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Tehran: `The Great Satan' doesn't live here anymore

You can hear them coming from blocks away -- big, long steel boats rumbling down the road. Chevrolet Impalas, Lincoln Continentals, Mustangs and Camaros.

Rusted American battleships from the 1970s, these old cars still get up to an impressive speed on Tehran's congested streets, forcing smaller cars and motorbikes to make way.

My translator drives a black 1972 Camaro with an emblem from the state of Arkansas bolted on to the rear. I often wonder about the history of his car, and all the others. Who was driving that Buick when it was brand new? Perhaps he was a US military adviser, or an oil engineer or one of the Shah's family friends.

Apart from the dinosaurs with V-8 engines, America doesn't live here anymore. Not since the Shah, with the best that air force dollars could buy, fled into exile in 1979. Shortly after he left, a group of students climbed over the wall of the US embassy and took 52 Americans hostage for 444 days.

Meddling us

It was a spontaneous act without political backing. But in the chaos of those early days after the fall of the Shah, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his aides decided it was too popular to discourage. This was, they said, revenge for Washington's imperial meddling, dating back to the CIA's overthrow of prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh's government in 1953.

As a result, Iran is one of the few countries where there has been no official American presence for more than two decades.

For the two-thirds of the population under 25, the Shah, his US patrons and the revolution only exist in books. And, according to a poll last year, most Iranians would like to move on from the "Great Satan" era. More than 70 percent favor restoring relations with Washington.

One of the men who conducted the poll, Abus Abdi, was the first one over the embassy wall back in 1979.

Now Abdi is in prison for conducting that survey, accused of violating national interests and passing on secrets to Washington.

Abdi, like many of the former student radicals, has grown disillusioned and wants to see an Iranian "reformation" that would end the clerics' divine right to rule.

Who's to blame?

Washington can no longer be blamed for everything that ails Iran. The focus has shifted to the troubled theocracy and the unelected Islamic clerics who run it. That is not to say that a 24-year old trade embargo imposed by Washington has brought Iran's hardline clerics to their knees, though Tehran has definitely paid a high price.

The hardliners in Iran could revive the specter of the "Great Satan" if neo-conservatives in Washington were clumsy enough to provide them with ammunition. A heavy-handed occupation next door in Iraq, military threats against Iran, or clumsy attempts to "promote democracy," could put back the cause of reform for many years.

European governments have been talking to Iran for a while, and that has helped ease the country's isolation and bring in some foreign investment.
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