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.

It's a tradition in Islamic society to issue pardons at the end of Ramadan.

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 wrong Democratic reaction to a stupid Republican utterance is to play hurt.

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.

The Iranian government has become pretty open about the drug problem in recent years. Opium use is a very traditional, cultural thing in Iran, so the government is actually more open about it than they are about some of the other ills in society. They just don't want to talk about things that might relate to a Western lifestyle even though they know that Iranians indulge. Because there is no real public life left in Iran - people go and have dinner and then everything retreats behind these Persian walls.

There has always been a confusion in the West about -Islam and about the Middle East and the assumption that the countries are Arab. Iranians very much object to that. They are very proud of their own history, but they have this real inferiority-superiority complex thing about the Arabs and the position of Islam in Iran. One of the reasons why Shi'a Islam is so entrenched in Iran is because it has allowed the Iranians to distinguish themselves from the Arabs, who are mostly Sunni.