Understanding Iran: Everything You Need to Know, From Persia to the Islamic Republic, From Cyrus to Khamenei - Hardcover

Polk, William R.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 023061678X ISBN 13: 9780230616783

Publisher: St. Martin's Press, 2009

Synopsis

William R. Polk provides an informative, readable history of a country which is moving quickly toward becoming the dominant power and culture of the Middle East. A former member of the State Department's Policy Planning Council, Polk describes a country and a history misunderstood by many in the West. While Iranians chafe under the yolk of their current leaders, they also have bitter memories of generations of British, Russian and American espionage, invasion, and dominance. There are important lessons to be learned from the past, and Polk teases them out of a long and rich history and shows that it is not just now, but for decades to come that an understanding of Iran will be essential to American safety and well-being.

About this title

About the Author:

William R. Polk established the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Chicago, was president of the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs, and helped to organize the "Table Ronde" meeting that laid the groundwork for the European Union. He was called back to the White House briefly during the 1967 Middle Eastern War to write a draft Peace Treaty and to act as advisor to U.S. National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

AFTERWORD

As I have written in the Foreword, I think that the primary reason for learning about another culture is humane:  our world would be a dreary, drab place if we were ignorant of the richness and diversity of the ways of life that have evolved from the endowments of history and geography.  Now I want to turn to a second, more urgent, reason: to avoid destructive war and move toward security and peace.  So, while I have anchored my account in the past, I now look forward to the future.

*              *              *

                In recent years, Americans have evolved two methods of predicting the future.  The first of these is the adaptation mathematicians and political scientists have made of the German Army General Staff kriegspiel, the “wargame.”  Essentially the politico-military wargame sets out to show how the opponent will respond to an escalating series of “moves.”   It assumes that he will be guided by a balance sheet of potential profit and loss.  If he does not add them up accurately we say he has “miscalculated.”  Thus, we view the foreigner as a sort of accountant --  culturally disembodied, mathematically precise and governed by logic.  In short, we posit in him precisely those qualities that do not shape our own actions.  So when we apply the results to “grand strategy” in our culturally diverse world, they are nearly always misleading; indeed, they have occasionally led us into danger.  Let me illustrate with an example:

                In the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis (during which I was a member of the “Crisis Management Committee”) I was ordered to participate in a sort of replay, a wargame designed to press similar events toward,  but not quite to, nuclear war.  My colleagues on “Red Team” were some of America’s most senior military, intelligence and foreign affairs officers and we drew upon the most sensitive information about the Soviet Union known to the American government.  We focused on an escalating crisis at the end of which we were informed that our “Blue Team” opponents had obliterated a Russian city.  How should we respond?   Our choices were: Do nothing, copy the Russians and obliterate a single American city or go to general war?  After careful consideration, we opted for general war, firing all our imaginary missiles to attempt to wipe out all American retaliatory capability and even the country.

                The “umpire,” Thomas Schelling, an MIT mathematician and author of The Strategy of Conflict, called a halt to the game, saying that we had “misplayed,” and set up in the War Room of the Pentagon a review session that in real life would have been literally a postmortem. Schelling opened by saying that if we were right, America would have to give up the theory of deterrence.  Why had we acted in this way?

In response, we showed that we went to general war because we had to.   If the leader of Red Team had done nothing, he almost certainly would have been regarded as a traitor, overthrown and doubtlessly murdered, by his own military commanders.  He would been unlikely to select that option.  Had he played tit-for-tat, incinerating an American city --  say, Dallas -- what could an American president have done?  No more than the Russian, he  could not have done nothing.  He would have had to “reply.”  That would have led to more “trade-offs” and quickly to general war.  So, despite the catastrophe for both nations, neither government could have stopped the fateful process.  In short, whatever the “interest of state,” which is what the war game focused on, the “interest of government” compelled actions that were not governed by the same category of “logic.”  No wargame had predicted this outcome.  Indeed, for the previous decade, all predicted, as did Schelling, exactly the opposite:   the Russians would back off in the face of threat.  That was the world of theory, but in the real world the results would have been different.   We did not then know how very close we had come to total world annihilation in the Cuban Missile Crisis and how much had depended on sheer luck[i] -- and on the bravery or foolhardiness of Nikita Khrushchev.[ii]

To supplement or correct the wargame, America has evolved a second means of predicting the future.  This is what is called a “National Intelligence Estimate” or NIE.  The flaw in the NIE is lesser than that in the wargame but is nonetheless serious.  It depends upon assembling “facts.”  That is, it takes the vast input of statements, acts and capabilities of the adversary and from them makes an “appreciation” describing what the adversary is doing and drawing from it a guess on what he is likely to do.    What is inherently deficient in this approach is both that no assemblage of facts can ever be complete and, more subtly, that the NIE cannot account for all the emotions, religious beliefs, fears, memories and even ignorance of the opponent. 

Even short of attempting an encompassing “appreciation,” guessing about peoples in other cultures is always difficult.  And, dealing with the complex interplay of Iranian-American relations is particularly hard.  As two well-informed former senior American officials with long experience on Iranian affairs have written, “Of all the black holes in America’s foreign relations few have been darker than Iran.”[iii]  Governments rarely reveal how they view their options and make their decisions – as I learned in my government service – and certainly do not share their thoughts with others.  Not know much about contemporary Iran or its historical culture, successive American administrations  have often been been reduced to guesswork – and usually have taken a “worst case” guess – while their own actions have often  imprecise, metastable and influenced by outside forces.  So, what can we do?

                I offer you two interconnected answers:  the first, as I have laid out in this book, is a different sort of “appreciation:”  it is the attempt to devise a view of the formation of contemporary Iranian mores as evolved incrementally over the whole range of the Iranian’s experience.  To do that requires an emotional leap in which all of us outsiders will fall short but which, in making the attempt, will get us closer to understanding the influences, fears and motivations that in sum define Iranians.  In short, this is the approach with which I began, drawing upon Herodotus’s  attempt to do the same over two thousand year ago.

                Understanding the American part of the Iranian-American equation appears, at least to insiders, less complex and less intellectually demanding, but it too requires a rigorous and exacting examination of attitudes, proclamations and actions which, moreover, must be put not only within a strategic and domestic political context but also must be examined in their international framework.  That too is inevitably imprecise.

                The second way to replace the war game and modify the NIE arises from my own experience as a sometime policy planner, diplomat and business consultant.   It comes down to a very simple notion:  to understand what anyone is likely to do, it always helps to try to put oneself in his position, to look at events from his perspective,  to try to see what he sees, to make the effort to try to understand what he wants or fears, and within the context of his experience to guess how -- or whether -- he and oneself can find a way toward a viable accommodation.  So, based on what I have learned, I now will bring forward a view of recent events that an Iranian, acting as I used to act for the American government – as policy planner --  would probably see events of recent years.  While I have no way to know what confidential sources of information he might draw upon, I will cite the public sources of information and opinion he could access in reaching his assessment.

*              *              *

                The question an Iranian government adviser would have to answer first is what the American government is trying to do in Iran.   The public record portrays a sober picture.ª

My hypothetical Iranian adviser to his government would begin, as most Iranians still do, with the overthrow of the first elected Iranian government, under Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadegh, by the CIA in 1953.[iv] That action returned the Shah to power and ushered in a period of intimate Iranian-American relations until his regime was overthrown in the 1979 revolution. Thereafter, Iranians see a pattern that varied in intensity but was consistently hostile. In the Reagan administration, the US Navy attacked and destroyed about half of the Ir...

About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 023061678X
• ISBN 13: 9780230616783
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272