Peripheral Visions

though most behavior in situations of conflict is also improvised. In America today we are going through a curious revival, in the conflicts of marriage, of the conventions of chivalry, as couples are tutored in fighting without mortal wounds.
    In the autumn of 1979, not quite a year after Ayatollah Khomeini’s triumphant return, the American embassy building in Tehran was taken over by a group of young Islamic zealots, and the staff was held hostage. The crisis rapidly turned into a standoff, and it was well over a year before it was resolved. During that entire period, news anchormen conducted a count-up of the days the American hostages were imprisoned and focused on every snippet of news about negotiations. In Tehran, anti-American demonstrations were choreographed for the media while spectators sipped soft drinks as if at a parade.
    I had presented a scholarly paper sometime earlier on the conventions of qahr and ashti , and I drew on it during the hostage crisis for an op-ed piece in the The New York Times about Iranian patterns of crisis resolution. Whether the piece had any effect, I do not know, nor do I know whether others made the same points, but I learned from the problems I kept running into. At the The Times , they wanted to edit out my comment that a degree of press silence might be a necessary component of qahr behavior to make mediation possible, since Iranians would regard American press commentary as a component of official communication. The piece was titled “Doing It Iran’s Way,” but at the State Department I was told that there was no reason for the United States to modify its behavior since Iran was in the wrong. We approached the crisis with few alternatives, for convention made them nearly unthinkable. Yet the resolution of the crisis did come, too late to save the Carter presidency, after the administration had suspended public comment and after a third party, the Algerian government, had taken on the role of mediator.
    It is not surprising that a model for a possible solution to the problem could be found in very humble kinds of domestic conflict, which diplomats were unlikely to look at. Very humble and, in Iranian eyes, rather childish. These are the settings in which everyone learns from experience how the world works, acquiring assumptions so deep that they may never be stated. Even highly sophisticated political thinkers can be trapped by what they take for granted about how the game is played. One of the American assumptions is that conflict is resolved by direct negotiations and openness is preferable to secrecy. Older and wiser, the Iranian tradition is inclined to believe that face-to-face meetings are more likely to cause trouble than to resolve it and that positions repeatedly proclaimed in public leave little room for maneuver. Trying to discuss these alternatives may seem to fly in the face of common sense or decency, to be so perverse as to be intended to fail.
    The conflict between different sets of assumptions crops up everywhere, sometimes wrapped in the elaborate protocol of international negotiation and sometimes in a taxicab or ten years into a marriage. We need to invent forms of interaction that will allow for learning without confessing ignorance and for mutual accommodation without either participant surrendering. It is not helpful to expect Iranians to accept Western styles of negotiation, but it is also not helpful to tell Americans to abandon their beliefs in order to interact more effectively, for “open covenants openly arrived at” is still a principle honored in America and freedom of the press a jealously guarded right. My efforts were complicated by the fact that although I could reach Americans to tell them how to understand and perhaps use Iranian conventions, I had no corresponding way to get the same kinds of messages to the Iranians.
    How does one combine in a dance or play a game when there is no common set of rules? On the dance floor, without learned steps, the easiest way to develop a shared pattern is to mirror the other, and here it works. Such mirroring often occurs in conflicts however, when parties who have different backgrounds and interests start imitating each other’s worst habits. Of all games, warfare is the one in which the partners are most easily tempted into symmetry. We risk becoming like our enemies as we join with them in common performances of mayhem. Revenge, tit for tat, retaliation, these are all effective and