| Review of: | Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States by Trita Parsi |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Leon Hadar |
| Reviewed in: | Middle East Policy |
| Date accepted online: | 14/01/2008 |
| Published in print: | Volume 14, Issue 03, Pages 143-173 |
Book Reviews
By the time this review is published, Israel may have ordered its F15 and F16 fighter-bombers to knock out Iran's nuclear facilities, starting a sequence of events in which the United States had no choice but to join the fray, with Tehran retaliating by striking America's hard-pressed forces in Iraq, launching terrorist attacks against America and its allies, disrupting the tanker traffic through the Persian Gulf and causing global energy prices to soar into the stratosphere.
Or perhaps as you read this review, Washington and Tehran might be following the policy recommendations that author Trita Parsi sketches out in
More likely, as this issue of
Hence, it is not surprising that Parsi, the president of the Iranian American Council, has been advocating in
Fast-forwarding to the early twenty-first century, you would not find Queen Esther in the Oval Office. Instead, it is the Iranian-Israeli rivalry that has been dwelling at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, making it difficult for any White House occupant to adopt a policy towards Tehran that reflects the real U.S. national interest and resists the pressures from interest groups and individuals with a political and ideological ax to grind.
In any case, to characterize
Against the backdrop of the U.S. military "victory" in Iraq and President George W. Bush's declaration of "Mission Accomplished" on the USS
The author also chronicles other machinations: secret talks between American and Iranian diplomats in Geneva; behind-the-scenes efforts by the Iranians to sell their proposal to the Israelis (General Mohsen Rezai, the former commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, tells a group of Israeli officials in Athens that Iran, like Pakistan and Malaysia, was not ready to recognize Israel but would avoid confronting the Jewish state directly or through proxies); the successful attempt by the Pentagon and the neocons to sabotage the "quiet diplomacy" between Washington and Tehran (and indirectly Israel) by accusing Iran of helping to facilitate a terrorist attack in Riyadh by members of al-Qaeda in Iran; and the continuing efforts by the neocons and the Israel Lobby and their supporters on Capitol Hill to provide support for Iranian opposition groups and groom Reza Pahlavi, the son of the late shah, as Iran's version of Ahmed Chalabi.
Like any good yarn, Parsi's saga has a villain that keeps reappearing at every twist and turn: Michael Ledeen, a neoconservative "policy intellectual" associated with Israeli Labor party leaders and Italian neo-Fascists, not to mention shady Iranian arms dealers and a cast of intelligence operatives. He was believed at one time by the CIA to be "an agent of influence of a foreign government." Ledeen's modus operandi seems to be a never-ending effort to reorient the U.S. relationship towards Iran based on the current interests of Israel. Hence in the 1980s, Ledeen becomes a central figure in the Iran-contra affair as he tries to promote an American opening to a "moderate" Iranian ayatollah as a way of assisting Iran during its war with Iraq - exactly what Israel's Shimon Peres was then advocating. After 9/11, Ledeen emerges as the most prominent pundit (and an occasional schemer in secret encounters with dubious Iranian figures) promoting U.S. military action against Iran that would result in a "regime change" there. Again, there is a policy that seems to reflect the kind of approach that Israeli leaders and their supporters are lobbying for in Washington.
As Parsi points out, there is no touch of irony in Ledeen's and, by extension, Israel's policy of diplomatically and militarily flirting with Tehran in the 1980s, when America (the "Great Satan") and Israel (the "Little Satan") were the main focus of its revolutionary ethos, while attempting to isolate and punish Tehran after the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, just when the Iranians were trying to open a dialogue with the Americans, who had just defeated two of their most hated nemeses - the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. In this and other cases, explains Parsi, Israel's foreign-policy harddrive consisted of the so-called Periphery Doctrine, adopted by the leaders of the Jewish state in its early years. It was aimed at strengthening Israel's ties with the non-Arab states on the periphery of the Arab world - Turkey, Ethiopia and Iran - as well as with non-Arab and non-Muslim minorities such as the Kurds in Iraq, the Maronites in Lebanon, and the Animists and Christians in Sudan. When it came to Iran, the relationship that blossomed during the time of the shah was intertwined with the close ties the two Middle Eastern countries had with Washington in its strategy against the Soviet Union and Nasserism. Israel had hoped that closer ties with Iran would help contain the pressure from the hostile Arab "interior" while the Iranians regarded Israel, with its close ties to Washington, as a strategic asset that could help them win American assistance.
The harddrive of the Periphery Doctrine, according to Parsi, survived many crashes, including the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the end of the Cold War and the first Gulf War, although concrete foreign-policy outcomes had taken surprising turns. In the 1980s, the fear that Saddam Hussein's Iraq would defeat Iran had driven Israel's Defense Minister Peres to press the Reagan administration to help Iran's ayatollahs, who, notwithstanding their hostility towards the Jewish state, were encouraging Israel to provide them with military assistance and lobbying in Washington as a way of helping them contain Iraq. In the 1990s, as Parsi sees it, Prime Minister Peres, hoping that the Oslo process and globalization would help Israel make peace with and integrate itself into the Arab "interior," turned the Periphery Doctrine on its head by trying to demonize the Islamic Republic as the leader of a radical Islamic menace that supposedly threatened not only Israel, but America and its Arab allies. This Israel strategy was evolving just when the Iranians under President Rafsanjani were trying to move towards détente with Washington. But the Israelis, according to Parsi, were successful in persuading the Clinton administration to isolate Iran. This approach has remained in place, with the Israelis and their supporters in Washington, as Parsi suggests, trying to sabotage any attempt at rapprochement between the United States and Iran that could threaten Israel's position as America's main ally in the Middle East and elevate Iran to the status of a regional power.
Through this and other provocative observations and intriguing accounts, some of which have never been made public, and which are based on 130 in-depth interviews conducted with Iranian, Israeli and American officials and analysts, Parsi is able to spin complex plots in a very lively way and with an eye for detail and personalities. As I read
"To ensure the reliability of the interviewees and their accounts, an extraordinarily large number of people have been interviewed and their accounts
I also think that Parsi's analytical approach is a bit flawed. He tends to overstate the significance of the centrality of Israel's Periphery Doctrine in shaping the "treacherous alliance." Hence, we are led to conclude that Israeli foreign policy has been dominated by debate between "pro" and "anti" Periphery Doctrine "schools of thought"; at one point, Parsi even describes Israelis who allegedly wanted to use the MKO as part of an anti-Iranian disinformation campaign as "pro-MKO," and he seems to exaggerate the supposed willingness of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his short nine-month tenure as part of a strategy to "return" to the Periphery Doctrine. In fact, the harddrive of Israeli foreign policy has always consisted of its core national-security goal, which revolves around its relationship with the neighboring Arab states. The relationship with Iran, or for that matter with Turkey and even with the United States, is the "software," the changing sources of diplomatic and military power it uses to advance its main foreign-policy goal: managing its relationship with the Arabs, including the Palestinians. For Israel, it's still the Arabs (and the Palestinians), stupid! At the same time, notwithstanding the importance of the role of Israel and its supporters in influencing U.S. policy towards Iran, there is little doubt in my mind that, if and when a U.S. president decides that opening a dialogue with Iran is in the national interest, he or she will resist all domestic and external pressures. President Richard Nixon, a member of the once-powerful "China Lobby," made a similar decision when he went to China.