Michiko Kakutaniコミュの（12）The Persian Puzzle

November 9, 2004
BOOKS OF THE TIMES
'THE PERSIAN PUZZLE'
Back to the Axis of Evil, This Time Without the Army
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

The Persian Puzzle
The Conflict Between Iran and America
By Kenneth M. Pollack
539 pages. Random House. $26.95


Kenneth M. Pollack's last book, "The Threatening Storm" (2002), made the case for invading Iraq a lot more eloquently than the Bush administration ever did and helped persuade some moderates who might not otherwise have supported the war to get behind it. In that book, Mr. Pollack argued not only that the United States should depose Saddam Hussein but also that it should go to war "the right way" - by dealing with Al Qaeda and the war on terrorism first, by restarting the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and by building a large multinational coalition employing at least 250,000 troops.

In the wake of postwar revelations that Mr. Hussein did not possess stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and was not on the verge of acquiring nukes, Mr. Pollack has become an increasingly vociferous critic of the Bush administration's rush to war. He has accused the administration of distorting intelligence estimates and criticized its execution of the war and postwar reconstruction as "reckless" and "often foolish." Now, in his latest book, "The Persian Puzzle," Mr. Pollack addresses the United States' relationship with one of Iraq's more troubling neighbors: Iran, another part (along with North Korea) of the "axis of evil" invoked by President Bush in his 2002 State of the Union address - a country that has supported terrorism, allegedly pursued nuclear weapons and tried to undermine regional stability and the Middle East peace process.

Mr. Pollack's recommendations for dealing with Iran turn out to be a lot less hawkish than the sort he proposed for Iraq in "The Threatening Storm." In these pages, he argues against invading Iran ("unless Iran commits some truly egregious act of aggression against the United States on the order of a 9/11-type attack"), calls for a flexible approach that would take into account fluctuations in Iranian foreign policy (caused by internal tensions in the country between hard-liners and pragmatists) and discusses the uses of containment and carrot-and-stick incentives.

The most noticeable omission in "The Persian Puzzle" has to do with Mr. Pollack's reluctance to analyze the consequences that the Iraq war has had on Iran and its regional ambitions - even though he notes in passing that one of the chief reasons the first Bush administration did not push to depose Mr. Hussein in 1991 was its concern that such a move would leave "a power vacuum in the region and no state to balance Iran."

The other high-profile omission in this volume concerns Mr. Pollack's failure to explain persuasively why he initially believed it was necessary to go to war against Iraq but feels containment can work with Iran (even when he writes that "with the demise of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, Iran," not Iraq, "is probably the world's worst state sponsor of terrorism").

What "The Persian Puzzle" does most effectively is put America's relationship with Iran into historical perspective. Mr. Pollack, who has spent the last 16 years studying Iran (as a C.I.A. analyst, as director for gulf affairs at the National Security Council and in his current capacity as director of research at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution), argues that "understanding the history of U.S.-Iranian relations is absolutely essential to appreciate the nature of the problems we currently confront." This is not exactly a new notion; the scholar James A. Bill took on much the same subject in his 1988 book "The Eagle and the Lion: The Tragedy of American-Iranian Relations." But Mr. Pollack brings a nuanced and carefully reasoned, if sometimes debatable, approach to his exploration of the emotional baggage that both sides bring to the table today.

He provides the reader with a brief history of Iran, underscoring the ferocious xenophobia of Iranian leaders like Mohammed Mossadegh and Ayatollah Khomeini, while emphasizing how the country's experience as a pawn in the Great Game played by Russia and Great Britain during the 19th century nurtured Iranians' suspicion of foreign interference in their country's affairs. He discusses the tendency of the Iranian people - fed by centuries of weak and corrupt regimes - to resent and resist their rulers. And he reviews the many traumatic encounters between the United States and Iran over the last 50 years.

Like most observers, Mr. Pollack sees the 1953 coup against Mohammad Mossadegh as a defining moment for Iranian attitudes toward America. "What is most knotty for the United States," he writes, "is that the popular Iranian version of history portrays Mossadegh as a wildly popular prime minister forging a new, democratic Iran fully in command of its own destiny, who was overthrown by American agents to prevent Iran from achieving political and economic freedom."

Though he argues that this myth "embellished and exaggerated" American mistakes "to grandiose proportions," he adds that "there is a kernel of truth in it, and therein lies the rub; the United States did help to overthrow Mossadegh, and it was culpable in the establishment of the despotism of Mohammed Reza Shah that succeeded him."

Many Iranians, furious at the shah for a multitude of sins, from his creation of a repressive police state to his squandering of money on military equipment, blamed the United States, which they saw as "his ally or colonial 'master.' " Mr. Pollack, on his part, contends that "to the extent anyone was manipulating anyone, it was the shah who was manipulating the United States through his ability to influence oil prices," his monopoly over "strategic freedom of action in the gulf region" and "his control over virtually all of the information the United States received from his country."

Despite the fact that the failure to anticipate Ayatollah Khomeini's ascendancy was a historic blunder by the United States, Mr. Pollack curiously does not blame American policy makers this blind spot. "The shah brought the Iranian revolution on himself," he concludes: America's "greatest mistake was not in failing to prevent his fall but in following policies that made his fall so injurious to our interests."

For Americans, Mr. Pollack goes on, the defining moment in relations with Iran was the 1979-1981 hostage crisis, which "left a terrible scar on the American psyche" and which has remained the "elephant in the living room" of American policy toward Iran ever since.

"The hostage crisis made the United States look weak in the eyes of the world," he writes, "and weakness invites challenge. It seems fairly certain that this impression of weakness contributed to Iran's decision to challenge the United States in Lebanon in the 1980's and throughout the Persian Gulf in the 1980's and early 1990's; Iraq's decision to invade Kuwait in 1990 and then to remain there even after the United States committed 500,000 troops in 1991; Syria's willingness to challenge us in Lebanon in the 1980's; and possibly to other international confrontations that followed."

Can the United States and Iran overcome their bitter past? Or will their psychological scars heighten their already very real difficulties with each other? As Mr. Pollack sees it, Iran may currently be at a kind of hinge moment in history, where either the country could make "a transition to real democracy" or Islamist autocracy could solidify; where the nation could acquire nuclear weapons or embrace the concept of collective security; where it could demonstrate a greater openness toward the outside world or make a more concerted effort to shut it out.

Just how the United States deals with Iran at this crucial moment in time, he writes at the end of this informative and often useful volume, "may be the ultimate test of America's leadership in the new era that is dawning."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/09/books/09kaku.html?ex=1137128400&en=e2499865a4eb47b4&ei=5070