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slippery surfaces or poor visibility and sped along, defying traffic regulations and on occasion ending up in a ditch by the side of the unforgiving road or stranded after a pile-up. Just my luck, I thought—the Intelligence Ministry will blame me, and not the storm, if my flight is canceled and I have to return to the hotel. Almost all the international flights that night were indeed canceled, except for two: mine to Frankfurt and one to Amsterdam. When the plane took off, two hours late and after a thoroughde-icing of the wings, I felt genuine relief: not only had I made it through passport control, but during the three hours that I had waited in the airport before boarding, no one had changed his mind about letting me out of the country. Furthermore, once I was seated, no one had come to drag me off the flight, as had happened to other Iranians on hit lists maintained by the competing security services. As soon as the plane leveled off, still in Iranian airspace, I ordered a scotch. A double.
    What is it about Iran and authoritarianism? Why, after so many attempts in the last hundred years or so to advance democratic rule, has Iran always reneged on the promises of people’s revolutions and reverted to dictatorship? Perhaps my optimism about the future, my belief that the country is on a circuitous path to an inevitable true democracy, was unfounded after all; perhaps we Iranians will forever simply replace one dictatorship with another; perhaps our very DNA condemns us to living in a society in which the absolute power of the state is accepted as a fact. I thought about it on the long flight from Tehran to New York via Frankfurt. Maybe I was more concerned now because I was about to subject my wife and child to living in an authoritarian state. Given my profession, it would be impossible for me not to be subjected to government scrutiny and perhaps constant observation.
    How utterly selfish of me! I had been privileged to live in liberal democracies all my life, first far away from the shah’s secret police, who had interrogated some of my student friends, and then far from the Islamic Revolution’s “guidance”—which was much more about dictate than about suggestion. In my reporting and research trips to Iran prior to the elections of 2009, I had been aware that since I didn’t have to live there, whatever discomfort I might feel would always be temporary. I had my escape, my foreign passport and myforeign home, and my stays in Iran were excursions, not a way of life. Although my family and I would still have that escape hatch after moving to Tehran, we would also be living as Iranians in a country whose appeal was, admittedly, more romantic than anything else. I knew people who had been caught up in the security apparatus of the state; I had friends and family members who had been arrested and had even endured long stretches of solitary confinement at Evin prison. Iran, I knew, was not quite the dystopia that Westerners sometimes imagine it to be—it could never be compared to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or the Kims’ North Korea—but it was also unpredictable in terms of its politics and civil rights. My interrogators in Tehran, Mr. Bad and Mr. Worse, merely represented the long Persian tradition of absolute monarchy, of state or aristocratic control over its citizens; if the shah were still in power, they would have been SAVAK, or his secret policemen. And despite the mildness, the near placidity, of my experience compared to the horrors others had gone through, I again wondered if there was something innate in our culture that consistently produced men and women who happily worked to subdue free thought and opposition to their sociopolitical system, or in feudal times, opposition to what was essentially serfdom.
    During those hundred years of the nation trying to free itself from despots and despotism, each time, from 1906 onward, Iran’s citizens’ efforts were foiled by the machinations of either foreign