From Washington Post
Desire for Improving Ties Grew With Population Too Young to Recall Hostage Crisis
By Karl Vick

Iran’s acceptance of direct talks with the United States over Iraq is being regarded among Iranians as a major foreign policy development, a historic if still tentative departure from 27 years of official enmity that held the government of the “Great Satan” as one to be spoken against, but never with.

Vehement opposition to the United States has been a pillar of Iran’s theocratic system since 1979, the year an angry population overthrew the monarch Washington had helped install 26 years earlier in a coup engineered with the help of the CIA. From the U.S. side, a similar enmity was embedded in policy when student militants overran the red-brick U.S. Embassy in Tehran, taking 52 Americans hostage and holding them for more than a year.

Inside Iran, however, an appetite for rapprochement grew along with a population whose youthful majority had no memory of the revolution.

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