Christopher de Bellaigue gives us this excellent review of Kenneth Pollack's newest book "The Persian Puzzla: The Conflict Between Iran and America" in the New York Review of Books. As you may remember, Kenneth Pollack (who frequently writes for the Atlantic Monthly and whose articles I've cited here before) came out in favor of the invasion of Iraq. He was the most qualified liberal to do so, and his authority was a counter-weight to most liberals who argued against the war. Unfortunately, he also happened to be wrong. Now he assesses the situation with Iran, in an effort to figure out what our next steps should be, and he does so in light of his prior mistake with Iraq. Bellaigue gives Pollack for being knowledgable about the subject, but he offers something important to the debate that Pollack doesn't...a sense of where the Iranians are coming from.
In his final chapter, "Toward a New Iran Policy," Pollack lists the Iranian policies that the US finds most abhorrent:
"its support of...international terrorism, its violent opposition to forging a just peace between Arabs and Israelis, its pursuit of nuclear weapons of mass destruction...and its poor record of human rights."
Pollack's list is reasonable, except that it conflates Iran's ambiguity about its strategic nuclear ambitions—in other words, to remain within the NPT, while protecting its ability to make nuclear weapons on short notice should it want to—with the actual production of the weapons themselves. (Pollack observes that the two amount to the same thing in strategic terms; in legal terms, of course, they are worlds apart.) Pollack's subtitle is "The Conflict Between Iran and America," not "The Problems that America Has with Iran." But he does not provide a similar, Iranian, list of complaints. Such a list might read as follows:
US support for Israel's brutal suppression of Palestinian demands for a viable state; the US failure to pressure Israel to declare and give up the nuclear weapons that it is known to have; the killing by American soldiers of many thousands of Iraqi noncombatants and (as illustrated at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere) its shameful record on human rights.
Pollack is right that Iran's leaders are obsessed with America, but history is not the main, or even a major, reason why. If its history were an important determinant of Iran's policy, the Islamic Republic would not have tolerable relations with Britain, its former neo-imperial tormentor, or good relations with Russia, another Great Power that tried to control Persia. The dispute between Iran and the US is over America's efforts to determine the future of the Middle East and to promote its own policy there, and the threat that this poses to a revolutionary state that was founded on principles that are antithetical to those of the US. No Western country pursues its own interests more vigorously in the Middle East than America; naturally, Iran regards America as its biggest threat. Iran's enmity for Israel is mainly based on its view that Israel is an American proxy. It is inconceivable, Iranian officials believe, that Israel would commit its atrocities against the Palestinians without American approval.
The point that Bellaigue is trying to make is impossible to overstate. We simply cannot deal with Iran without an understanding of their motivations for what appears to us to be a reckless desire to possess nuclear weapons. In all the hype over the "threat" Iran poses, it's somehow amazingly easy to forget that we are in fact in Iran's backyard, throwing our weight around in Iraq and Afghanistan, and attempting to remake the entire Middle East in an image we prefer, an image that if not necessarily hostile to the Iranian people themselves, is certainly hostile to the regime that rules Iran. We simply cannot act towards Iran as if their fears of us are not credible, and as if they do not have a right to consider the most effective means by which they can defend ourselves. If anything, it is the height of both arrogance and foolishness to assert that we have a right to act as we wish on the other side of the world to defend ourselves here at home, while at the same time say that Iran does not have the right to protect themselves by whatever means they think is most effective against the superpower acting on their very doorstep. I don't say this because I think that Iran should have nuclear weapons; I say it because we'll never stop them from getting them without understanding this.
Additionally, it would do us a world of good to try and understand things from the common Iranians point of view. Behzad Yaghmaian, in Monday's USA Today, helps us to understand what this all looks like to the man in the street in Iran, in an op-ed titled "Iran's Distrust of America is 50 years in the Making"
The recent revelation of secret U.S. reconnaissance missions inside Iran and President Bush's inaugural speech, which included his promise to end tyranny around the world, brought back memories for me and many Iranians. Those recollections include a coup d'état in 1953 that led to a distrust of America that lingers today.
I was born a few days after America helped overthrow the democratically elected government of Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 and reinstalled the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Afterward, my birth was never mentioned without some reference to Mossadegh and America. As a child, I remember being afraid of America.
It wasn't until the late '90s that I visited Tehran and lived there during the peak of student protests against the Islamic Republic in 1999. The young people intrigued me. They defied the Islamic Republic and its social and cultural codes of conduct. And, even more than my generation, they longed for American culture: Hollywood films, MTV and Western fashions.
But, like my generation, they were keenly aware of what America had done to their country. They, too, were distrustful of America.
In the students' frequent protests against their government, the youth carried pictures of Mossadegh. Student organizations held memorials for Mossadegh on the anniversary of his death on March 5, 1967. Newspapers and magazines carried long articles about his legacy. Long after his death, the man who was removed from power by the Americans was, once again, a hero and a national symbol of patriotism and resistance against foreign domination. Many foreign observers and journalists have overlooked this important detail.
The Iranian people have plenty of reason to distrust us and our motives when dealing with Iran; they have the weight of history on their side. Don't let conservative commentators fool you into thinking that an invasion or an attack on Iran would motivate the Iranians to throw out an incompetent regime. Such an attack could have the effect of rallying them "around the flag" so to speak to oppose us, or it could push the regime into collapse. There is simply now way to know, and it would be foolish to assume the most favorable consequence to is as a toss-off justification for attacking.
In short, it's simply irresponsible of us to act against Iran without understanding their motivations for how they're acting towards us. We can only hope to find some peaceful resolution of the issue by understanding their needs and addressing them, while we work to make sure that they do the same for us.
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