Volume 53, Number 17 · November 2, 2006
Defiant Iran
By Christopher de Bellaigue
Confronting Iran: The Failure of American Foreign Policy and the Next Great Crisis in the Middle East
by Ali M. Ansari
Basic Books, 280 pp., $26.00
Hidden Iran: Paradox and Power in the Islamic Republic
by Ray Takeyh
Times Books, 259 pp., $25.00
At the beginning of 2002, President George W. Bush tried to punish Iran for supporting anti-Israel militants, for refusing to adopt a Western-style democracy, and for allegedly trying to produce weapons of mass destruction. He included Iran, along with Iraq and North Korea, in the 'axis of evil.' Among foreign diplomats and journalists in Tehran, it became fashionable to speak of the coming 'implosion' of the Islamic Republic, Iran's revolutionary state. Weakened by a power struggle between reformists and conservative hard-liners, Iran was now, or so it was said, acutely vulnerable to the sort of threat that the United States, whose forces had easily toppled the Taliban and scattered al-Qaeda, seemed to represent.
Review, 5408 words
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