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Kenneth M. Pollack, The Persian Pu::.::.le: The Coriflict between lraJZ and America, New York: A Saban Center at the Brookings Institution, Random House, 2004, 539pp.

In his Foreword, Strobe Talbott\ pats Ken, the Institute, and himself on the back as follows: "In its timeliness, its trenchancy, and its solid grounding in non-partisan, objective research, Ken's book is a model of what we try to do at Brookings and how we do it" (p. x). This would have been more accommodating should it have come from a third party.

The author spent seven years in the CIA as a Persian Gulf military analyst, four years (1995-1996 and 1999-2001) as director for Gulf af­fairs at the National Security Council as the principal working-level official responsible for implementation of U.S. policy toward Iran, and presently director of research at the Saban Center for the Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.

K. M. Pollack, while being aware and regretful that he has never visited Iran, tries to minimise this deficiency by stating that: "I have always found that it is much better to listen to the views and experi­ences of a wide range of people to create a more 'statistically signifi­cant' and, hopefully, unbiased portrait of the country" (p. 427). At best, this reasoning is viable in the native country, certainly not the case for sporadic contacts, and in communication with the mostly dis­sident Iranians living in the United States, particularly so in Wash­ington DC most of whom represent a selective segment of the Iranian community and are likely to present a warped, biased view of events. Further on, he grossly underestimates his lack of first hand Iranian knowledge by affirming that: "I do not see it as a calamitous gap" (p. 427). Judging by the references, Mr. Pollack does not even speak Per­sian. Consequently, the book would have been much more authorita­tive had it been co-authored by an unbiased iranologist with due aca­demic training. This deficiency is not limited to Mr. Pollack, but is unfortunately reflected also in most aspects of American policy and strategy towards Iran. This dilemma has been the cause of many ills in U.S. decision making towards Iran. At the time of the Revolution "the

1 The President of the Brookings Institute.

©Brill, Leiden, 2005 Iran and the Caucasus, 9.1

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U.S. Embassy in Tehran had few officers who could speak Farsi or who had previously served in Iran" (p. 106). A seemingly insignificant word may lead to major political misunderstanding.

The following is an interesting example of a simple but very momen­tous conversational misinterpretation due to lack of socio-linguistic awareness on the American part: "Whenever American officials are able to talk to Iranians about what is that they would want from a Grand Bargain, and whenever American citizens are able to talk to Iranian officials about what it is that they would want from a Grand Bargain, one of the foremost things that the Iranians invariably say is respect. In my own conversations with Iranians, in and out of govern­ment, I have found that it is usually the first of their demands-and they often say it immediately and then have to think hard as to what their other demands might be. Respect is an abstract concept that needs to be made tangible if it is going to be part of a deal. So, like good ne­gotiators, the Americans inevitably ask, 'What do you mean by respect'? Typically, the Iranians cannot define what respect would be, but they are full of illustrations of disrespectful American behaviour that would have to end for Iran to be willing to accept a Grand Bargain". Irani­ans often express themselves metaphorically, a fact that bewitches the straight-speaking Americans. The word resped is often used in Persian to mean 'recognition'. What the present Iranian regime is after its recogni­tion by the American administration, all other things being unimpor­tant and secondary.

In spite of its shortcomings, this is one of the best and most infor­mative books written on the Iran-America conflict, particularly in its treatment of the American foreign policy and strategy towards Iran. The author has tried to look at the problem in a scholarly and impar­tial manner. He has been very successful in the presentation of the facts concerning the tumultuous, contradictory, and flawed American policies toward Iran; and the highly disorderly and confused strategy within different agencies, policy makers and strategists of the Ameri­can administration; but, he is perhaps the most knowledgeable and successful in his own field as a military analyst, including his investiga­tion of the Iran-Iraq war (chapters 7-3), and the assessment and the pros and cons of various military options open to the U.S. administra­tion in a possible American military action against Iran (parts of chapter 13).

2 Presumably the word in discussion is ehteriim "honour, respect , reverence'', an Arabic word profusely used in Persian.

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K. M. Pollack has been unsuccessful in three major aspects of his book: firstly in his treatment and analysis of the Iranian side of the Puzzle; secondly, in some of his expositions, on which he has been car­ried away by his CIA background and the American psyche rather than an impassionate, stoic logic; and thirdly, lack of unbiased and unprejudiced judgment when balancing the grievances.

The presentation of opposing statements and conclusions, combined with some overstated, unrealistic and biased analysis, are the main draw­backs of this book. The following examples are given as illustration of this point: On page 172, Pollack admits: " ... we had dispatched Gen­eral Huyser to Iran for the express purpose of instigating a coup d'etat against the Revolution", on the next page concerning the hostage taking he argues: "By that [the hostage taking by the Iranian students for 444 days and the provisional confiscation of the U.S. Embassy compound] we mean that it was wrong not only from an international legal standpoint, but also in the sense that we were innocent of the charges that the Iranians levelled against us and that their claim moti­vated them to launch the attack" (p. 173). "The hostage crisis has left a terrible scar on the American psyche" (p. 172).

The taking of the fifty-two American Embassy staff as hostages in an extremely volatile period of the Islamic Revolution by a group of brash, overexcited students was indeed an act of wrong doing on the Iranian part, but considering that the hostages were relatively well treated and assured that they would be released unharmed has cer­tainly become an overly obsessed mania with both the American gov­ernment and the nation-mainly due to the fact that it has hurt the American ego. This is surely nothing compared with the 1953 Ameri­can organised coup against Mosaddeq, which affected a quarter cen­tury of a nation's history and is lightly dismissed as: "was clearly a set­back for Iran's political development" (p. xxv), or the Huyzer coup attempt, which made the up starting revolutionary regime very jittery and became the cause of many ills and later mistrusts. It is also surely very insignificant compared with the intentional downing by the American navy of the Iran Air passenger plane3 with a loss of life of 290, considered the world's sixth biggest air disaster, and which is still being covered up by American authorities as a mistake (pp. 232-233).

Concerning the level of American complicity and interference in Iran's internal affairs, Pollack says: "As I have tried to describe in the previous three chapters, Iranians have tended to greatly exaggerate

3 On 3rdJuly 1988 over the Persian Gulf

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both of these matters" (p. 1 7 3). In one place he says: "The larger pol­icy failure in Iran was to tie ourselves so tightly to the Shah's regime. In Iran we hitched our wagon to a falling star" (p. 137), and in another he reiterates: "The Shah was neither our creature nor our puppet, and consequently a very great deal of Iran's animosity toward the United States is undeserved" (p. 174). The Shah was certainly not an Ameri­can creature, but he was surely the product of American incarnation. "America's Iran policy turned out all right in the end, and that makes it hard to criticise. However, it ultimately turned out well in 1997 be­cause of the deus ex machina of Mohammad Khatami's election" (p. 293). This kind of reasoning by Pollack betrays his lack of first hand knowledge of the Iranian society and polity. The election of Khatami sprang from a deep-rooted desire on behalf of a great majority of the Iranians for democracy and change; it had nothing to do with Ameri­can politics or strategy.

The overstated, unrealistic side of the equation is very evident in overre­actions manifested by American policy makers. K. M. Pollack describes the American rationale and the shift in siding with Saddam in the Iran-Iraq war by the following statement: "However, the develop­ments that actually triggered the American shift were Iran's sudden run of victories on the battlefield. By mid-1982, the Iraqis were afraid that Iran not only was about to conquer Iraq and over-throw Sad­dam's regime, but planned to mount subsequent invasions of Jordan and Israel and/ or the Gulf states. After the systematic way, in which the new Iranian armies had shredded Iraq's better equipped ground forces and driven them out of Iranian territory, there were widespread fears that Iran would be able to export the revolution on the shoulders ofPasdaran infantry", "The sophisticated equipment Iraq bought with these licenses proved crucial to its weapons of mass destruction pro­grammes. U.S. allies followed suit and started selling Iraq virtually anything it wanted in terms of arms and WMD [Weapons of Mass Destruction] ... including using chemical warfare" (pp. 207-208). De­scribing the American official feeling towards Iran, the author states that "American officials considered Iran one of the greatest threats to American interests on the planet" (p. 206). What answer can one give to this other than the typical American "Oh come on!".

Mr. Pollack dismisses lightly various American interventions in Iran by concluding: "They are a product of American mistakes made twenty-five or fifty years ago, embellished and exaggerated to grandi­ose proportions by the Iranian imagination", he does not use the same logic when considering the mistake of hostage taking under very ex-

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ceptional circumstances, which also was twenty-five years ago. The above mentioned American actions are never qfficially acknowledged as "illegal actions against international law". On top of all these, there is no doubt that the American Embassy in Tehran was not being used for pure and simple diplomacy considering its enormous size of 1,400 persons, one of the largest in the world. This gave the newly formed regime good reasons to worry.

The Persian Pu;:.:;}.e is divided in to 13 chapters; the first three give a brief run of the mill history of Iran from the Elamites to the reign of the last Shah with nothing interesting or new4

• These chapters could have been dismissed from the book or left unread by someone who has an overall knowledge of Iranian history. The real subject matter of the book starts from chapter 4, "The Last Shah" onward.

In his Introduction the author is carried away by saying: " ... and [I] think that we would benefit from a warmer relationship with their country. But I will say very bluntly that I don't think the United States <needs' Iran (my Italics); we have been isolated from Iran for twenty-five years and in that time have experienced the most extraordinary economic prosperity in our history, coupled with strategic developments that have made the United States the most powerful nation the world has ever seen" (p. xx). While the above statement is perfectly true in one sense, it is not quite so in another, and that is the Middle East strategy, which has bogged down the most powerful nation on earth, mainly because of Iran's opposition. The positive role of Iran in solving the Middle East crises even if not absolutely crucial is certainly very important and in the least benificial in Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and most of all Palestine. A couple of pages on, Pollack gives an ex­cellent example of how the U.S. needs Iran as follows: "The issue of Iraq raises another Iran-related problem. The reconstruction of Iraq was always going to be a long, hard process, but we have made it much harder than it ever needed to be thanks to our many mistakes during the first year after the fall of Baghdad. Iran has considerable as­sets it can bring to bear in Iraq. If we can somehow convince them to be helpful there, it potentially might mean the difference between suc­cess and failure. On the other hand , if they decide to try to undermine our efforts there, they could create the kind of hellish conditions for American forces that they eventually did for us in Lebanon in the

4 Pollack is right in a rguing that the historical context is importa nt for the understanding of the Iran-U.S. conflict, but the Elamite, Median or Achaemenia n history that he presents can hardly play any part on the subject under consideration.

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early 1980s" (p. xxiv). Iranian posture is undoubtedly crucial for any Middle East solution. Then he continues: "The same cannot be said for the Iranians. They have not fared particularly well over the past twenty-five years. They are not destitute, but their economy is hob­bled" (p. xxi). It is true that the Iranian economy is not admirable, but this is not due to a severed relationship with the United States, but due mainly to a variety of other reasons. First and foremost it is due to the immediate upheavals inherent in any revolution, this not being an ex­ception, the second is bad management on the part of the Iranian authorities, and thirdly, due to the imposed Iran-Iraq war. Having passed the original obstacles of the Revolution, repaired the Iran-Iraq war damages, if the Iranian rulers devise and execute wise economic programmes, I will say very bluntly that I don't think Iran <needs' the United States!

The severing of relations with the United States has not been with­out benefits to Iran. Iran has become self sufficient in the production of wheat and fruits, it has made good progress in the production of other agrarian products and in dairy farming and poultry. It has been enormously successful in the expansion of electricity, gas and petro­chemical products. It has made great strides in education, and public health services. Most important of all, it has gained a certain sense of self confidence and self reliance both psychologically and in reality.

Neither Mr. Pollack, nor other American strategists comprehend the extraordinary story of a hundred years of almost ceaseless struggle by the Iranian nation for democracy.5 The successful Constitutional Revolution of Iran (1906) was a peaceful and purposeful revolution, directed by the intellectuals, and the enlightened mullahs with the support of the populace at a time when very few countries in the world had a parliamentary democracy. This was thwarted by the British and the Russians; the Mosaddeq uprising was again a struggle for democ­racy and it was pacified by the United States and Britain; and, the Is­lamic Revolution was initially understood by the populace as a move­ment for democracy, derailed to a large extent through unrealistic policies and mistaken strategies of the Americans in pre- and post­revolutionary Iran. The two Khatami elections, combined with the 6th post Revolution parliamentary election was again a struggle by the people for democracy.

5 Lack of understanding in the assertion that "Democracy was not the a im of the rev­olutionaries but their method" (p. 24).

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Reading the book, it is very clear that the U.S. policy makers never really came to grips with a workable policy toward Iran from the time when the Shah was in trouble to this day.

The American foreign policy is not a cohesive smooth running in­stitution run by lifelong foreign office civil servants who are mostly immune to changes of government and internal political quarrels, as is the case in most other countries. This makes long term foreign rela­tions planning almost impossible. U.S. foreign policy is often over­shadowed or overruled by conflicts of interest and ideology. Many unfortunate examples are at hand to illustrate this no matter who was President of the United States: that of Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, Ambassador Sullivan and National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzez­inski, in the Carter administration; Dick Cheney, Colin Powel and Condoleezza Rice in the Bush administration, etc.

The U.S. President often makes an unwarranted impromptu or early statement concerning any international event, change of govern­ment, etc. before the unravelling of the situation, which make later reconciliation difficult or impossible. U.S. foreign policy suffers from a psychological factor of self esteem that whatever the U.S. says or does is right and all other ideas are worthless or wrong. The American .rys­tem on the contrary is only workable in the U.S. and not anywhere else in the world.

The American system of government and its various institutions have been conceived basically for a country, which has been separated and isolated from the rest of the world. America's sudden leap to the world stage after the Second World War created an inexperiencedgiant super power that was quite unprepared for the task. Ever since the Second World War, America, the promoter qf democracy, has been con­tinuously supporting the wrong side, the unpopular, undemocratic dictators, "On many occasions the United States has ignored repression and human rights abuses by autocratic regimes" (p. 139), e. g. the Shah of Iran, the rulers of Saudi Arabia, Saddam Hussein, Husni Mubarak, General Mosharaf and many others, giving birth to the un-defendable and unpopular American double standards policy. The U.S. has had and still is having many forced honeymoons with these and other dictators, and unpopular heads of states. The Cold War helped to justify and mask some of these.

The U.S. foreign policy has not yet come to grips with a post Cold War diplomacy, the real enemy has now turned to an imaginary one used effectively for the manipulation of public opinion and the result­ing unequivocal support obtained by the President, very effectively

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used by George W. Bush's War on Terror gimmick, which has in fact boiled down to the taking of some precautionary measures (airport se­curity), concrete blocks and other minor actions, while Usama bin Laden is almost forgotten if he does not choose to make himself pre­sent or felt every now and then. The imaginary post cold war enemy of America became Iran, al-Qa'eda and then Islam. Interestingly Khomeini played the same game with the Great Satan6 for exactly the same reasons.

Whereas we agree with Mr. Pollack's remark that "If Americans know the history of Iran and U.S.-Iranian relations too little, then Iranians know it too well" (p. xxii), we disagree with his sweeping statement that "For Iranians, the history is a constant stumbling block, made much worse by the fact that what they know as history is, in most cases, a distorted concoction of their own nationalist, religious, and even Marxist zealots" (p. xxii). Or, the very misinformed state­ment that "Washington had still another problem to contend with: the Iranians were completely ignorant about the United States" (p. 162). Right from the start of the Iranian Revolution, and prior to it, there were many Iranians in the entourage of Khomeini, who were trained in top American Universities, spoke perfect English, and had lived and worked in the United States for many years. In the present Iranian administration there are more American trained Ministers, deputies, technocrats and managers than from any other country.

Before the Second World War, the Iranians looked at America as a neutral friendly country. The establishment of American hospitals by American missionaries were very well looked upon. Even after the War the Iranian relationship was still on very fair grounds. The sour­ing of the relationship as far as the Iranian population (and not the government) is concerned started with the Kermit Roosevelt coup of 1953. The acknowledgement and apology came very late and in an inappropriate manner (p. xxv). There has been so much manipulation and meddling by Britain and the United States in the internal Iranian affairs in the past century that the Iranians have good reason to have become infatuated about the mal intentions of these two foreign powers in particular. Khomeini had every reason to mistrust and be anti­American. I do not think "Khomeini was obsessively-even mind­lessly-opposed to the United States" (p. 146), The off beam Ameri­can policy forced Khomeini to become radically anti-American, be­cause of three reasons: firstly, the American support of the Shah to the

6 The pejorative nickname given to the U.S. administration by Khomeini.

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last moment; secondly, the State Department support of the Jebheh Melli faction; and much worse, the Huyzer mission, which was planned directly to destroy the Khomeini regime. Had the Huyzer mission not been devised, Khomeini's position towards America might have been very different.

"While no one really knows how close Iran is to acquiring a work­able [atomic J weapon" (p. xxiii), the irreversible attainment of the know-how of atomic technology is undoubtedly either there or very near. Consequently, the American policy must be based on this and not on the unsuccessful Texan tough guy methodolog/ followed so far by the Bush administration. Such unrealistic analysis and statements do not help solve problems: "Like a bad dream, Iran's nuclear pro­gramme continues to plague us night after night" (p. xxiii). It is often better to accept a fact and act accordingly than either to turn a blind eye on the matter or to think force is the only solution.

Now we come to the other important issue discussed, the American accusation of Iranian participation in terrorism. What this boils down to is the Iranian support for the Palestinian cause-a matter, which has bogged down the U.S. Middle East policy for many years. This too must be looked at by the United States as a long established and standing fact, demanding Iranian participation rather than isolation. Ira­nian authorities have shown that they can be both reasonable and helpful if approached with friendly gestures. This is well proved by the mature approach of both sides concerning the Iranian cooperation re­garding the stability of Afghanistan and Iraq. Such a formula can be worked out relating to the Israel-Palestinian issue.

The second part of the theme of this book is summed up by the author: "there are no easy answers to our problems with Tehran". While this is true, it is not as difficult as it appears at the first sight. First of all the author continuously talks of the Iranians animosity against the United States. This is not the case; the Iranian population is keen for a resumption of the ties with U.S., Pollack (and possibly other policy makers) appears to be unaware of the controversial Abbas Abdi opinion poll on the subject, which showed a margin of 70% in favour of establishment of relations with the United States of America.

Both sides must admit that twenty-five years of broken relationship has neither destroyed nor made the other side. Considering that the

7 This policy has not only been applied toward Iran, but has been also applied to the United Nations, various International organisations and the Western Europe with very negative results, particularly concerning the Iraq war.

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animosity has achieved nothing very positive for any side, it is to both sides advantage to revise strategies, the most effective way of amend­ing past differences is for both sides to let bygones be bygones and agree to start with a new page in their rapport.

But before this, I suggest that such a great rift should not have happened in the first place; the differences should have been solved much earlier; under present circumstances it is better to resolve the differences as soon as possible through a mutually trusted face-saving third party or a group of third parties on the same lines as the Algerian accord, or the troika of Britain, France and Germany with the view of complete normalisation of relationship. With a little give and take quick results are possible.

Summa Summarum: likes it or not America must recognise the pre­sent regime in Iran, and secondly, it must accept that Iran's geo-politi­cal weight was not only necessary in the Cold War period, it is very necessary at the present, and will be very essential when China be­comes a super power. If we are going to learn the lessons of history, a stable Middle East is only possible when America, Iran, and Israel live in peaceful coexistence.

Dariush Borbor Institutefor Humanities, Tehran

Nicola Laure al-Samarai, Die Macht der Darstellung, Wiesbaden: Ludwig Reichert Verlag, 200 1, 158 pp. + xxxii

How is the status of women reflected in Medieval Arabic biographic literature? What was the difference between the images of free and slave women in mediaeval Arab imagination? What were, finally, the modes of representation of women in such an andro;::.entrisch society as the Abbasid court, to use the author's term. The exposition and analy­sis of the biographies of two women, a free one and a slave, as pre­sented by excerpts in the Kitiib al-Aghiini by the medieval Arab literary scholar Abu 1-Faraj al-I~fahani: is an attempt to answer to these and a number of other questions.

The book is divided into three parts. The first part purports to situ­ate biography and biographic lexica in the context of the mediaeval Arab historical writing. Here the author discusses in brief the devel­opment of the Islamic historiography, presenting then the structure of the biographical dictionaries, and their role in the formation of the Is­lamic Weltanschauung. The Islamic umma, thus, being a sum of individu­als, needs to have a register of the most prominent ones of them, those

A Review of the article by John Limbert "Death to America? Or a Life Sentence? (Source: Lobelog).

As an Iranian I am very sorry that John Limbert and others were taken hostage, but there are many factors concerning the hostage taking and various comments on the subject which do not consider the real grievances of the Iranians or when they do, they present the Iranian grievances very lightly and in passing only in a way as if the United States had committed no wrong and all the blame rests on Iran and the Iranians.

It is a proven fact that actions lead to reactions whether by a person in particular or a nation in general.

It is very necessary that a number of actions by the United States and its closest allies, the United Kingdom and Israel be aired in the Western Media in their proper perspective and the degree of importance.

First of all both the citizens and the governments of these three countries should ask themselves the simple question "why is it that the majority of Iranians are distrustful of these three nations, and why they feel badly against these three governments." They must ask themselves why the Iranians keep on chanting death to these three nations and not to any other nation? They should also let their public know that the Iranians have nothing against the nations, but the governments of these countries, more exactly the actions of their governments. Statistics have proven that the Iranian nation is more pro-American than any of the Near East countries.

A couple of very bitter proven facts for the Iranians are mentioned very light-heartedly and in passing by John Limbert himself: "A third group rationalizes the slogan as a justifiable reaction to past American misdeeds such as shooting down the Iranian Airbus in 1988 and sponsoring the 1953 coup d'etat that toppled Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. It should'nt, however, be taken literally."-- he dismisses the reality and enormous scope of these two tragedies in comparison with the hostage taking. The 1953 coup d'etat completely changed the destiny of a whole nation and the wilful shooting down of the Iranian Airbus in 1988 killed 290 persons. I do not think any person in his right mind would compare and give the same level and weight between these atrocities committed by U.S. and the hostage taking incident, in spite of the fact that Mr. Limbert might not have been very satisfied with the food that he had been served!.

The continuous and everlasting American and Israeli threat of military action, and the rhetoric of "all options being on the table," which is a blatant disregard of the Charter of the United Nations by all top politicians and diplomats of America, including the President is a real threat, whereas "death to America" is only a symbolic protest against the American foreign policy and it is only uttered by a very small fanatical hardline group. The sustained manifestation of the Iranian "support of terrorism" is a further insult to the Iranian nation. Iran has supported several national causes in various countries --just as the U.S. and other major nations do. The problem is that when a country supports a

movement which is fundamentally against the American and Israeli interests, then it is labelled as supporting a terrorist movement.

I am sure if the government of the United States assures the Iranian government that they will stop the above rhetoric the Iranians will also stop "death to America." Dariush Borbor