Soft Talk
DORAN, MICHAEL
Soft Talk The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America By Kenneth M. Pollack Random. 539 pp. $26.95. Reviewed by Michael Doran Assistant Professor, Department of Near...
...Nor is this, in Pollack's view, a sinister prospect...
...support for the Shah as the cause of Iran's travails...
...Themullahs' support for anti-American groups throughout the region speaks to a strategy designed to build up Iran as a regional counterweight to the United States...
...Reviewed by Michael Doran Assistant Professor, Department of Near Eastern Studies, Princeton University Kenneth M. Pollack, who served as director of Persian Gulf affairs on President Bill Clinton's National Security Council, is having second thoughts these days, judging from a recent interview he gave the New York Times Magazine: "Q: In your new book...
...In other words, Iran is not a benign power...
...I feel awful...
...Of course, I feel guilty about it...
...We must resign ourselves, he suggests, to living with a new atomic power in the Middle East...
...By failing to engage the hawks' analysis directly, and downplaying the Iranian threat, Pollack stacks the deck in favor of the dovish stance...
...Conversely, the hard-liners contend, stripping the regime of nuclear weapons would emasculate it...
...But since the Iranians have a deep interest in becoming a nuclear power, and the Europeans have no stomach for confrontation, Pollack admits Tehran would probably reject the Grand Bargain...
...Pollack's greatest contribution is his implicit attack on the myth that the United States is solely responsible for the confrontation with Iran...
...Iran, he reasons, is essentially a benign power, uninterested in overturning the international order in the Middle East...
...Pollack-the-penitent wrote the last two chapters, which outline a new soft policy toward Iran...
...That reality prompts Pollack to dismiss the option of using force against Iran...
...Instead he advocates—with little enthusiasm—a "Grand Bargain'' that would have Tehran renounce its nuclear program and drop its support for terrorism, in return for economic and security guarantees from Washington...
...That is not to suggest he is obliged to advocate the use of force...
...This excellent overview provides an important corrective to the dominant thinking in liberal circles regarding conflict in the Middle East...
...For here he systematically downplays the nature of the Iranian threat and avoids placing the toughest questions it raises before the reader...
...Others, including the Bush Administration, see the situation from a different perspective...
...The U.S.' reputation as a manipulative empire notwithstanding, more often than not it has been the one getting kicked around in Iran—according to rules of a game Americans do not understand, let alone influence...
...One regrets that this rising star of the policy world has, for the moment at least, decided not to bite the bullet...
...Quite the contrary, the war on terror cannot be won so long as Tehran follows its current policies...
...If it acquires nuclear weapons, the Islamic Republic will become more legitimate at home—because the nuclear program is popular at all levels of society—and more aggressive abroad...
...Its support for AI Qaeda is "tactical" rather than "strategic"—meaning that the mullahs have shielded Al Qaeda militants in order to bargain with, not destroy, the United States...
...A: I made a mistake based on faulty intelligence...
...And Tehran is positioning itself to reap the political benefits of its enemies' destruction...
...you seem to have abandoned your hawkish stance...
...Your last one, The Threatening Storm, helped persuade many reluctant Democratic policy makers to support the invasion of Iraq...
...Washington feared the Soviet Union would exploit the power vacuum...
...The Persian Puzzle demonstrates that Washington bent over backward to reach an accommodation with Mosaddeq, whom it shielded from British gunboat diplomacy for two years following the Iranian Parliament's decision to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company...
...In their view the toppling of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein—both implacable foes of Iran—has created a power vacuum in the Middle East...
...He avoids the widespread tendency to depict U.S...
...The CIA joined forces with the British only after tedious rounds of negotiations with the prime minister...
...The demise of the Soviet Union has opened up a space for a powerful regional state to play the role—like Gamal Abdel Nasser's Egypt in the 1950s—of challenger to the Americans...
...So alien is the playing field that sometimes, as in the Iran-contra affair, they cannot even identify the majorplayers...
...By that time many prominent Iranians had grown weary of his autocratic style, while the whole country had become restive...
...In a typical example, he notes that during the early 1990s Tehran rebuffed Washington because of "the continuing evolution of domestic politics after Khomeini's death, and America's continuing role as Iran's biggest political football...
...The mullahs regard Iran as the greatest power in the Persian Gulf...
...Furthermore, European powers, particularly France, would happily offer Tehran a helping hand...
...In its most reductive form, this myth holds that by sponsoring a coup against Prime Minister Muhammad Mosaddeq in 1953, when he refused to step down as the Shah had demanded, Washington destroyed the prospects for democracy in Iran and sowed the seeds of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's Islamic revolution...
...Pollackthe-hawk wrote the first 11 chapters, which constitute a very useful history of U.S.-Iranian relations...
...Thus the "American" coup bears the fingerprints of many of Mosaddeq's countrymen, and they are the primary architects of their own history, Pollack refreshingly points out...
...It is unlikely to influence the public debate to a degree commensurate with the author's talents...
...As for the mullahs fomenting insurgency in Iraq, we are assured it is hardly worth mentioning...
...he does have an obligation, though, to present opposing views more faithfully—if only to refute them...
...Perhaps that explains why The Persian Puzzle, whose publication coincides with the 25th anniversary of the Iran hostage crisis, appears to be the work of two distinctly different authors...
...He is keenly sensitive to the fact that Iran's relations with the outside world are held hostage by its internal feuding...
...The failure to do so actually weakens his dovish conclusions...
Vol. 87 • November 2004 • No. 6
