Iran's Western front
Published: Monday, 19 January 2009, 12:41PM
By International editor, Bill Neely
Iran has two faces. No, make that many more than two. This is the country that chants "Death To America" at every opportunity, especially at Friday prayers.
But there's no other Middle Eastern country, bar their great enemy Israel, where so many people seem to have relatives in America.
One man chanting the death mantra in front of Iran's President has two sons in Ohio.
A whole crowd of chanters thought Barack Obama was the man to change relations with Iran for the better, one describing him as someone who truly understood discrimination and oppression. Then back to the chanting.
It's a country where I have yet to see a single woman without her head covered. But the same women wear designer boots, sunglasses and jeans and drip with jewellery and perfume. It's an Islamic Republic and a theocracy.
Yet here you can have a "pleasure marriage"; a few appropriate words allowing a couple to have sex or an affair for as long or short a time as they wish. Sunni Muslims frown on it, but not the Shia of Iran.
Tehran is a city, I'm told, where most Western vices may be hidden but can be had. Britain rarely gets away without an insult during demonstrations.
But as I was checked by the security men, going into the Iranian Parliament, the guard asked me for the latest on David Beckham.
Iranians are football crazy and the Premier League is their passion. "It's just so fast," drooled one man. Before I came, I must admit I hadn't factored in the image of revolutionary guards getting excited watching Hull against Stoke.
And then there was the snowboarding instructor I met at the traditional cafe filled with the smoke of hookah pipes. The ski slopes are an hour north of Tehran. He was also the head of a baseball team in Tehran. And yes, his two brothers were in the United States.
Satellite television is banned but Iranians use the internet obsessively. After English and Mandarin, Farsi is the most popular language on the web.
Iran is a paradox. And so with the bigger problems in life. It wants to be respected as a great and ancient culture.
But it wants, above all, the respect of the country it has set itself against, the United States.
It is welcoming and friendly but regards just about every foreign visitor as a spy. It adores complex conspiracy theories. And it makes the most of the privations it has suffered; like the former soldier I met who'd been a prisoner of the Iraqis for seven years but learned Arabic, German and English there.
The war made them stronger, they say. Banning American movies made their own film industry flourish - today its world class. Iranians insist they have suffered too much; from sanctions, the Iran-Iraq war, occupation by the British and Soviets, terrible casualties in wars and natural disasters.
They want to be great again. They live in a tough neighbourhood. They want nuclear power. It's their right. And that is where the problems begin. Where their rivals - chief among them Israel - want to draw a line. Where the touchy paradox that is Iran is on a collision course with the rest of the world.
Those contradictions may come to seem even more extraordinary if Iran and the West head towards greater confrontation this year.
On Teheran's streets, they may chant "death to America", but they really don't want the clash that would break their split personality in two.