Unreality Check

Magical realism normally sells well in Iran. Gabriel García Márquez, whose 1967 novel "One Hundred Years of Solitude" popularized the literary genre around the world, is a special favorite of the Persian intelligentsia. Earlier this year an exhibition commemorating the 40th anniversary of the novel's publication was held in Tehran, and 70 artists displayed works inspired by the book or its 80-year-old Colombian author. Lines from his work resonate with eerie truth for the children of the Islamic Revolution: "Normality was precisely the most fearful part of that infinite war: nothing ever happened."

So it was something of a surprise last week when the puritanical mullahs banned García Márquez's latest novella, "Memories of My Melancholy Whores." This, even though the last word of the title had been changed in translation, rather delicately, to "Sweethearts." But Iranians quickly found ways to work around their government, as they've grown used to doing over the years. The first printing of more than 5,000 copies had sold out before the ban was even announced. Then some dedicated fan posted the entire Persian text of the book on the Web. Neither the people of Iran, nor their leaders, fit easily into the simple Western categories of tyranny and subjugation, or for that matter fact and fiction.

Precisely for that reason, the rest of us need to be concerned as the international debate about Iran's nuclear program continues to get nastier, more dangerous and potentially apocalyptic. Is it magic or realism that dominates the thinking in Tehran? Do the leaders there live in a rational world, or one of their own imagining? Or both? As a European diplomat privy to the nuclear negotiations told me privately this morning, "Nothing is what it is."

Certainly the Bush administration seems to get lost in the subtleties. One reason the threat of war hangs so heavy in the air is that Washington equates the certifiable reality of Iran's ongoing nuclear energy program with the White House's own perfervid imaginings about the mullahs secretly developing atomic weapons. Maybe that's what they're doing, maybe not. But nothing's been proved—or disproved—definitively.

The Iranian regime delights in the ambiguities. Its strategy appears to be to take its place among what International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Mohamed ElBaradei calls "virtual nuclear powers," like Japan, that are known to have the ability to build arsenals of atomic weapons, but choose not to—for now. Such a virtual reality may have magical powers of deterrence, but it already has provoked sanctions and could bring on a pre-emptive military strike by Israel, the United States, or both.

"It was as if God had decided to put to the test every capacity for surprise and was keeping the inhabitants … in a permanent alternation between excitement and disappointment, doubt and revelation, to such an extreme that no one knew for certain where the limits of reality lay," García Márquez wrote of the characters in "Solitude." "It was an intricate stew of truths and mirages."