Iran is a huge country and much, much more sophisticated than most people imagine... It certainly has the potential to be at least the way Turkey is to most Americans.

I know that my cell phone in Iran... is bugged, and they listen in, and my emails, I'm sure, are monitored inside Iran. They have my email address; it's not like they can't snoop on it.

I think there is an American attitude that is very hard to break which is "We're great. Who wouldn't want to be like us? Who wouldn't want to have the benefits of our largesse, handing out aid and having American companies based in their countries?" and "our culture is great," and all that. It's hard for us to imagine ourselves as not being the greatest country on earth.

The thing about Iran is there are many political factions and it's not quite the dictatorial, authoritarian state with one person always making every single decision.

The problem is that Iran has been identified as a dangerous enemy, and the longer the media forwards that proposition - and the media is guilty, just as it was in the Iraq war - then the easier it becomes for Americans to accept that we might just have to resort to military force to remove any Iranian threat.

There's a lack of knowledge about Iran and the Iranian people.

I was born in Iran, left at a very young age - less than a year old - and grew up and was educated in the West.