Inside the real Iran? A business viewpoint

The first casualty of war is the truth. "It's a good idea to get to know people before you start bombing them" remarked Rick Steves, a US businessman who brought a film crew under a UN mandate into the heart of Iran and set the cameras rolling at street level. It has just been aired by the Public Broadcasting Service in the US, a non-profit organisation.

The video below highlights him delivering an open lecture to a US audience back home. During filming, he openly admitted he was stunned by his shortcomings as an American looking in. Although there was a government minder attached to the crew, there were no onerous restrictions on what they were prohibited from filming (only government buildings, banks, clubs and nuclear sites were forbidden).




Why is the country not open for business? Iran has been under a US trade embargo since 1979, following the Iranian revolution. The sabre-rattling has polarized into a battle between the Great Satan and the Axis of Evil. Iran has a population of 66 million people - twice of Iraq's. Over 50% of the population is under 30. Iran is not three separate peoples - Sunni, Shiite, and Kurds. It's one people and they are Persians, not Arabs.

His observations? The consequences of misreading a culture are expensive. The country is a theocracy. It’s a cash society with no international banking. Unlike the Arab world, the country is “dry” – there really is no alcohol, not even in the top international hotels (although he probably could have got some if he had dug The Lonely Planet). He has spent about a fortnight capturing images and conversations of modern day urban and rural Iran, answering questions ranging from the motivations and fears that confront everyday people he openly came across, why junctions have no traffic lights, the presence of women-only carriages in the underground system and why family houses can have two knockers. He attended a mosque, criss-crossed the bazaars and happened upon parts of the old Silk Road in the country.

This is not like the Discovery or National Geographic channels putting on a dash of soundbite bombast plus technicolour gloss to one side of a story. While Steves acknowledges the answers are complex, it is just one team’s raw unfiltered insight to the fundamentalist Muslim faith which the outside world, to date, has not had much access to. It strives to bridge the perceptions gap greatly needed to get to the cultural roots of how this proud country lives alongside its massive oil reserves, projects its power and has so far not been allowed to realise its economic potential.