Just finished "The Persian Puzzle" by Kenneth Pollack

[Sal316]

..and all I can say is Oh. My. God.

This book tied together alot of seemingly stray elements in a coherent, simple, and easy to understand way. It also opened my eyes to how much the fear of Communism played into US foreign policy. I always knew alot, but was surprised at how much.

This book rocks. I've recommended it to everyone I know who's even slightly politically aware.

For more on the book and the author, look here


<snip>

Kenneth Pollack: Absolutely. I think if you could remove all of the baggage—all of the ideology, the history, whatever else—and look in purely geostrategic terms, I think it's hard to figure out why the US and Iran would necessarily be in conflict. In fact during the shah's era, before 1979—recognizing that there were all kinds of other problems—the US and Iran worked together splendidly at the strategic level.

But the source of the problem is this history—our support for the Shah, the CIA coup in 1953—has become infused into the Iranian political discourse. The regime that came to power in 1979 during the Iranian revolution actually defined itself as anti-American, and that's now a critical ingredient in the Iranian domestic political debate. That really is the source of our problems—the regime in Tehran continues to see itself as opposing the US. In their eyes, everything the US does is directed at them in a very malevolent way, and therefore they have to fight back against it.

<snip>