Washington's Missing Piece
Review By Roger Howard
Kenneth Pollack, The Persian Puzzle: The
Conflict between Iran and America. New York:
Random House, 2004, 576 pp. $26.95.
It is a curious paradox that a foreign government
should play a starring role on the
political stage of a country with which it has
no formal relations. Nevertheless, in the
past quarter century, Iran has haunted
successive U.S. administrations like a sinister
eminence grise. The rupture of
U.S.-Iranian diplomatic relations and the
tragic failure to rescue American hostages
from the U.S. embassy in Tehran in April
1980 dashed. Jimmy Carter's hopes of
winning the presidential elections the following
November. Six years later the Iran-
Contra scandal rocked the Reagan administration
and led to criminal proceedings
against numerous officials, a suicide
attempt by a former National Security
Advisor, and the near impeachment of the
president. More recently, it has been
alleged that the chimera of Saddam's
weapons of mass destruction was conjured
by an Iranian intelligence service that
sought to use the influence of its protégé,
Iraqi leader Ahmed Chalabi, to deflect
American pressure from Tehran and lure
the U.S. military into an Iraqi quagmire.
During President George W. Bush's
second term, Iran is under the spotlight
of attention once again. Amidst claims
that its leaders are close to developing the
fissile material for a nuclear weapon and
press reports of U.S. personnel on
Iranian soil reconnoitering possible targets
for a pre-emptive military strike, Vice
President Dick Cheney has described Iran as "right at the top" of the challenges facing
the new administration. Meanwhile,
President Bush continues to voice idealistic
rhetoric about bringing "freedom" to
those "oppressed" by the tyrannies of the
Middle East.
The timing of Kenneth Pollack's new
book, The Persian Puzzle, is therefore as
meticulous as his earlier work, The
Threatening Storm, a best-selling piece on the
alleged threat posed by Saddam that
appeared in September 2002, just as the
clouds of war darkened Iraqi skies. Now, as
the author points out, "there are signs of
important developments in Iran." While it
is, of course, extremely difficult to judge
what lies ahead, whether change will be
prompted by the regime's nuclear program,
or what the impact will be of events
in neighboring Iraq, the pertinence of
Pollack's latest work is hardly in doubt.
Such a work is much needed not just
because Iran is such a timely subject, but
also because its subject matter represents
so much else. For example, the regime's
nuclear program and alleged links with
Middle Eastern militia groups raise the
wider questions of how and why the West
should deal with weapons proliferation
throughout the developing world and
how terrorism should be defined and
addressed.
Although many might claim that his
strong support for the Iraq war destroys his
credibility, Pollack is nonetheless extremely
well qualified to write on Iran, having
acted as the director for Gulf Affairs at the
National Security Council during the
Clinton years. In these roles, and during
his subsequent work at the Brookings
Institution, he has acquired not only a vast
knowledge of almost every aspect of the
country, including its relationship with
the Middle East and the wider world, but
also considerable first-hand experience and insight into American policy formation.
This means that his book is valuable
because, consciously or not, it necessarily
reveals something about the unspoken
assumptions held by those who pull the
strings of power in Washington.