Notes on "Targeting Iran"

Posted in martin's blog on ,

"Targeting Iran", by David Barsamian, with Noam Chomsky, Ervand Abrahamian, and Nahid Mozaffari. City Lights, 2007

This book is essentially an extended pamphlet against the Bush-Cheney administration's talk of a military attack on Iran - talk only temporarily shelved, and not clearly repudiated by Obama.

The interview with Noam Chomsky is thin - largely, I guess, an effort to boost the book's sales by getting Chomsky's famous name on the cover.

Ervand Abrahamian's contribution is much more substantial.

David Barsamian's introduction records that in May 2003, straight after the US invasion of Iraq, Iran (then under reformist president Khatami) made diplomatic approaches to the USA for a comprehensive deal on issues including Iran's nuclear programme and possibly including an Iranian commitment to support "two states" in Israel-Palestine.

The US administration, presumably then still expecting quick and easy triumph in Iraq which could free it from the irksome necessity of dealing with Iran which it had had to accept in Afghanistan, "simply declined to respond".

Conflict has hardened since then, despite the paradoxical fact that, simultaneously, whatever measure there has been of political stability in both Iraq and Afghanistan depends on some degree of tacit cooperation between Iran and the USA.

Abrahamian reckons: "Both sides [US and Iran] feel overconfident... Both sides feel that they can play chicken with the other side because they have the trump card...

"The [chief] danger is a war coming from miscalculation, misjudgement, and misperceptions... The danger is that both sides will escalate the crisis and... things could get out of hand...

"The US... might be tempted to escalate... two or four days of air strikes and that's it... Iran would have no choice but to back down....

"But if Iranians are hit by air strikes, they will hit back where they have the upper hand, which is in Iraq and Afghanistan..." Iran could choose to use its influence to "unravel" both countries, and "the only way the US could be able to prevent that is to send an army of another 500,000 men".

The book also notes that the US threats on Iran - and even more so, any actual US attack on Iran - serve to rally people behind the Iranian regime. Abrahamian: "dissenters criticise the government [but] they also like to distance themselves from the Bush administration".

Abrahamian notes that "fairly conservative people from the [Iranian] military" have argued against Iran developing nuclear bombs; and at present "there is a fatwa from Khamenei that they shouldn't build the bomb".

On the whole: "I think the most important reason for [the Iranian government's] interest in nuclear energy is not necessarily the nuclear bomb, but the option of having it. The thinking of the present leadership in Iran... [is that if] at some point the country is put in a corner... it [should have] this choice".

Unlike some other literature opposing a US attack on Iran, the book takes note of Iran's turn to the "right" since 2005 under Ahmadinejad.

Nahid Mozaffari: "There is a sense... that a creeping coup d'etat by nonclerical conservative Islamists connected to the Revolutionary Guard and baseej paramilitary forces is occurring. The Guard and baseej formations were involved in the Iran-Iraq war as young men, and today many of them are in positions of power. These forces constitute Ahmadinejad's core constituency...

"[With Ahmadinejad] there was a plan to curtail the social freedoms... we see the clampdowns on the bloggers, on the women's groups, on various reformists... on university professors... a second cultural revolution, unfortunately, if they actually go through with it".

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