Ali M. Ansari's Confronting Iran
Ali M. Ansari's book Confronting Iran (2006) is especially timely given the current discussion of Iran and its future and concerns about what the U.S. may do to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon and becoming a much greater threat. Of course, also in the news is the recent National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) stating that Iran is not the immediate threat President Bush has been implying it is and that Iran ended its nuclear program several years ago. None of this means that Iran is not a threat or that a confrontation with Iran would not be the sort of devastating action critics believe it might be. Ansari considers the nature of Western diplomacy in the region primarily form 1953 to the present and suggests a number of reasons for the failure he discusses. For the first two decades or so, relations were good enough because the country was under the rule of the Shah, rule that was largely imposed by the West. This rule also created great resentment among the population and would contribute to the angry reaction once the Shah was deposed. The taking of the American hostages at the embassy in Tehran was one of the consequences of the failure of diplomacy in the first period, while the subsequent history has been la
politicians of linking all perceived enemies to events they had little to do with only makes the U. would insist that the new War in Iraq was based only on moral issues, this was immediately doubted as the same oil theory was raised by various commentators and still is to this day. Mossadeq opposed the Supplementary Agreement, just as he had earlier opposed a bill to grant oil concessions to the Soviet Union. There was no moral justification for the original invasion, and repelling this invasion thus was a just cause. this is in keeping with the history of U. American involvement with Iran actually extends back into the nineteenth century, and as Ansari notes, the failure to recognize the nature of the society in that region and to find a way to accommodate it and communicate with its leaders began at the same time and has continued ever since. removal of Saddam now has only increased tensions and raised new doubts in Iran about U.
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