Psychological warfare between the US and Iran

They finally met for talks, but both sides are ramping up the pressure.

from the May 30, 2007 edition

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There have also been extensive US fleet maneuvers off the Iranian coast, which, though blandly dismissed as routine by the Navy, have captured the attention of the Iranians and been interpreted, perhaps correctly, as part of a US war of nerves against them.

Intriguingly, all this transpired on the eve of Monday's ambassadorial-level talks between the US and Iran in Baghdad. Those talks were confined to discussions about turmoil in Iraq, and not about overall US-Iranian relations. Indeed, major policy shifts by either nation would ordinarily be negotiated at substantially higher diplomatic levels. However, those on the American side who have been urging serious discussion between the two countries argue that the ambassador-to-ambassador meeting could be a forerunner to more-substantive discussions.

Whichever way events play out, it appears that the US, deeply engaged in Iraq, and apparently not eager for military action against Iran, has nevertheless been ramping up the psychological pressure. The Iranians have similarly been stoking things on their side of this war of nerves. Unmoved by UN sanctions, they have defied calls to slow the level of their uranium enrichment. They have provocatively turned to hostage-taking of visiting Iranian-Americans who seem unlikely threats to Iran's stability.

Haleh Esfandiari, director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington went to Iran last year to visit her 93-year-old mother. She was barred from leaving the country, jailed in the notorious Evin prison earlier this month, and accused of trying to undermine the government. Also this month, the Iranians detained Kian Tajbakhsh, an Iranian-American urban planning expert who has worked for the World Bank and is a senior research fellow at the New School in New York. He currently works for the Open Society Institute, a foundation supported by the financier George Soros that encourages democracy around the world. The Iranian Intelligence Ministry charges that he, like Ms. Esfandiari, is engaged in a plot to overthrow the government. A third Iranian-American, Parnaz Azima, a reporter for Radio Farda, the Farsi-language station operated by the United States, has been prevented from leaving Iran and interrogated since January, when her passport was seized.

Reason should dictate that a shooting war is not in the interests of either the US or Iran. But neither does the present posturing suggest the speedy advance of amity.

• John Hughes, a former editor of the Monitor, is a professor of communications at Brigham Young University.

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