The current New York Review of Books (11/02/06 issues) has a long, informative article on Defiant Iran by Christopher de Bellaigue. He's reviewing two books, Confronting Iran: The Failure of American Foreign Policy and the Next Great Crisis in the Middle East by Ali Ansari and Hidden Iran: Paradox and Power in the Islamic Republic by Ray Takeyh.
Some of the more memorable factual parts, which will likely be lost in a fog of propaganda sooner rather than later, include the following. Iran offered wide-ranging negotiations with the United States in 2003:
The fear of intervention by the US in Iran became more urgent among Iran's leaders when America invaded Iraq the following year. Indeed, it later became known that, in early 2003, the Iranian Foreign Ministry quietly sent Washington a detailed proposal for comprehensive negotiations, in which the Iranian government said it was prepared to make concessions about its nuclear program and to address concerns about its ties to groups such as Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, in return for an agreement from the White House to refrain from destabilizing the Islamic Republic and start lifting long-in-effect sanctions. The US rejected this overture out of hand. It seemed that Bush didn't want to offer guarantees to a regime that he intended, at a later date, to try to destroy.
This is an important point. The Bush administration is committed to "regime change" in Iran. It wasn't really so long ago that it was easy for even the punditocracy to understand that it was difficult to have productive relations with a country when you were actively in the process of trying to overthrow their government. According to Seymour Hersh's reporting, the Cheney-Bush administration actually has had special operation troops of some kind already at work inside Iran.
In the normal terms of international relations, a security guarantee is an eminently sensible goal for Iran to seek. But so many Republicans have embraced the Cheney-Bush rogue-state model of American foreign policy that it seems self-evident to them that the US has the right to unilaterally decide which governments should be overthrown.
I wonder how long it will be before our Director of Homeland Security, or Senior Gauleiter, or whatever his title is, repudiates this:
Iran's technicians still have several years' work ahead of them before they can produce enough fuel to run a reactor and, if ordered to, build a bomb. ...
In fact, Ahmadinejad, and every other Iranian politician and official who speaks on the subject, takes elaborate, even ritual, care to reiterate Iran's longstanding claim that it has no intention of developing nuclear weapons, and that the program is exclusively peaceful. The US national intelligence director, John Negroponte, has predicted that Iran "might be in a position to have a nuclear weapon" at some time between 2010 and 2015.
This is also an important fact about Iran's stance on Chechnia of which I had not been aware, which Ali Ansari uses in the context of discussing the outlook and temperment of Iran's leaders:
As an example of Iranian pragmatism, he cites Iran's silence in the face of Russian atrocities against Chechen Muslims. In return for this surprisingly accommodating Iranian attitude, and for Iran's acquiescence in Russia's dominance over much of Central Asia, the Russians provide the Islamic Republic with diplomatic support, conventional arms, and nuclear know-how. (Russia has built Iran's sole, and still unused, nuclear reactor at Bushehr, on the Persian Gulf coast.)
And we also need to keep in mind that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has become a convenient propaganda demon for Republican and Israeli Iran hawks. But he does not have the final word on Iranian foreign policy - and apparently not even the next-to-last or next-to-next-to-last:
On major decisions concerning foreign and military policy, we can assume that Ahmadinejad's views are no more than advisory. He does not set the Islamic Republic's policy toward Israel any more than he would decide whether to use nuclear weapons should Iran eventually acquire them. Strategic and important tactical decisions are taken by the supreme leader and his advisers, who include Ali Larijani, Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, and senior officers in the Revolutionary Guard.
The current New York Review of Books (11/02/06 issues) has a long, informative article on Defiant Iran by Christopher de Bellaigue. He's reviewing two books, Confronting Iran: The Failure of American Foreign Policy and the Next Great Crisis in the Middle East by Ali Ansari and Hidden Iran: Paradox and Power in the Islamic Republic by Ray Takeyh.
