American Soft Power Working In Iran?

According to a recent New York Times article, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad experienced major setbacks in the partial election results that have thus come forth. Likely having no bearing whatsoever on the aforementioned piece of information, but of particular interest, is that just days before this setback, Ahmadinejad wrote a letter to the American people in an attempt to reach out to them and make a clear distinction between his qualms with the American government and its people, who, in the recent 2006 mid-term elections, turned against President George W. Bush’s policy of being indefinitaly comitted to an American military presence in Iraq.

The major beneficiary of the votes lost by Ahmadinejad’s hard-line government was Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a somewhat confusing figure in Iranian politics. Rafsanjani, the leader of the Kargozaran party, has, over the past several decades, been walking somewhat of a political tight rope between the conservative fundamentalist politics that have dominated the Middle East since the fall of the Shah and pragmatist philosophies advocating free market reform.

These policies of reform have, in the last several years, overtaken his party’s conservative stance as a result of Ahmadinejad’s boisterous anti-Zionism, which was trumpeted earlier this week when he and several other “free speech advocates,” such as David Duke and a group of ultra-Orthodox Jews, congregated to denounce the state of Israel and the historical legitimacy of the Holocaust. But to suggest that anti-Zionism is a contraversial stance in the Middle East would be a bit ridiculous. When it comes down to it, it’s about money. With Iran facing possible U.N. and U.S. economic sanctions, the people of Iran seem to be turning against Middle Eastern insularity and fundamentalism, desiring modernization and free market reform to prevent their country from suffering any further economic hardship.

So, the question is, is American foreign policy responsible for this change in the Iranian body politik? I think that the answer is, to a degree, yes. But, I think to a larger degree, the prospects of a free market are tantalizing to a country that has suffered economic hardship for decades. We as Americans tend to see countries, particularly Iraq, from a “foreign policy” perspective, focusing on what leaders do rather than how individuals act. And this isn’t just an issue with American, you could say that it’s an issue with how every country perceives the other. What I am trying to get is that we shouldn’t over-emphasize the strength of American soft-power, especially in such a volatile, anti-American region as the Middle East. But, I am all for economic reform, and while it’s likely that Ahmadinejad will be reelected, it seems like a positive step forward towards a less impoverished Iran, whatever the political consequences for that may be.