Most Iranians like Americans. The problem with Iran is their theocratic dictatorship.

How do I know most Iranians like Americans?

What I read somewhere. Also, I watched on TV an American on vacation in Iran who noticed virtually every Iranian he met wanted him to come to their house for a free dinner.

I play chess on the internet. Frequently my opponent lives in Iran. These people are always very nice.

Also, there is this from the New York Times about 6 years ago:

A comment:
persian boy iran January 12, 2016
iranians love all american humans and all people
i'm iranian and i know iranians what think about americans or german or...
you can travel to iran and Learn iranians like you or not

New York Times - How Young Iranians View America

BY CAROL GIACOMO DECEMBER 13, 2013 10:04 AM

ISFAHAN, Iran — It’s not hard for an American to draw a crowd in Iran. Just speak English.

That’s how I ended up in a heated hour-long debate this week at this ancient city’s Iman Mosque. I had stopped to interview three male students from the local university about their lives in today’s Iran and their hopes for the future. They were visiting the mosque — begun in 1612 during the reign of Abbas I, the shah of Persia — on a class trip.

Before long, we were surrounded by about two dozen of their friends, who listened quietly at first but grew increasingly animated, gesturing for emphasis, talking over each other and jockeying to be heard. They were all in their early twenties. While most only knew snippets of English, they could follow the conversation through my Farsi-speaking interpreter, Roya Saadat. And they all had something to say.

Many of them were apprehensive about the future. Mohammed, 21, who like the others was reluctant to have his last name published, is studying medical engineering and wonders whether he will find a job making medical devices after graduation. It is a reasonable concern: Each year, some 1.2 million Iranian youths enter a job market that is unable to meet their needs. Unofficially, unemployment is estimated at over 50% for young people.

Hamed lamented the fact that although many people in his hometown are talented, they cannot rise beyond a certain level because of a lack of education, training and other opportunities.

Like his friends, Hadi, a third student, voted in the June election for President Hassan Rouhani. “He’s the one the country needs now because there are problems — the economy, inflation — I think he can solve,” he said.

The group was most passionate when the conversation turned to the prospects for improved Iranian-American relations.

Probably the toughest challenge was to try to answer why America accuses Iran of terrorism when, as one student phrased it, America has been involved in wars and violence “all over the world.” We went at it for a while, trying to understand where each was coming from. But with our language differences and our limited time, it was impossible to find much common ground on a subject at once nuanced and volatile.

Neither did we reach closure on another student’s charge that the United States “has its hands on the throat of Iran and doesn’t let us make development and also imposes war on poor nations.”

But overall, the attitudes expressed about America were remarkably positive. “In science and technology the United States is best and no one can deny that, but culturally it’s so different us,” including on the concepts of heaven and hell, Hamed said. But he concluded that Americans “help people a lot so they can’t go to hell.”

“We love Obama and your country,” another student shouted. Yet another added: “America is very very good.”

This is starkly at odds with the “death to America” chants that protesters, mobilized in the past by anti-American hardliners, have used to taunt the United States since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Seven days into a 10-day visit to Iran, I have found the reception in every quarter — on the street, in government, academia, commercial outlets and among more enlightened clergy — to be overwhelmingly welcoming.

The debate at the Iman Mosque was eventually broken up by an over-zealous policeman who felt compelled to check and double-check my press card and passport. “I’ll see you on Facebook,” one of my more vigorous adversaries called out as he and the other students dispersed.

There is no doubt that many Iranians, especially young Iranians, want to engage with America and are listening to what the country and its leaders have to say. It is an opportunity Washington should not squander.

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Wall Street Journal

A Regime Still Fighting the ‘Great Satan’

Since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the Islamic Republic’s foreign policy has been defined by one key principle: anti-Americanism.

By Gerald F. Seib
March 1, 2019 10:35 a.m. ET

The sun had just set in Tehran when the car screeched up alongside me in the parking lot of the old Hilton Hotel. Four men dressed in camouflage uniforms jumped out, grabbed me, threw me face-down into the back seat and sped away. I knew immediately that they were Iranian security agents. Screaming at me in Farsi, they drove wildly to Evin Prison, where they informed me I was accused of being a spy.

It was February 1987, and tensions were running high in the fraught U.S.-Iranian relationship. Working then as a Middle East correspondent for the Journal, I had been trapped in the crosscurrents. The murderous Iran-Iraq war was still raging, and the Reagan administration had been playing both sides, sending missiles to Iran while also providing valuable intelligence and material support to Iraq.

The hard-liners in the security apparatus apparently wanted to make a point, through me, about the evils of dealing with America and Americans. After four days of intense interrogation, most of the time blindfolded, I was released into the waiting arms of a Swiss diplomat.

In the years just after my detention, there actually was reason to believe that U.S.-Iranian relations might start to improve. The Iran-Iraq war finally ended in 1988, removing a giant open wound in the relationship, and many observers thought the strategic logic that had made the U.S. and Iran, under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, partners for decades might slowly start to reassert itself.

But it was not to be.

In the 40 years since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, huge change has swept the globe. The Berlin Wall has fallen, and the Soviet Union has disappeared. Vietnam has become a hip tourist destination for Americans. The leaders of the U.S. and North Korea now exchange chummy letters.

But through it all, there has been one constant: The relationship between the U.S. and Iran continues to be implacably hostile, defying efforts at normalization and dashing hopes that time would heal old wounds. Many factors have contributed to this enduring tension, but the most important is also the most obvious: the choice of Iran’s leaders to define the foreign policy of the Islamic regime almost exclusively in terms of its anti-Americanism, creating a dynamic that has been impossible to break.

Under the rule of the shah, Iran presented itself as a Cold War model of pro-Western moderation and a bulwark against extremist, Soviet-aligned Arab states and movements. Iran’s strategic location, athwart oil riches and strategic shipping lanes in the Persian Gulf, made it an appealing American partner. Successive U.S. administrations showered the shah with love, and arms, and even the promise of a nonmilitary nuclear program.

Then, of course, it all collapsed in the 1979 Iranian revolution, fueled by hatred of the shah, his corrupt regime and his secret police—and a widespread belief that his excesses were made possible by American support. Iranian dissidents seethed not just over U.S. support for the shah at the time but over the Central Intelligence Agency’s covert role in helping to put him on the throne in the first place, during the 1953 coup that ousted the country’s elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh. That anger helped lead to the 1979 seizure of hostages at the U.S. embassy in Tehran, the episode that, for many Americans, remains the indelible symbol of the Iranian regime.

Those passions might have been expected to fade over time, particularly in a sophisticated society such as Iran’s, with a large intelligentsia and a population marbled with family connections to the U.S. But one particular characteristic of the Iranian revolution has made it impervious to softening over time, said Ray Takeyh, an Iran analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations: “In some sense it’s because the revolution presents itself and its foundation as religious.”

In a Marxist revolution, the opposing ideology is presented as wrong or corrupt, perhaps even evil. But in the Islamic revolution, America was presented as immoral and ungodly. It was no accident that the regime’s founding father, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, labeled the U.S. the “Great Satan.” As Mr. Takeyh said, “The Soviet Union promised material progress and wealth. The Iranian revolution doesn’t promise you rewards on Earth, but promises you a celestial reward.” And how is a nation to come to terms with Satan himself?

The tension with the U.S. also has been exacerbated by a second principle of the revolution and its architects: that Iran’s duty isn’t simply to consolidate Islamist rule at home but to export it abroad. That view grew in part from the religious fervor of Ayatollah Khomeini and his insistence that Islam had been corrupted by pro-Western states in the region. It also reflected a more calculated conclusion that the way to protect the Iranian regime at home was to extend the boundaries of revolution across the region.

This program inevitably put Iran on a collision course with America’s Arab friends, most notably Saudi Arabia. The Shiite revolutionaries in Iran were openly hostile to the Sunni rulers of Saudi Arabia and their guardianship of the holiest sites in Islam. More than that, Iran’s leaders openly sought to inspire the Shiite minority to rise up in both Saudi Arabia and next door in Iraq, thereby threatening to foment strife throughout the Persian Gulf oil fields so crucial to America’s economy.

Put that sectarian fervor together with the regime’s deeply ingrained hostility toward Israel, the closest American ally in the Middle East, and you have a formula for more or less constant friction with the U.S.

The anti-American core of the 1979 revolution was only reinforced by the long, calamitous war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq during the 1980s, a fight that Americans only vaguely recall but that is seared in Iranian memory. With an estimated 200,000 deaths on the Iranian side, almost every family was affected.

Iranians remember how the U.S. supported Iraq and prevented it from being overrun at key points in the conflict. “The lesson they drew was that you can’t trust anybody else, particularly the Americans,” said William Burns, a former deputy secretary of state and the author of a new memoir, “The Back Channel,” in which he recounts, among other things, his own role in launching the secret Obama-era diplomacy with Iran that led to the 2015 accord limiting its nuclear-weapons program.

In the three decades since the conclusion of the Iran-Iraq war, periodic efforts at rapprochement have been undermined by Iranian behavior, American politics and recurring cases of bad timing. By the early 1990s, American energy companies, sensing the possibility of an opening, were starting to explore ventures in Iran’s oil industry. Conoco, for example, worked on a deal under which it would have developed large offshore oil fields for Iran.

At the same time, however, Iran’s government was busy providing arms, training and money to radical Palestinian groups and seeking to disrupt any peace process with Israel. Strong American support for Israel, particularly in Congress, in turn stoked anti-Iranian sentiment.

Sen. Alfonse D’Amato, a New York Republican and one of Israel’s strongest allies, proposed legislation in 1995 to ban trade with Iran and block trade with foreign companies that did business with Tehran. President Bill Clinton preempted the legislation by signing an executive order cutting off both trade and investment. A year later, in June 1996, a truck-bomber destroyed Khobar Towers, an eight-story building housing American military personnel in Saudi Arabia. Saudi and American officials blamed an Iranian-backed militant group.

The cycle of opportunity and disillusionment in the relationship has repeated itself ever since. In early 2000, then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright sent a signal to Tehran by apologizing for America’s role in the 1953 coup. More dramatically, there was a brief opening when American and Iranian interests appeared to align after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The U.S. invaded Afghanistan to root out radical Sunni terrorists responsible for the attacks; Iran, which sits next door, was similarly concerned about the Sunni radicals. The two countries’ diplomats actually met in Bonn, alongside representatives from other nations, to discuss forming a new government and constitution for Afghanistan.

But the U.S. “never seized” the opening, Mr. Burns writes in his new book, and that opening collapsed under two heavy blows. In late 2001, U.S. intelligence agencies began to track two clandestine sites where Iran was producing nuclear material, potentially for a nuclear weapon. In the fall of 2002, President George W. Bush fingered Iran as part of a world-wide “axis of evil.” Iranian officials thought they heard in those words a plan to overthrow the regime.

A few years later, the chances for a thaw again resurfaced, mostly because of changes within Iran. Dissatisfaction with the regime had grown, particularly among younger Iranians with less emotional attachment to the revolution and its ideology. Student protests erupted in 2003; women took to the streets in 2005 and 2006. They seemed to reflect a desire to open up Iranian society and also to open it up to the outside world, perhaps including the U.S.

More serious protests erupted in 2009. They coincided with the arrival in the White House of a new president, Barack Obama, who explicitly desired new lines of communication with an Iranian nation that seemed to be in transition. But Iran’s own politics had gone in the opposite direction.

The 2009 protests, which became known as the Green Movement, broke out in response to what many Iranians and outsiders saw as the rigged re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a hard-liner who crushed the uprising. Mr. Ahmadinejad also proudly brandished his antipathy toward the U.S. and took anti-Semitic and anti-Israel rhetoric to new levels. He had no desire for the rapprochement that Mr. Obama sought.

The stars seemed to realign four years later when Hassan Rouhani, a more moderate figure by Iranian standards, was elected president of the Islamic Republic. He was open to dialogue with the U.S., and the Obama administration moved into the opening to seek a negotiated freeze for Iran’s nuclear program.

Completion of the agreement in 2015 was followed by the election the following year of Donald Trump, who had repeatedly denounced the deal for its failure to curb Iran’s missile programs and export of terrorism. He promptly suspended American participation. Once again, the American and Iranian ships passed in the night.

Skeptics of closer ties between the two countries are now ascendant in both Tehran and Washington. This week saw the resignation of Iran’s American-educated foreign minister, Javad Zarif, who negotiated the nuclear deal. The hard-line leaders of Iran’s security forces have political reasons to stoke hostility with the U.S. but also economic incentives, since they profit from the black market kept humming by American sanctions.

For its part, the Trump administration is openly campaigning for allies, especially in Europe, to take a tougher stand. In a speech this January in Cairo, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo mocked Mr. Obama for his outreach and declared: “Countries increasingly understand that we must confront the ayatollahs, not coddle them.”

Ultimately, the best hope for improvement in relations between the two countries may lie in generational change. Iran is still led largely by men steeped in the zeal of the 1979 revolution, like Ayatollah Ali Khameini, the current supreme leader. Iranians who, as students in their 20s, took part in the 1979 seizure of the American embassy are now presumably close to the end of their careers. Implicit in the Obama administration’s strategy in striking a nuclear deal with Iran was the belief—or at least the hope—that over the 10-year span of the deal a new generation of leaders, more pragmatic and willing to reconnect with the West, would arise.

There’s little doubt that Iranian society is evolving in significant ways, becoming younger, more sophisticated and less male-dominated. Almost four in 10 Iranians are under the age of 25. Journalist Robin Wright, who has visited and written extensively about Iran, notes that in 1980 only 37% of the population was literate; today, 81% is. There now are more women in Iranian universities than men. In the first post-revolutionary Iranian parliament, 61% of the members were clerics; today, only 6% are. “It’s a very vibrant society even if the government is not,” says Haleh Esfandiari, an Iran analyst at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

The official U.S.-Iranian relationship is perhaps more embittered now than it was on that day in 1987 when I walked out of Evin Prison. At the time, the Reagan administration was trying to identify moderate interlocutors in Tehran. Today, the Trump administration has closely aligned itself with the views of the leaders of Saudi Arabia and Israel, who see Iran as a wholly malign influence across the region. The administration doesn’t openly call for regime change, but it comes close.

Perhaps the death of Ayatollah Khamenei, who is 79, will create that long-awaited generational change in Iran. Perhaps popular unrest inside Iran will force him or his successors to change their attitudes. Perhaps Iranians and Americans will find ways to create some social exchanges that begin create new ties.

Or perhaps Iran’s leaders will simply decide to wait out Mr. Trump. That would leave the relationship for at least a few more years in the deep freeze where it has sat for four decades.

Write to Gerald F. Seib at jerry.seib@wsj.com

Appeared in the March 2, 2019, print edition as 'A REGIME STILL FIGHTING THE ‘GREAT SATAN’ Forty Years of Distrust and Enmity.'