BOOK
REVIEW That '800-pound gorilla'
... Treacherous Alliance:
The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the
United States by Trita Parsi
Reviewed by Khody Akhavi
WASHINGTON - The past few years have
produced an enormous trove of literature about
conflict and violence in the Middle East, no doubt
because there appears to be so much of both.
Academics, policymakers and media pundits
remain fascinated
by
the "nature" of terrorism and the impending threat
of a nuclear-armed Iran. The superheated rhetoric
of leaders in Iran and Israel has only accelerated
the possibility of confrontation between the two
countries, while the cumulative effect of the
media echo chamber has added to the clamor of war
drums and saber-rattling inside the Washington
Beltway.
Out of this cacophony emerges a
book with the clarity and insight that so often elude
US policymakers. Trita Parsi's Treacherous
Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and
the United States is a deft account of the
back-channel relationship linking the three
countries from Israel's inception in 1948 through
the present.
In revealing interviews with
130 decision-makers in Iran, Israel and the US,
Parsi, an analyst who also heads the National
Iranian American Council, crafts an alternative
view of a conflict that is often couched in
ideological terms.
In the opening chapter,
Parsi shatters several myths about the Israel-Iran
rivalry, or the "800-pound gorilla", as he refers
to it several times throughout the text. For
example, while President Mahmud Ahmadinejad
publicly condemns Israel and questions the
validity of the Holocaust, the Islamic Republic is
actually home to the second-largest population of
Jews in the Middle East (Israel is first).
Few Iranian Jews take Ahmadinejad's
rhetoric seriously, writes Parsi, "and they point
to the fact that little has changed for Iranian
Jews under him".
In fact, Iran's sole
Jewish representative in the Majlis (parliament),
Maurice Mohtamed, spoke out against the
president's comments, and during the height of the
Islamic Revolution, ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini
issued a fatwa protecting Jews as a
religious minority contingent on their rejection
of Zionism and the Israeli state, according to
Parsi.
In Israel, he complicates the
notions of separate Israeli and Iranian identities
through his exchanges with several Iranian Jews
who left Iran not for ideological reasons as much
as for economic ones. Interestingly, some of
Israel's most prominent public officials are
originally Persian, including scandal-tainted
President Moshe Katzav and former Israel Defense
Forces chief of staff Dan Halutz (born to Persian
immigrants).
But Parsi's book is
remarkable for its detailed look at the
international-relations dimension of the
Israel-Iran relationship. There exists, beneath
the vitriolic public exchanges, a history of
intelligence cooperation, arms sales, and secret
dialogue between the two countries. And the
dialogue continued even after Iran turned from a
monarchy into an Islamic theocracy.
The
"alliance of necessity" initially formed out of a
mutual concern over the threat of neighboring
countries - purely pragmatic and practical, the
epitome of realpolitik. Israel viewed Iran as a
possible peripheral ally, outside the orbit of its
immediate threats (Gamal Abdel Nasser's Egypt,
Syria, Jordan). Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the shah of
Iran, envisaged his country as the dominant
hegemon in the Middle East, and viewed neighboring
Iraq as its most immediate threat.
In
Parsi's narrative the shah, who ultimately fled
Iran during the Islamic Revolution and died in
exile in 1980, exhibited all the signs of
megalomania. He was a Middle Eastern dictator with
a shopping list for US-made weapons and lucrative
oil rents to pay for the merchandise. But he
wasn't the smartest political
tactician.
The shah's appetite for status
as the dominant power in the region led him to
sign the Algiers Accord, an agreement between Iran
and Iraq that would end hostilities and settle
territorial disputes, notably the Shatt al-Arab
waterway. At the time, Iraq was fighting a Kurdish
rebellion launched by peshmerga guerrillas
(who were supported by Iranian and Israeli
intelligence agencies and financed by the US).
In the long term, Parsi writes, the shah's
shortsighted agreement led to the unraveling of a
tacit alliance with Israel, with which it was
conducting intelligence operations. Furthermore,
the end of hostilities gave Iraq an opportunity to
crush the Kurdish rebellion and rebuild its army.
It would use it against Iran five years later.
The Islamic Revolution took the US by
surprise, but even the rigid ideological rhetoric
of the mullahs could be manipulated if the
political situation demanded. While the mullahs
maintained a fierce public posture condemning
Israel, they approached the country for weapons
during the Iran-Iraq War. Parsi writes, "The more
the Islamic Republic's foreign policy was
presented as different from that of the shah, the
more it resembled it at its core ... the ideology
had shifted astonishingly. But the end goal
remained remarkably similar."
The end goal
was to build a stronger relationship with the
United States, and if that meant theocratic Iran
would have to go through Israel, it would do so.
But successive US administrations complicated the
relationship further.
US
neo-conservatives, who got their country involved
in the Iran-Contra scandal at the height of Iran's
war against Iraq, opposed contact with Iran 15
years later in spite of Tehran's repeated
overtures. "There is a great deal of confusion as
to how America got mixed up in an Israeli-Iranian
rivalry that is neither about ideology nor
religion," Parsi writes.
Currently, Iran
is a country that finds itself increasingly
isolated by the West, while the US and Israel now
represent a complete alignment of views on
terrorism and how to deal with it. Parsi's book
also analyzes the extent to which the pro-Israel
lobby influenced policy and views on Iran. In the
early 1990s, after the defeat of Saddam Hussein's
Iraqi Army in the Gulf War, Israeli politicians
began describing Iran as the primary threat.
"The pro-Israeli community turned strongly
against Iran, influencing US policy on Iran in an
almost emotional way," said former US national
security adviser Brent Scowcroft.
As a
result, Iran, Parsi argues convincingly, created a
different equation, one in which Israeli actions
against Palestinian "rejectionist groups" Hamas
and Islamic Jihad, as well as Lebanon's Hezbollah,
would be met with retaliatory terrorist attacks
against Jews and Israelis abroad.
But even
Iran's links to groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah
could be negotiated, as evidenced by the 2003
overture by the Iranian regime, and approved by
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to stop
funding them in return for certain safety
guarantees and a wider political opening with the
United States. Then-US congressman Bob Ney
delivered the message to the White House, but Iran
never received a reply.
Treacherous
Alliance is a timely and important read for
anybody who wants push back the essentialist
arguments that suggest an impending clash of
ideologies. In Parsi's estimation, as long as the
US ignores the "800-pound gorilla" in the room, it
will not be able to resolve any of its problems in
the region.
Treacherous Alliance: The
Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United
States by Trita Parsi. Yale University Press
(October 1, 2007). ISBN-10: 0300120575. Price
US$28, 384 pages.
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that so often elude
US policymakers. Trita Parsi's Treacherous
Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and
the United States is a deft account of the
back-channel relationship linking the three
countries from Israel's inception in 1948 through
the present. 
