Going to Tehran: Why America Must Accept the Islamic Republic of Iran - Softcover

Leverett, Flynt

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1250043530 ISBN 13: 9781250043535

Verlag: Picador, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

A FOREIGN POLICY MAGAZINE BOOK TO READ

Less than a decade after Washington endorsed a fraudulent case for invading Iraq, similarly misinformed and politically motivated claims are pushing America toward war with Iran. Challenging the daily clamor of American saber rattling, Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett argue that America should renounce thirty years of failed politics, diplomacy and strategy and engage with Iran-just as Nixon revolutionized U.S. foreign policy by going to Beijing and realigning relations with China.

In Going to Tehran, former analysts in both the Bush and Clinton administrations, the Leveretts offer a uniquely informed account of Iran as it actually is today, not as many have caricatured it or wished it to be. They show that Iran's political order is not on the verge of collapse, that most Iranians still support the Islamic Republic, and that Iran's regional influence makes it critical to progress in the Middle East. Drawing on years of research and access to high-level officials, the Leveretts' indispensable work makes it clear that America must "go to Tehran" if it is to avert strategic catastrophe.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Flynt Leverett served at the National Security Council, State Department, and CIA, and is currently a professor of international affairs and law at Penn State. Hillary Mann Leverett served at the National Security Council and State Department and negotiated for the U.S. government with Iranian officials; she is now senior professorial lecturer at American University. Their writing has also appeared in the New York Times, Politico, Foreign Policy, and Washington Monthly, among other publications. They live in Northern Virginia.

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Going to Tehran

Why America Must Accept the Islamic Republic of Iran

By Flynt Leverett, Hillary Mann Leverett

Picador

Copyright © 2013 Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-250-04353-5

Contents

Title Page, 
Copyright Notice, 
Dedication, 
Epigraph, 
Introduction: Will the United States Lose the Middle East ... or Come to Terms with the Islamic Republic of Iran?, 
PART ONE THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC AS RATIONAL ACTOR, 
Prologue, 
1: A Revolutionary State in a Dangerous World, 
2: Rationality, Realism, and Iranian Grand Strategy, 
3: Engaging America, 
PART TWO THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC AS LEGITIMATE STATE, 
Prologue, 
4: Religion, Revolution, and the Roots of Legitimacy, 
5: A Leader and Three Presidents, 
6: A Controversial Election, 
PART THREE THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC AS AMERICAN TARGET, 
Prologue, 
7: Myths and Mythmakers, 
8: Iran and America's Imperial Turn, 
9: The Road to Tehran, 
Afterword to the 2014 Edition, 
Notes, 
Acknowledgments, 
Index, 
Praise for Going to Tehran, 
About the Authors, 
Copyright, 

CHAPTER 1

A REVOLUTIONARY STATE IN A DANGEROUS WORLD

The position of a state in the world depends on the degree of independence it has attained.

— Leopold von Ranke, 1833

In a surprise assault beginning on September 22, 1980, more than half of Saddam Husayn's army poured into the nascent Islamic Republic of Iran, seizing significant chunks of its territory. Defying the Iraqi president's expectations of quick victory, the new government in Tehran mounted a tenacious defense of its homeland. Over eight bloody years, Iran recaptured all the territory the Iraqis had taken, paying a horrible price in the process.

In 1982, the Iraqi forces began using chemical weapons — initially, tear gas — on the battlefield; from 1983 on, they unleashed more potent chemical weapons, mainly mustard gas and nerve agents, against Iranian forces as well as against civilian targets. Iraqi officials later told United Nations inspectors that their military had used approximately 100,000 munitions filled with chemical weapons against Iran. To raise the cost of resistance even more, in 1984 Iraq made population centers its primary target, opening the so-called war of the cities, with air and missile strikes that continued until the fighting ended, in 1988. By then, more than 200,000 Iranians had been killed and almost 400,000 injured. More than 10,000 Iranian victims of Iraqi chemical weapons attacks died; 60,000 to 90,000 continue to suffer — in many cases, acutely — from the effects of their exposure. Beyond the human cost, the war inflicted extensive damage on Iran's economy and infrastructure.

What Iranians to this day call the Imposed War and the Holy Defense had a profound effect on the way they see their country's strategic situation. It drove home how severely the Islamic Republic, as a revolutionary state, is threatened in a dangerous world. For it was not launched solely by a power-mad tyrant seeking more territory. Throughout his war of aggression, Saddam had the financial, logistical, political, and intelligence support of the United States, other Western powers, and the Arab world's richest states. In September 1987, as the war still raged, Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei, then Iran's president, told the United Nations General Assembly that "no revolution is safe from the counterstrikes of the power system dominating our world, but the variety, the depth, and the enormity of the enmities and the wild anger unleashed against us ... constitute an exceptionally interesting story." This view remains widely shared by his compatriots.

Western students of international affairs have long divided states into two categories. Those that accept the formal and informal rules of international interactions and the distribution of power underlying them are said to pursue "status quo" foreign policies; those that do not accept the prevailing international order and want to change it in fundamental ways are deemed to have "revisionist" or even "revolutionary" foreign policies. The distinction is problematic; it overlooks the fact that consequential states (including, for most of its history, the United States) usually seek to increase their power relative to others even as they work within prevailing frameworks of international order. Nevertheless, it continues to influence the way in which Westerners, and especially Americans, think and talk about international relations.

For all that the United States is the product of a revolution, it has generally not liked revolutions in other countries and has certainly not approved of states with what it considers revolutionary foreign policies. Many analysts argue that revolutionary states are, almost by definition, more likely than others to initiate conflict, either because their ideologies compel them to export their revolutions (even in violation of international norms of sovereignty and nonintervention) or because their internally fractious nature creates a need to divert public attention from domestic problems by creating external enemies. In Western discourse, the Islamic Republic is commonly tagged with this image of the revolutionary state as an ideologically driven aggressor.

The historical record shows that postrevolutionary Iran has been — and, Iranians say, desires to be — a fundamentally defensive state. In contrast to other Middle Eastern powers, it has never attacked another state or even threatened to attack one. In fact, since the revolution it has grown less and less capable of projecting conventional military force beyond its borders. The Iranians who forced the shah from his throne in 1979 inherited the powerful U.S.-armed military he had built up during the last quarter century of his reign. But in the revolution's wake, most of the officers who had commanded the shah's military either fled or were executed. Washington cut off logistical and technical support immediately after the revolution, a debilitating measure that was exacerbated by an embargo on military shipments from most other countries during the Iran-Iraq War. Once the war ended, the Iranian government shifted budgetary resources away from the military and toward reconstruction and economic development, reducing the nation's conventional military capability to marginal levels. Today, the United States spends almost seventy times more on defense than Iran does, Saudi Arabia more than quadruple, and Israel nearly double. Assertions that the Islamic Republic poses an offensive threat are baseless; to borrow a phrase from the U.S. Army, it won't be parking its tanks in anybody's front yard anytime soon.

While some revolutionary states have been aggressors, they are not inevitably so; history shows that a revolutionary order can just as easily become the target of aggression by states that, fearful of destabilizing contagion, calculate that its internal upheaval makes it more vulnerable to defeat. This was precisely the Islamic Republic's experience. It had to fight off a devastating Iraqi invasion launched less than eighteen months after its creation — an invasion prompted by Saddam's confidence that the fledgling state could not defend itself. Coming out of this war, Iranian policy makers understood that a stable region was crucial — for postwar reconstruction, for longer-term economic development, and for the growth of the Islamic Republic's regional influence. As one Iranian academic...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Picador
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1250043530
• ISBN 13: 9781250043535
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 496
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland