...Iranians, he went on, understood American pragmatism better than the American people themselves, not being fooled by the official reasoning. The war in Iraq wasn't about terrorism, he said, although it was bound to make terrorism worse: everybody knew that. It wasn't even about oil.
'You need a war to sell stuff,' he said cheerfully. 'Arms and computer systems, mostly. Construction. Roads, factories, and all that. That's how the Americans maintain their economy. Big economies need wars every few years, just to survive.'
It was refreshing to hear this from a citizen of the very country that America was now poised to attack. Yet it was characteristically broad-minded. In the course of all these journeys around the country I had never heard a word against Americans; only expressions of a kind of resignation, and deep sadness at the contemporary American perception of Iran.
I asked him whether he believed politicians had a responsibility to avert bloodshed; I had seen what bombs did, I said, and the results were never pleasant.
'You'd never be a politician,' he chuckled, and deftly flicked the butt of his cigarette into a nearby urn. 'Politicians can't afford to care,' he said. 'It's like this: if politicians were the humanitarians you'd like them to be, they wouldn't be politicians, because politicians have to start wars to keep their economies going. They'd have to kill themselves if they faced up to the truth.' This, he added was the very reason that religious men didn't make good politicians, as in Iran: they had to lie for their work, and lying was bad religion. The West didn't have that problem: lying was much easier for us.