N Interview by Dr. Ali Khazaee, Editor-In-Chief, the Reader, with Dr. Antony T. Sullivan

n Interview by Dr. Ali Khazaee, Editor-in-Chief, The Reader, with Dr.

Antony T. Sullivan, Senior Fellow, The Fund for American Studies,

Washington, D.C. 20009

QUESTION: You have probably heard about Iranian hospitality. But some foreigners may not know that we love foreigners. In fact, we treat foreigners as guests. Let this be a message of friendship from the Iranian people to the people of America. How do you think that we can get the people closer to each other so that we can remove the misunderstandings that politicians have created?

ANSWER: Your question concerning the enormous hospitality of Iranians reflects the reality that I experienced not only in my most recent visit to Iran, in early December 2004, but also what I encountered in my last visit, long ago, in 1965. When I told Americans that I was about to visit Iran again, they commiserated with me, indicating that they really thought I was putting my life in danger. Since my return to the United States from Teheran and

1 Mashad, I have informed numerous Americans that the only danger to my life in Iran was the enormous volume of food that my wonderful Iranian hosts piled before me! When I tell them that, Americans tend to look blankly at me, not quite sure whether I am joking or serious. Today, the challenge for both Iranians and Americans is indeed to get to know each other firsthand. Given the unfortunate political realities that exist, that will not be easy.

One step that Iran could take to encourage American visitors would be to simplify visa procedures. These are now onerous, and may discourage even those Americans who obtain American authorization to come to Iran from making a visit. Another might be to make adjustments in the Iranian dress code as applied to foreign females so that while modest dress would of course be required, wearing of the hijab by American women visiting Iran might be made optional. Finally, it would be helpful if Iranians in Mashad and elsewhere were to stay in touch with me and my American colleagues who visited Iran with me, in order jointly to explore how more people-to- people contact between our two countries might be encouraged. Surely, that is a task of the greatest importance.

2 QUESTION: President Bush has referred to Iran as part of the “axis of evil.” Obviously, this is a hostile term. To what extent do you think that

President Bush’s success in the second presidential campaign was due to his warmongering policies in the Middle East? What gave him the advantage over his rival in spite of all the mess he has created outside of America?

ANSWER: Americans today are terrified of terrorism, and have come to the conclusion that Islam is the engine that produces this scourge. The memory of the taking of American hostages in Teheran in 1979 remains fresh.

Since 9/11, Muslims in general and Iranians in particular, especially because of the American conviction that Iran is now in the process of developing nuclear weapons, have come to constitute America’s “Great Satan.” The war now raging in Iraq (and the beheadings of Americans and others there by self-proclaimed “Muslims”) give Americans nightmares. Since most

Americans know nothing about the Islamic world, and have never spoken to a Muslim in their lives, they find it easy to believe a President who argues that confrontation with the Islamic world is the only way to prevent another

9/11. In other words, a majority of Americans does not agree that President

Bush’s policies constitute “warmongering.” Rather, people are convinced that these policies are the only way that the security of the United States

3 against further terrorist attack can be enhanced. There is no doubt that this

American conviction contributed to his reelection. Personally, I believe that the policies of President Bush are radically misguided, but that does not alter the fact that most Americans are of a very different mind.

Nevertheless, the fear of terrorism, and the foreign policy of the Bush administration, are not the only reasons why President Bush was reelected.

One important reason for his reelection is that Senator John Kerry ran a very poor campaign. Mr.Kerry attempted to “outbush Bush,” a sure recipe for failure (why should Americans buy an imitation when they already have the real thing?). But much more important in President Bush’s victory is the fact that American domestic issues proved to be of decisive concern once

Americans got inside the polling booth. By reelecting President Bush,

Americans demonstrated their steadfast opposition to such social innovations as gay marriage, abortion, and radical secularism generally. The

United States is a religious country, and such societal changes as these are not accepted by a majority of Americans. This sort of radicalism has long been associated with the Democratic Party, and Senator Kerry paid the political price for that. What is clear is that none of this had anything to do either with terrorism or with U.S. policy in the Islamic world.

4 QUESTION: How do you analyze the power structure in the Bush administration? Does the administration still enjoy the support of traditional

Republicans?

ANSWER: As he begins his second term, President Bush continues to be surrounded by two ideological groups. The first is made up of what are called “neoconservatives.” These ideologues are largely Jewish, strongly pro-Israeli, and aggressively militarist in their approach to the rest of the world. They have been the great advocates of “regime change,” first in Iraq and now in Iran. There is nothing “conservative” about them.

Neoconservatives were dominant in the Department of Defense during the first Bush administration, and with the imminent departure of Secretary of

State Colin Powell they promise to also control the Department of State in the second. The other ideological group consists of American Christian fundamentalists. These Christian fundamentalists are ideologically intolerant, fanatically pro-Israeli (quite unlike most mainstream American

Christians), and politically very powerful (they have far more followers among Americans than the neoconservatives can ever dream of having).

5 Given this reality, Christian fundamentalists may constitute a considerably bigger threat to world peace than do the neoconservatives.

I would define a “traditional” Republican as one whose world view has been shaped by such Western thinkers as Edmund Burke, Eric Voegelin,

Gerhart Niemeyer, and Russell Kirk. Such traditional Republicans have never had any use for the neoconservatives. Unfortunately, some of these traditional Republicans have recently been captured by the fundamentalist

Christian right. Nevertheless, there are still many other traditional

Republicans who are today grouped around the new journal of opinion, The

American Conservative. To understand how intellectually significant traditional Republicanism still is, one can do no better than to read The

American Conservative online. If Iranians visit its website, they will discover that this magazine is leading the American opposition to any strike against Iran by the Bush administration.

QUESTION: In the West, not only common people but also the intellectuals and social theorists and thinkers believe that what is generally known as

Western thought, in all its social, philosophic, and ethical manifestations, is perfect. I am not going to deny the value of this collection of ideas which is

6 in fact the legacy of human reason throughout centuries, but I think, as a result of the glorification of these Western congeries of ideas, there is a kind of cultural arrogance in the West which is blind to the values of other civilizations. What do you think about this? Are Western societies as desirable as this pride in Western civilization suggests?

ANSWER: Perhaps what you say was, at one time, true. But today I must disagree with the premise of your specific questions. Far from any idealization of Western thought and values, Western thinkers over the last three decades, especially in the United States, have attempted to

“deconstruct,” or destroy, the canon of “Great Books” that explicates and endorses the particular virtues of the West since antiquity. Rather than extolling anything about the West, academic deconstructionists have attempted to destroy what generations of Western thinkers have wrought.

These deconstructionists, or “new barbarians,” perhaps now constitute the majority of intellectuals in departments of the social sciences and humanities in major American universities. It may be noteworthy that one way the neoconservatives got their start was by taking positions against the excesses of such tenured radicals. In this regard, I think especially of Professor Allan

Bloom’s book, The Closing of the American Mind, which since its

7 publication in 1988 has served as a rallying point against the deconstructionists for both neoconservatives and many Republican traditionalists. The image you paint of a confident and homogeneous West, united in support of a civilization that it considers perfect, is flawed.

However, were you to confine your assertion merely to the neoconservatives and some of their former Cold Warrior fellow travelers, you would be absolutely correct.

Western civilization, like all civilizations, has major problems. The genius of the West is that it has been able to recognize and correct many of these flaws through utilization of its own internal resources. The abolition of slavery is one case in point. The great question today, in an age of international terrorism and domestic panic, may be whether or not the West in general and the United States in particular will be able to continue to rectify their failures. Likewise, in this regard, one might inquire whether the

Islamic world will finally be able to effectively address the assorted and serious shortcomings that have beset it in the modern period.

Culture-traditional culture-is important. Inside all cultures, one learns about what the greatest minds of the tradition have said through an

8 encounter with the particular tradition in all of its genres: the purely rational, the literary or poetical, and the inspired or revealed writings. The goal today, whether in the Islamic world or in the West, should be to preserve and understand the relevant tradition by reflecting on how those in earlier times thought about questions that seem always to be with us: the nature of human beings, the question of good versus bad conduct as individuals and with others in society, and the relationship in which we stand to the world around us—the natural and divine world. That project is one that the best minds in both East and West may need to undertake today as perhaps rarely before.

QUESTION: Was Samuel Huntington’s article on the clash of civilizations prophetic? Do you think Huntington has been used correctly or has he been misunderstood by the Bush administration?

ANSWER: Professor Huntington has been profoundly misunderstood not only by the Bush administration but by many public policy analysts and university scholars in the United States. The problem is that there are several “different” Samuel Huntingtons, in argument and vigorous disagreement with each other. In simplest terms, the Huntington of 1993,

9 when his seminal article entitled “The Clash of Civilizations?” was published in the leading American journal of international relations, Foreign

Affairs, is a very different thinker from the Huntington of 1997 who published an article in the same journal entitled “The Erosion of American

National Interests.” Between these two essays, Professor Huntington in

1996 published a book entitled The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. This book corrected some important assertions that

Huntington had made in 1993, and paved the way for his rejection in 1997 of his earlier thesis that a clash between Western and Islamic civilization is likely.

Note that even in 1993, a question mark followed the title of

Huntington’s article. Nevertheless, in that 1993 piece Huntington did suggest that an epic clash between the West and the world of Islam would probably shape the geopolitics of the 21st century. However, by 1997,

Huntington baldly rejected this thesis, stating that “[The] United States lacks any single country or threat against which it can convincingly counterpose itself. Islamic fundamentalism is too diffuse and too remote geographically.” Thereby, Huntington categorically repudiated his earlier

10 hypothesis concerning the likelihood of civilizational conflict between the

Islamic world and the West.

But note: all of this was before 9/11 2001. The catastrophic events of that day changed the United States, and the world. Specifically, for many

American foreign policy makers, the disaster of September 11, 2001, resurrected Professor Huntington’s 1993 article as a persuasive explanation for the way the world is now likely to work. Yes, Huntington’s 1993 essay does today constitute required reading for many in the Bush administration.

So the ultimate tragedy is this: although Professor Huntington himself had repudiated his thesis of an impending clash of civilizations by 1997, the events of 9/11 2001 gave his 1993 essay an influence over American foreign policy formulation that it had never possessed before. And for that we all have Usama bin Laden to thank. The corridors of history are indeed cunning.