Peace of Mind

[March 19th, 2008]

Some Americans may remember that March 20 marks the first full day of spring.

But Thursday is also the fifth anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq—and the first full day of the Persian New Year (known as Norouz or “New Day”) for millions worldwide. Those millions include an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 Iranians in the Portland area.

Many of those Iranian émigrés are breathing easier since the once-worrisome threat of a U.S. war on Iran seems to be vanishing along with the Bush administration—like so much neocon dust in the wind.

“Three or four months ago, you could see the community was very, very tense,” says Ahmad Mostafavi, producer of My Iran TV, an hourlong Farsi-language news and cultural program broadcast Saturday evenings on Portland Community Access Network Channel 11. “Lots of people were really afraid that they would wake up, ‘OK, Bush was going to attack Iran.’”

Mostafavi says some Iranians supported an attack on Iran at the time of the Iraqi invasion in 2003. They hoped that would let them return to their former lives and positions before the 1978-79 Islamic revolution. (Mostafavi and others declined to identify anyone who once advocated war on Iran because it would be dangerous for those people and their families, who would be considered “traitors” to the Islamic Republic.)

Instead, the Iraq war exposed the gaping flaw in the logic of invading Iran.

“They thought that by attacking Iran the regime was going to go away,” says Mostafavi, a 57-year-old professor of computer information systems and programming. “They never ever realized that attacking a country could have the consequences of what we have in Iraq right now, that everything is going to be destroyed.

Most local Iranian émigrés have opposed a war on Iran from the beginning, instead urging increased ties to the international community and truly open elections to achieve the regime change some sought through war.

One group comprising 70 percent non-Iranians, the American Iranian Friendship Council, helped draft a resolution passed unanimously March 21, 2007, by the Portland City Council “that challenges the possibility of a new war in Iran.”

The resolution made Portland only the second U.S. city, after Berkeley, Calif., to pass such an antiwar measure. Since then, at least three other cities have taken similar action.

Tensions over a possible U.S. strike on Iran have decreased somewhat for local Persians since the start of 2008. Most attribute that to the lame-duck status of the Bush administration, an overextended U.S. military, and especially the December 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate, or NIE, reporting Iran had stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

“We can’t rule [an attack] out, but for the time being, we feel the chance is low,” says Davood Fatehi, host of the hourlong, Sunday morning Farsi-language program Persian Art & Music on KBOO-FM. “But something could happen tomorrow.”