“The Iran question.”
An exchange with Muhammad Sahimi.
23 MAY—I first “met” Muhammad Sahimi over the internet after reading the pieces he was publishing a couple of years back on Lobe Log, Jim Lobe’s admirable project that gave shelter to all sorts of interesting voices. Muhammad’s work there was singularly insightful on all topics Iranian, especially the nature of the Iranian opposition—in Tehran, this is to say, and also within the diaspora community. Lobe Log is now folded into Responsible Statecraft: Muhammad has followed it, publishing occasional comment in RS as well as other publications.
It was a pleasure to become friends by way of our email exchanges, and it was a pleasure the other day finally to set eyes on him—although we haven’t, even now, met without quotation marks.
It seemed the right time to ask if we might converse for a Scrum webcast. Our exchange ranged over many topics—the state of current nuclear negotiations in Vienna, Iranian foreign policy, the imminent presidential elections in Iran, the shifting currents within the Iranian opposition—the “real” opposition, as Muhammad calls it, as against the “fake” opposition funded by the State Department and populated by regime-changers, lingering monarchists, and various creatures of American subversion programs. We also spoke of FM Zarif’s long-running efforts (never reported in the Western press) to establish a regional security mechanism through which conflicts can be resolved without recourse to violence or the patronage of outside powers: Middle Eastern solutions to Middle Eastern problems.
Sahimi is a courteous man whose compassion and humanity are impossible to miss, although he is resolutely straight-ahead in his judgments of events and those shaping them. He is a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Southern California and an admirably productive commentator. We spoke via Zoom—Muhammad from his home in L.A., I, per usual, from here in the sentence factory.
— P.L.,
Norfolk, Conn.