Yellow Phone Booth

With promising advances in the COVID-19 vaccination effort and a new administration in the White House, 2021 has felt hopeful for many reasons. For me, an Iranian-American immigrant who has maintained an emotionally split home for the past eighteen years, the new administration’s approach to foreign policy is particularly exciting and relieving. On January 20, before Inauguration Day even ended, President Biden issued an executive order that put an end to the travel ban, known more infamously as the Muslim ban. Offering America’s open arms again to embrace the tired and poor from all nationalities, ethnicities, and religions, this is a promising step toward inclusiveness and peaceful foreign relations. However, only a week later, on January 27, American bombers appeared flying over the Gulf, an act meant to ensure the world of the American presence and dominance in the Middle East.

The presence of American bombers over the Gulf sends a message that is not too different from former President Trump’s incendiary tweet last year about destroying Iranian heritage sites.

“Let this serve as a WARNING,” Trump wrote, “that if Iran strikes any Americans, or American assets, we have … targeted 52 Iranian sites (representing the 52 American hostages taken by Iran many years ago), some at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture, and those targets, and Iran itself, WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD.”

Reading that hateful tweet, the sites that Trump called “targets” — historic monuments that I had visited countless times as a child, spending hours submerged in their beauty and glory — flashed in front of my eyes. The site I saw most clearly, however, was a little yellow phone booth, not of any architectural or heritage significance, but where I spend endless hours playing with all the neighborhood kids, growing up in Tehran during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. We would stay in the yellow phone booth until sun went down, and our mothers started searching for us worriedly. They would find us all piled up in that small, lonely structure, letting our imaginations run wild and loud. The most exciting game was the pilot game, where we pretended the telephone cords were controls and pulled them hard to accelerate, nose up. Once, one of the boys pretended he was dropping bombs, and the rest of us got irritated, warning him of what could happen if any of those hit a house or an alley where other boys played soccer from dawn to dusk until they are out of breath.

Things changed unexpectedly, as our pretend childish games gave way to the loudest and cruelest reality. Red sirens in the middle of the night, explosions and horrified crowds stepping on broken glass and running out of their homes. And then the next bitter day, packing and moving to our relatives’ house while our own home underwent repairs. As we loaded our luggage in the car and my dad drove around the corner, I felt something grab my throat. A crumbled pile of metal was there at the corner, looking like it had been painted yellow at some point but now all burnt and black. It was the yellow phone booth, and it blurred behind my tears as we drove away.

We did not move back to my old neighborhood. My family chose to live in an all-concrete mid-rise residential complex, gloomy and gray, with no sunflowers or phone booths, but safe during the air raids.

The Iran-Iraq war ended in 1989 after eight years, and the country started healing. My generation grew up, becoming teenagers, learning to find joy in all things smuggled and underground: rock music, Hollywood movies, jeans, and chocolate. And we learned about America, a faraway place from which so many of these happy things came.

Now, I follow the progressive efforts of the new administration now from my home in Chicago, and every day is like a breath of fresh air. It has been only weeks and President Biden has been quick to address the problematic decisions of the previous administration and their consequences, from expanding the number of refugees accepted in the United Stated, to putting an end to the support for the Saudi-led coalition and war in Yemen. His message is one of unification, healing, and peace. Although Biden most directly means to unify across party lines, I am optimistically looking forward to the healing in United States foreign policy. Presidents Biden speaks of unity while American bombers still appear over the Persian Gulf, weeks after the anniversary of the assassination of General Soleimani, the Iranian major general killed by the Trump administration last year, an event that brought both nations to the brink of full-blown war.

The perception of an imminent war triggered much anxiety in the Iranian defense system to counter possible American missile attacks. That in turn resulted in an accidental shooting of a Ukrainian passenger plane, where all 176 passengers and crew were killed, many of them children. This is one horrific example of how destabilizing a presence the United States has been in the region during its long history of intervention policy in the Middle East, from the 1953 Iran coup d’état and Iran-Contra, to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. presence has not been without rewards for Middle Eastern nations, but it has been overshadowed by the high human and economic costs to both Middle Eastern nations and Americans, to the point that the necessity and legitimacy of the initial intervention is questionable and condemned. Initiating diplomatic reconciling interventions, peace talks, and military and humanitarian aid have been helpful, but only to create temporary ceases of conflicts that vanished all too quickly and contributed to more power imbalance and struggles.

The Middle East — with all its oil and nations fighting for sovereignty and religious and economic dominance — is not unfamiliar with conflict. The dynamic between countries with different religious denominations, natural resources, and cultures has been shaped organically as each nation developed within the bounds of local geopolitics. Though the Middle East is still far from ultimate peace, peace is not too unimaginable for a collaborative covenant to continue international trade with the region as a whole. Intervention from outside powers to put down any turmoil, if requested by Middle Eastern nations, is only effective if it is done impartially and as vigilantly as a surgery; aiming to heal only the specific ailment and leaving without any trace, because remnants of anything foreign will create further problems for a recovering body. Empowering one side, then the other — the type of intervention that United States has been exercising in the Middle East for the past many decades — has proven to be detrimental to peace. As an example, the financial and military support that US provided to Saddam Hussein during the war with Iran in the 1980s empowered him to elongate the war, which in turn provided opportunities for more arms trades with both sides of the war — such as in the Iran-Contra affair — that resulted in stretching the war even further. These incidents have left such a bad taste that even US interventions for only humanitarian reasons cause backlash and complicate the initial humanitarian issue even further.

It is time for a contrary approach, one that stems from independence from Middle Eastern oil and gas. Given our need to invest in renewable energy moving forward, there is no better time than now. Energy independence would help heal the planet Earth, our only home, as well as being critical in preventing additional population displacements due to climate disasters on top of political conflicts.

This is the type of healing that people like me, who grew up and were displaced under the conditions and aftermath of war, wish to be taken on by the Biden administration. President Biden seems to genuinely want to secure a safe and peaceful future for all communities, domestic and foreign. The removal of foreign military threats in the Middle East will be an honest move in that direction, one that will bring in trust and make further diplomacy, negotiations, and peacemaking easier. In making foreign policy decisions, we must consider the real people caught in the turmoil and the pride they take in their sovereignty, independence, and cultural heritage. We must remember all the little phone booths at the end of each block, however many of them that might exist these days, where kids pretend play endless hours, until their mothers call them in for dinner while sky turns orange and purple at dusk.