepared to embrace freedom of religion and democracy.”

Instead, he said, the current administration’s policy of increased pressure has played into the perceived “enemy’s” hands. “Every pressure we have applied has made Ahmadinejad better received in his own country.  Because when it comes to the perceptions of the Iranian people that their independence is the question and not anything else, the left, the right, and the middle will all coalesce.”

As a man who has regularly traveled the world to share his ideas and insights, Ruhi has been particularly struck by the reactions he has received in recent years from international colleagues. They point, he says, to the fact that we as a nation have lost a critical part of our identity.

“We have lost legitimacy and legitimacy in the world and domestically both are important. People don’t sometimes connect that legitimacy, being respected, has anything to do with power.  It has a lot to do with power.”

However, after devoting half-a-century to using the power of ideas to bridge the seemingly widening gap between these two countries, Ruhi is not about to give up hope. “There is hope, but not based on false assumptions. There is hope in the sense of thinking about the world in terms of the oneness of mankind. Look, there has to be hope because otherwise I would give up. I am almost 80 years old, and I don’t’ give up because it has to be done.”