The Persian puzzle, or the
CIA's? By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
TEHRAN - The Persian Puzzle is the name
of a new book by Kenneth M Pollack, author of The
Gathering Storm: The Case for Invasion of Iraq
, widely regarded as a main justification
for Iraq's illegal invasion last year. Pollack, a
former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst
now at the Brookings Institution, seeks to explore the
roots of problems between Iran and the United States
over the past quarter-century. In so doing, however, Pollack
unfortunately proves incapable of breaking free from a
CIA school of thought that, in addition to denigrating
Iran's national character, consistently predicts the
imminent demise of the Islamic regime in Iran.
Concerning the former, much like Graham Fuller,
another former CIA analyst and author of The Center
of Universe: The Geopolitics of Iran
(Westview Press, 1991), Pollack indulges in criticizing
Iranian emotionalism, xenophobia, exaggerated
"self-importance", "considerable ignorance of many of its
policymakers", etc, thus making a mockery of objective analysis
bereft of such abstract generalization smacking of what
the late Edward Said labeled "Orientalism".
According to Pollack, the "clock is ticking"
for regime change in Iran, reminding us of the
rosy predictions of another CIA analyst, Raul Grecht, who
in the early and mid-1990s wrote articles, for instance
in the influential Foreign Affairs, under the
pseudonym Edward Shirley, about the "meltdown" of the
Islamic Republic of Iran, so imminent that Grecht
advised the US government against even bothering to
locate any moderates in the Iranian system in order to
enter into dialogue with them.
A decade or so later,
it is of course a legitimate question to ask what is
behind this persistent CIA knack for vilifying Iranian
national character and taking the risk of going on
record with respect to regime change, even though there
are few, if any, visible signs of regime change in today's
Iran. Is it because of an undeclared, subliminal CIA
grudge harking back to the 1979 Islamic Revolution that
caught the US government totally by surprise, notwithstanding
the complaint of then US president Jimmy Carter
that a few months prior to the revolution he was never
told by the agency that Iran was in a pre-revolutionary
stage? Or is it because the CIA has received
so much flak recently over what Pollack in his new
book refers to as "our 25-year experience misstating
Iraq's weapons of mass destruction" that the likes of
Pollack want to redeem the agency in the guise of former
CIA analysts?
Clearly, even with their high-tech
pool of information, no present or former CIA analyst,
or for that matter anyone else, is capable of historical
clairvoyance with respect to a future regime change in
Iran. Certainly, one may cite the indicators of regime
instability and its opposite for a "scientific" study of
political trends inside Iran enhancing the potential for
political transformation, but to leapfrog from such
limited studies to the categorical, albeit metaphoric,
conclusion that the "clock is ticking" - in other words,
it is simply a matter of time - is to substitute
teleology for empirical research.
Related,
Pollack presents a skewed analysis of post-revolutionary
state-building in Iran and simultaneously refers to the
present regime as the "worst sponsor of terrorism" and
also as an increasingly moderate regime that "has no
history of reckless behavior". At times, Pollack appears
undecided as to where the chips are falling regarding
the evolution of the Iranian system, contradicting
himself particularly when discussing the Iranian nuclear
issue.
On the one hand,
Pollack claims that Iran's possession of nuclear bombs will
stimulate a back-to-the-past policy of "aggressive" foreign policy by
Tehran aimed at undermining its neighbors, using past
tense, and on the other, accusing Tehran of precisely
such "aggressive" actions as terrorism and subversion,
using present tense. As a result, the book leaves a
confusing impression of the post-ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini political system in Iran, partly due to
Pollack's failure to touch on important facets of Iran's
foreign policy, such as Iran's role in regional conflict
management.
A major flaw of the book is
that it claims that the Non-Proliferation Treaty
(NPT) permits nuclear weaponization through
"transparency", whereby all the fissile stages, save "loading the material"
in a bomb, can be done under the watchful eyes of
the NPT. This is, without doubt, a caricature of the NPT
and its safeguard mechanisms, which Pollack may
have been cognizant of had he devoted minimal attention
to the intrusive Additional Protocol of the NPT, signed
by Iran last December.
The biggest flaw of the
book, however, is that it adds precious little to our
knowledge of the subject matter. A fairly average
summarizer of pre-existing approaches (eg, the grand
bargain approach, which Pollack endorses by nuancing it),
the book reads like a polished doctoral dissertation, and
a mediocre one at that, one that insists Iran is to
blame for most, if not all, of the problems in the
current US-Iran quagmire, in part by psychologizing
deep-seated, even structural conflict, and insisting
that if only the Iranians could set aside their
"emotionalism", then they could see the light of
rapprochement with the US.
In an ideal world,
authors explicitly espousing war and armed conflict
would be chastised for contributing to "hate
literature", and the likes of Pollack would at least not
be treated as media celebrities as they are in the US
today. But sadly we live in a unipolar Orwellian order
where truth is a casualty of ideological warfare,
espoused under the veneer of "clashing civilizations",
and certainly ill-equipped to deconstruct the discourse
of warmongers who use the considerable resources at
their disposal to lay the groundwork of public diplomacy
for America's next military gambit.
The
Persian Puzzle is, in conclusion, highly recommended
as a useful reading for the students of the CIA and the
US government to decipher the riddle of a whole array of
(former) CIA analysts sold to the historical determinism
of regime change in Iran, as part and parcel of its
perpetual demonization reaching its apex in George W
Bush's "axis of evil".
Kaveh L
Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini:
New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview
Press) and "Iran's Foreign Policy Since 9/11", Brown's
Journal of World Affairs, co-authored with former deputy
foreign minister Abbas Maleki, No 2, 2003. He teaches
political science at Tehran University.
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