Reforming the U.S. Iran relationship

My interview with Mehran Kamrava was published in the June 2nd issue of Shukan Daiyamondo. Kamrava, who chairs the political science at Cal-State Northridge and has written a dozen books on the Middle East, had recently come back from doing research in Iran, and gave me a much different perspective on the country’s political climate than what I was reading here.

Kamrava noted, for instance, that Iran “is a theocracy with some very glaring secular features. In implementing economic and industrial development, there is really no viable Islamic model to follow, Also, the Iranian political system is an evolving one and it really hasn’t assumed its final shape.”

He said there is much debate within the country over whether Iran will become an Islamic republic in name but a secular state in practice, a la China, which is politically Communist but practically capitalist. And he was optimistic that the hardliners currently in power would lose their grip on it, particularly if the United States would shift its diplomatic efforts, which has subsequently begun to happen.

For more, Kamrava World Voice.