Rebel Without a Green Card

Americanized: Rebel Without a Green Card
288 pages
© 2018 Ssara Saedi

Sara Saedi and her older sister Samira were both born in Iran, but following the revolution their parents fled to America by way of Italy.  Although Sara had virtually no memory of her home country, she was marked by it, growing up as an undocumented resident when her family visa lapsed and the green card applications were endlessly delayed. In Americanized, Saedi offers a memoir of her coming of age,  most of which is humorous takes on the indignities of youth: fighting with older relatives, stressing out over acne and puberty, worrying about boys, etc.  Occasionally, however, the memoir grows more serious when her parents' on-going attempt to move forward with permanent legal residency and citizenship is stalled again and again.   The memoir is obviously political in its intent, as Saedi  frequently frets over residential attitudes regarding illegal immigration,  so Rebel can be read as an attempt to put a human face on an abstract policy. Her family would certainly be poster children for more inclusive immigration policies (being good, passionate people who want nothing more than the freedom to live their lives and pursue their dreams, etc),  but the Saeds are only one family, and not necessarily representative. Immigration offices can be painfully difficult to navigate, however, and needlessly burdensome: as a public librarian, I've personally witnessed struggles by my city's Yemeni and Bangladeshi immigration population to make any any progress with naturalization,  with form after form being rejected because a jot was a little too tiddlish -- there being specific requirements for only using capital letters, for instance. I've no doubt it could be made far more humane.

As a book, Americanized has some interest -- but honestly, it's more of a teen-girl-in-the-90s memoir than a serious discussion about immigration.  Firoozeh Dumas'  Funny in Farsi offers a much fuller idea of the immigrant experience, partially because Firoozeh remembered more of her childhood in Iran. 

The Iran Wars

The Iran Wars: Spy Games, Bank Battles, and the Secret Deals that Reshaped the Middle East
© 2016 Jay Solomon
352 pages

When the young people of Iran hit the streets in protest about suspicious election returns in 2009, the United States was unexpectedly quiet. For years DC's establishment had voiced ominous desires to effect regime change in Iran, and now an opportunity had presented itself.  All that was needed was a little stoking of the fires, passing of intelligence and funds to the right people. And yet..nothing happened, and soon the leaders of the "Green Movement" were in jail.  What no one realized then was that the Obama administration had already begun its efforts to move toward some kind of concordance with Iran, and that this silence was a show of  good faith, an indication that the administration was serious about its efforts to establish a working relationship with the Islamic Republic. Much of DC's foreign policy in the middle east from 2001 to 2016 was conducted with an eye towards Iran,  including the American response to Syria, and The Iran Wars follows two presidents' attempts to find a solution to the Iranian problem, through war,  finance, and diplomacy.

The middle east is a complicated place, to say the least,  with active ethnic, religious, and political conflicts. Iran's role in all this is poorly understood by many Americans;  in addition to Persians and Arabs being two  separate  ethnic groups with a competitive history, the version of Islam which is the state religion in Iran is a minority everywhere else, and viewed with contempt by Saudi-held Arabia, al-Queda and its would-be successor, ISIS.  Iran's sole ally in the Arab world, Syria,  is an important support for it, and a  source of continuing conflict between Iran and the west. 

The events of September 11, 2001, as tragic as they were, presented an opportunity for American-Iranian relations to begin anew, with a common enemy in al-Queda and its drug trade. What opportunity there may have been, never developed by skeptical aides,  was dead by the time DC chose to invade Iraq,  with the intent of weakening Iran's influence in the region by freeing its Shiite majority from Saddam's rule and giving them the opportunity to protest against the ayatollahs. Instead, that Shiite majority aligned with Iran more closely as sectarian war erupted in the region, That  conflict was promoted by both Syria and Iran to prevent American power from growing in Iraq, as Assad promoted Sunni militias in the north and Iran promoted Shiia power in the south. Their role in promoting Iraqi instability made both enemies in DC and abroad.  Still worse,  Iran counted itself the implacable foe of Israel and pursued nuclear capabilities, with the possibility of militarization.

Although some in DC ominously hinted that military options were fully on the table for addressing Iran,  with so many resources mired in two civil wars, few actually proposed it.  Bush chose instead to develop a third option: disrupting Iran's nuclear program through cyber warfare. (See Countdown to Zero Day for a comprehensive history of that.) Solomon only barely mentions this, but moves quickly on to Obama's two-track attempt to reach some kind of concordance with Iran.  Obama moved to isolate Iran financially by working with China and the powers of Europe to effect heavy sanctions and remove Iran from the global economy, while at the same time reaching out to the Iranian people through public speeches, and Iranian leadership through an Omani intermediary who saw his vocation as being a broker of peace between DC and Iran.

Both tracks meant compromise, as DC had to give more than it would like to prove to both its international partners and Iran that it was serious about effecting a deal. It also meant  that Obama felt compelled to intervene in Libya to indicate to Iran that he was serious about enforcing red lines, but had to walk back his threats against Assad so as not to drive the Syrian ruler's allies from the negotiating table. Although the deal itself was hailed as a triumph, with one historian optimistically chronicling it in a volume called Losing an Enemy,  Jay Solomon concludes this history with a warning.  If DC and Iran do truly establish a lasting peace, there will be disruption to contend with. The Saudi family in particular  may aggressively court other alliances, and whatever influence DC has over its codependent partner will lessen. The Iran wars are not over, writes Solomon; this deal, as promising as it sounds, is only the start of a new chapter.

Solomon was quickly proven correct, and in 2018  it is sad to read about the years of dogged labor Kerry, Obama, Mohammad Zarif, and Sultan Qaboos  poured into making the deal, including the long labors with Europe and China, now squandered, and US diplomatic credibility seriously reduced.  For me, this was a valuable book to read,  illustrating why Obama reacted toward Syria as he did, and why Syria is such an obsessive target for the west in the first place.

Related:

• The Twilight War: The Secret of America's Thirty Year War with Iran, David Crist
• Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon, Kim Zetter
• Confront and Conceal:  Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of Power, David Sanger
• Iran and the United States: An Insider's View on the Failed Past and the Road to Peace,  Seyed Hossain Mousavian

The Ministry of Guidance Invites You Not To Stay

The Ministry of Guidance Invites You Not to Stay
© 2010 Hooman Majd
272 pages

Hooman Majd left Iran for the first time as a young boy, barely eight months old, and when his own son was eight months old, Majd returned. He returned with an American wife in tow,  and with more than a little trepidation. Majd was no stranger to Iran: he did grow up there, leaving for good only in 1979, and since then he'd visited many times in his capacity as a journalist. His familial ties with reformists in Iran, and his less-than-complimentary remarks on the government there, made him an object of concern to the state authorities.  Nevertheless, they allowed him to live again in Iran, this time for a year, so that his young boy could experience his familial homeland.  The Ministry of Guidance Invites You Not to Stay  records that year, as Majd digests the current state of Iran and the world.  It is not a travel memoir or a cultural journey, though elements of both are present. Instead, this amusingly-titled book is largely driven by Majd wrestling with his Iranian identity: is it still home, despite the changes since his youth and his long years living as an American abroad?

Short answer...yes. Mostly.  The longer answer is that while Majd is disturbed by the growth of a soft security state in Iran, distressed by the overcrowding and pollution in Tehran,  and unsettled by the apathy of the rising generation,  Iran is the irreplaceable land of his childhood, and one that accepted his wife and child with complete hospitality.  His young son was fawned over by strangers in the street, so much so that it disturbed his New York wife Karri. (Why did they want to take photos?)   Karri's stumbling Farsi was accepted and aided with stumbling English by shopkeepers and cab drivers, none of whom gave her the kind of grief they gave Majd over fair prices.   Although wealth for some in Iran is growing, decades of sanctions from the west have throttled opportunities for the young,  but instead of exploding in furore many have lapsed into fatalism. Some of that fatalism is inimically Persian, Majd allows;   even its practice of Islam, Shi'ism, is fatalistic in that it expects and sanctifies defeat and martyrdom. In his conversations with Iranians young and old, at parties and in private quarters with no bugged phones,  Majd records a lot of disgruntlement about the government's thought-and-morals police (the "Ministry of Guidance"), but people's specific problems with the government are confused and divided.  Many don't like the present state of affairs, but they can't agree on what  to do about it, or what goal they should arrive for. Even the arch-reformist Mohammad Khatami admits that Iran can't simply import the morals and politics of the west:  liberal democracy has to grafted into Persian culture, not replace it.,  When Majd decides to end his year-long stay back in Tehran, it is with a mixture of sadness and hope that he looks back on the country of his birth.

The Ministry of Guidance Invites You Not To Stay's  recollection of everyday experiences, cut with Majd's internal wrestling over his identity,  may not make it attractive to readers who want to learn about contemporary Iran in broad strokes; The Ayatollah Begs to Differ is more amenable to that goal.   If the reader is interested in every day life in Tehran, however, or a dual citizen's view about Iranian-American relations and Iran's promise, it's quick reading.

Mirrors of the Unseen

Mirrors of the Unseen:  Journeys in Iran

© 2006 Jason Elliot

432 pages

Readers uninterested in the origins and history of Islamic art, metaphysics, or pigeons, should skip to the next chapter, here.

In the late nineties, before Afghanistan was rendered more chaotic and dangerous than usual, Jason Elliot visited the country and was moved by it. Building on the success of that trip,  he looked over the border to Iran, a nation derided by the Afganis as full of sandwich-eating women, and decided to travel throughout it, as well. Mirrors of the Unseen collects the experiences of several trips made by Elliot throughout Iran, visiting it again and again as the seasons changed. What did not change was the ready willingness of Iranians to receive him  -- and ply him a surprising amount of spirits.    Elliot's interest in Iran is more cultural and historical than political, and as time passes he transforms from interviewing tourist to a man on pilgrimage, one with Iran's architectural wonders as its goal, working in historical recaps along the way, telling of the rise and fall of empires as he gazes at their ruins and proud reminders. He is particularly struck by the  predominant role of gardens in Persian culture and art, one that predates views of Heaven as a paradisaical garden. (Not by accident is the German title of this book Persia: God's Forgotten Garden.)   Elliot is sensitive about architecture in that it seems to affect him deeply, taking over his mind. Discussions with friends and discourses on Sassanian history fade into the background when Elliot takes in the fullness of a bazaar or mosque and begins to wax lyrical about plazas and windows.  He is self-conscious about some of his obsessions -- several chapters see him poring over historic maps and making measurements to figure out why a particular building isn't lined up the way symmetry  suggests it should -- to the point that he includes at least one disclaimer.    Of more general interest are Elliot's many conversations with Iranians of various ethnic groups; he never fails to find a friendly host wherever he travels, and those who do not have concealed stocks of ardent spirits have opium pipes.  (Similarly,  no one Elliot meets observes the laws against foreign television stations, but it's possible that the people most eager to host an Englishman were the most dubious about the currently-reigning politics.)   The Iranians featured here range from poor cab drivers to horse ranchers,   and unless they're selling something  they're extremely generous with their time and resources. 

Although the aesthetic tangents might throw some readers off, I personally enjoyed this curious mix of travel memoir, history, and architectural commentary. 

Ta'arof on Reddit

I recently shared a book called The Ayatollah Begs to Differ which covered the Iranian culture of hospitality. Oddly enough the same subject came on reddit, so I share it below for the curious. Click on the picture to expand..

The Ayatollah Begs to Differ

The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran
288 pages
© 2008 Hooman Majd

Whatever nebulous conception most Americans have of the Middle East, Iran should stand apart. Not because it is currently DC's designated enemy,  but because Iran is different. Its people are not Arabs,  the state religion is a markedly different of Islam than that practiced and promoted by its Sunni neighbors, and its political constitution is its own, a curious fusion of theocracy and democracy which was self-invented.  The Ayatollah Begs to Differ profiles Iran as a nation of paradox, a place increasingly secular but ruled by clerics, driven by both aggressive insistence on its rights and an internal ritual of utter deference and hospitality.

When I began reading this over the weekend, it wasn't in anticipation of the House of Saud's business partner in the White House stirring foreign policy turds. Bush's obsession with Iran, and Obama's later difficulty in coming to a concordance with them, made me increasingly curious and even fascinated by the land formerly known as Persia.  Hooman Majd mentions here that Persia was formally dropped in the 1930s in favor of the older Iran, both to invoke a glorious ancient past and to buff over the inglorious recent past, when old Persia was an increasingly bedraggled object in a tug of war between Russia and the United Kingdom.  Iran's foreign policy is driven primarily by a need for self-protection, from both its Arab neighbors  and from interference from farther points.  The two often intersect, as when the United States abetted Saddam Hussein's eight year war against Iran.

Foreign policy is only a small part in this guide, however. Majid is Iranian-American, but not the kind who bemoans that Iran is not more like Europe and the United States. He has close ties with a former president of Iran, the reformer Mohammad Khatami, and his father was a leading cleric. His warm regard for Iran is not predicated on what it can do differently, but what it has done already and can mature. The Ayatollah Begs to Differ includes some of the usual "experiencing Iran" chapters, like his Ashura experience in Qom and anecdotes about  traffic and family life, as well as unique interviews with friends of his in Iran -- like the aforementioned minister Khatami.  Majd's book is draws on time spent in Iran just as  Khatami's administration was being replaced by the more strident one of Mamoud Ahmadinejad, whose aggressive posture against the west over nuclear development was cheered by many in Iran who thought their country was the whipping boy of the international community.  Majd is not a fan of Ahmadinejad, however,  despite his sympathy for Ahmadinejad's working class supporters. One worrisome aspect of Ahmadinejad for Majd is the man's fervent religiosity; he is not merely observant, but anticipates the imminent end of the world and is willing to talk about it, much to the dismay of the leading clerics who do not believe theology and eschatology are the province of the uninitiated.

Although I've read a fair few books on modern Iran in the last few years,  even so The Ayatollah Begs to Differ offered a lot of insight. I've read previously how common exterior walls are in Iranian residential architecture, for instance,  keeping outsiders firmly at bay -- but Majd writes that the law also respects this boundary, and that Iranians tolerate so much social policing in the community because they are largely left alone inside their own homes.  Majd's extensive chapter on Iranian ritual ta'arof was both amusing and informative; I've encountered numerous world-travel memoirs that marveled at Iranian hospitality. Although this strikes me as attractive to a small degree, the way its expressed by Majd seemed exasperatingly drawn out.  Taking a cab involves an endless spiel of "How much do I owe?", "No, sir, I am your humble servant this was my honor, please go", "No, I insist I pay, how much?", "God forbid sir, it was nothing", etc. Eventually the bow-haggling stops and honest money changes hands.  Majd also notes that while the language is outwardly deferential,  this ritual of civility is also competitive, and practitioners of the 'dark' ta'arof like to reduce their rival to begging them to accept the money or the favor.

Slightly more colorful 1st edition cover:

Related:

Neither East Nor West: One Woman's Journey Through the Islamic Republic of Iran, Christiane Bird

The Republic of Imagination

The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books
Other edition subtitle: A Case for Fiction
© 2014 Azar Nafisi
352 pages

When Azar Nafisi taught literature in Iran, she dreamed of America. Not the United States, the government of which had been making itself decidedly unpopular in Iran, but "America" -- an idea, a dream, where people were free to pursue their own lives, to grow and flourish without a shah or a thought-police militia's interference.  She discovered and explored this America via its literature,  an experience which is partially shared in her Reading Lolita in Tehran.  When she came to the United States to teach literature, another Iranian immigrant disgustedly told her that these people were not what she was looking for. Americans weren't passionate about literature the way Iranians were -- not even their own.   Although Nafisi rejected his resignation,  the fate of the humanities - literature, particularly --  weighs on her in writing this, and the experiences that she and others have had wrestling with American literature are offered here as proof of what serious engagement with literature can provide.

Nafisi's subtitle, America in Three Books, takes reader through Huckleberry Finn,   Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt, and Carson McCuller's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.  Nafisi describes all of these as subversive, and links them as Individualist experiences --  the individual against conformity, consumerism, and their own lonely anguish.  My own experience with American literature has been so paltry that I haven't read two of the three books mentioned,  but Nafisi's strikes me as a fair take on Huckleberry Finn -- both because he resists being 'sivilized' and shut up in doors, and because his instinctive human sympathy for a friend of his outweighs the dictum of the day that his friend is a slave who should be punished for escaping.   Nafisi's intent is to connect themes in literature with our lives, so amid the literary discussion are events from Nafisi's life, and conversations (or arguments) she has had with Americans and Iranians. Those who have read Lolita in Tehran will remember the style from that book. Nafisi's deep love of literature puts her slightly at odds with the political currents she is otherwise sympathetic to: she abhors the knee-jerk reaction the academy has to classics, of automatically dismissing them because they are old and by the wrong people.  Literary criticism has missed the point altogether; instead of embracing works like a friend or lover to relate with, the books are beaten to death and the corpses picked at..  (To borrow from Douglas Adams:  “If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a non-working cat.")  Similarly, she is not a friend of the 'common core', and its sterile treatment of education as nothing more than mounds of Gradgrind facts to memorize.

When I first heard this title, it resonated with me, making me think of both the Greek cosmopolis -- an ideal republic admitting all with reason as citizens -- and another republic, one that absorbing a tradition makes us a member of, allowing us to learn and fight with a lecture from Cicero, or an argument from Aquinas or de Montaigne. Nafisi's conviction that literature unites people across political boundaries led me on, however, as her republic of the imagination is a little more ethereal. It's a place where people escape to -- a place where people can find connection even if they live in a dehumanizing state. But it's not merely a place of escape; in her epilogue, Nafisi admonishes those who demand trigger warnings on books and cry out for safe places. The world is not a safe space.  Even if you live in a perfectly bland place, a Pleasantview right out of 1950s television, you may fall in love or lose a parent or find yourself facing some other emotional storm. Literature, Nafisi argues, prepares us for these storms: it fixes our feet, steels our spine, clears our mind.   We must embrace its challenges, not shrivel away from them.

While I suspect anyone reading a book subtitled America in Three Books would already regard fiction as important,  for me this was a welcome exposure to a couple of books I've only heard a little about,  an encouraging reminder about the universality of good literature.

Related:
Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi
Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran, Fatehmeh Keshavarz

Baghdad without a Map

Baghdad without a Map and Other Adventures in Arabia
© 1992 Tony Horowitz
285 pages

So your wife is on extended assignment in Cairo, and you’re a freelance journalist without a regular gig. What do you do? Why not wander around northern Africa, the Arab world, and Iran whenever an opportunity presents itself – chasing stories, even when they led you into dark mountains where grenades and AKs are cheaper than a week’s worth of the local narcotic? Baghdad without a Map presents anecdotes from Tony Horwitz’s time spent in Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Sudan, Jordan, Yemen, and Iran, mixing comedy and tragedy.

Because Horwitz is chasing stories -- a refugee crisis in Sudan, for instance, or the still-simmering conflict between Iraq and Iran on the border -- he is often exposed to misery and danger. He still finds humor in the chaos of Cairo's streets, the chanciness of Egyptian-Sudanese air travel, or the loopiness of Yemense men after a goodly amount of qat-chewing. Horowitz attempts to learn about local cultures and politics as he can on the ground, conversing with people in his rough Arabic, chewing qat, or playing soccer. Although much of the middle east has changed drastically since the 1980s – the invasion of Iraq and the Arab spring just in the last ten years, these snapshots of life in the middle east are worth taking a look at for readers with any human interest in the region.

Neither East nor West

Neither East Nor West: One Woman's Journey Through the Islamic Republic of Iran
© 2001 Christiane Bird
396 pages

Christiane Bird didn't have an ordinary childhood. Her father was a doctor attached to a Presbyterian mission a world away, in Iran.  They focused more on healing bodies than converting souls, but the Iranian revolution still forced them to return to the west.  Despite all the negative news about Iran in the decades that passed, however, Bird remembered her time in Tabriz fondly and wondered (as an adult) which parts were true, which parts were merely disguised in the haze of childhood nostalgia, and which parts had disappeared or endured. So, contacting  one of her father's former colleagues in Iran,  Bird requested a visa and set about touring the country,  living in the homes of Iranians and talking to them in her rough Persian about their lives. Neither East nor West is a travelogue through Iran, but Bird's previous experience and emotional ties to Iran produce an memoir that isn't just another wide-eyed tour through an 'exotic land',  Combining her travels with reflections on Iranian history and culture,  she has produced a balanced look at Iran much needed in the west.

Bird's journalist visa gave her more freedom of movement than an ordinary tourists's, but she remained under the watchful eyes of the tourist-management of the Iranian government, and was required to find local guides. As time wore on Bird suspected this was done out of genuine concern for her protection, as Bird encountered several potentially volatile situations. (She also actively courted them, as she visited a  shrine in Mashdad that strictly prohibits non-Muslims) Bird toured Iran throughout 1998, when a bombing in Saudi Arabia had cast a darker-than-usual pall over DC-Iranian relations,  and  President Clinton was answering charges that he had lied under oath regarding his kennedian antics in the Oval Office.   Bird's interviews with Iranians -- from liberal Tehranis to orthodox Qom clerics --  involved both give and take. Bird's various guides encouraged her to live with them and their families during her stay, and she often did,  bonding with their daughters and friends.  Bird queried her new friends about their life before and after the Iranian revolution,  probing for its effects on their lives. They in turn asked her about America:  was it really so violent? Were the women really all so skinny?  And why did it hate Iran?

Most of the people Bird spoke with had cautious praise for the Iranian revolution, which ousted the Shah and led to its present mixed-state, theocracy and democracy intermingled.  While she encountered many young students in Tehran who scoffed at the 'morals police', outside the capital other people took Iran's status as an Islamic republic more seriously; these included women who believed in the hijab and were frustrated that Americans seemed to view the entire middle east as if it were Saudi Arabia. Iranian women run and vote for office and own businesses, for instance, and many would wear the hijab even if it weren't legally required.  She often found wariness about the pervasive moralism of the new Iranian state, a belief that the country had gone too far in the reverse of the Shah.   Bird was similarly conflicted by Iranian traditionalism; she delighted in the lack of consumerism and the closeness of Iranian family life, in the fact Iranian men regarded their family and not their jobs as their first priority -- but didn't like how old women on the street would regard any young woman and man talking together on the street as evidence of decadence that needed to be checked.

The Iranian people's relationship with their republic has undoubtedly changed in the last twenty years; during the reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Tehran's young people did more than scoff at authority, they challenged it.  Many aspects of Iranian culture that Bird encounters here are still present, however:  for instance, the overwhelming hospitality she encountered was likewise commented on by Niall Doherty when he found himself in Iran with nothing but $10 to his name.  (Another common aspect is the double lives that urban Iranians live; circumspect behavior out in public, and relaxed rules behind the familiar walls of home.)    Because it combines travel with history so smartly -- reflecting on Iran's Shi'ism during a visit to a shrine, or on the durability of Persian while visiting the home of a legendary poet -- and shares a land that western news presents only as a villain, Neither East nor West could serve well as an introduction to a fascinatingly rich culture that has endured for millennia.

Countdown to Zero Day

Countdown to Zero Day:  Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon
© 2014 Kim Zetter
448 pages

A couple of years ago I created a new label, 'digital world', in recognition of the fact that the Internet is no longer a discrete system (like a grid of water pipes). It has seeped into every aspect of our everyday lives, as basic as electricity. Through it, the entire developed world moves. War is no exception to this digital revolution, and the fun is just beginning. People may associate cyberwar with the theft of intelligence, or perhaps monkeying-around with the power grid, but the case of "Stuxnet" demonstrates how weaponized computer programs can cause physical destruction no less complete than a bomb. What's more, the specific vulnerability used to great effect here is virtually universal in the industrial world. Countdown to Zero Day is a forensic-political history of how the United States used a computer virus to effect the kind of destruction only imaginable before by an airstrike, and a warning to the entire online world that we are vulnerable.

If war is the continuation of politics by other means, cyberwar appears to occupy a grey area between the two. The policy of the Bush administration, once it became obvious that Iran was pursuing nuclear weapons, was to squelch the threat through any means necessary. While there may have been many in DC who wanted to see another example of shock-n-awe, even Bush knew a third war in the same mideast minefield wasn't possible. Remote sabotage, however, offered an alternative to war or a nuclear Iran, and a program which started under Bush would bear full fruit during the Obama administration. What a small elite knew in DC as "Olympic Games", the world would later call "Stuxnet": a virus that began as a carefully targeted weapon and but which would later spread across Eurasia.

The author delivers the full story of Stuxnet in a back and forth narrative: the first track begins with the eruption of the virus, and the methodical picking-apart that Symantec, Kapersky, and other cybersecurity firms subjected the code to. Step by step, they attempted to figure out what the code was doing, how it got in, what mechanisms the code was using, and finally -- what was its intended target? This campaign of digital detection work wasn't the product of one cyber Sam Spade, but a collaborative effort between various businesses who shared their information and results. Eventually, over the course of two years, they realized that the initial program was highly target specific: it was aimed at two kinds of programmable logic controllers, or computers used in industrial work. The particular PLCs targeted were used in rotors that were specific to the kind of centrifuge that Iran used to enrich uranium.

The teams dissecting the Stuxnet code marveled several times at its structure, but marveled all the more when they figured out - -based on reports coming in from Iran -- how the program worked. Because the centrifuges' speed and weight necessitate careful handling -- slow acceleration and then slow deceleration, nothing too abrupt -- the program's main attack was to methodically stress the centrifuges by taking them up to speed, or down, in patterns resigned to slowly ruin the pieces. What's more, long before this act of digital undermining ever began, the program silently sat and waited, recording the normal activities: during the actual sabotage, the program fed recorded data to he plant's control room, meaning eventually the Iranians had to physically watch the motors to see what was happening. The program had a nucleus so deeply hidden that when the machine software was placed under repair by the Iranian engineers, the core program methodically re-wrote the new programming. It's as if an invasive bacteria promptly turned the body's immune system into its own means of reproduction.

The case of Stuxnet is important because PLCs are pervasive; they aren't just used in manufacturing, but are common wherever computer-controlled machinery is used. They're in hospitals, food production plants, powerstations, transit networks: there's no end to the mischief that could be managed by attacking them, and until recently very little done to protect the systems. Stuxnet was a wakeup call to many technical directors in the developed world, an alarm bell to their vulnerability. As the recent WannaCry attack which cripped hospitals in the UK demonstrates, however, we're not taking cybersecurity anywhere near enough seriously. (The WannaCry and Stuxnet attacks also demonstrate the volatility of cyberweapons: they don't go away. In both cases, code and tools designed by DC were trapped and corralled into use by other parties.) Throughout the world we rely on computers which haven't been protected for years, or we have foolishly ensnared vital public infrastructure like the power grid with the public internet. Stuxnet was only the beginning -- perhaps it may be like the Hiroshima-Nagasaki attacks, a singular event that frightens everyone into more caution. I doubt it, though.

Related:
@ war: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex, Shane Harris
Glass Houses: Privacy, Secrecy, and Cyber Insecurity in a Transparent World,  Joel Brenner

Confront and Conceal

Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of Power
496 pages
© 2012 David E. Sanger

Barack Obama may have been the only Nobel Peace Prize winner in history to order lethal force used on a regular basis, but things could have been worse. Confront and Conceal attempts to make a case for an "Obama Doctrine", one which avoids epic disasters like the destruction of Iraq, but still asserts American influence via surgical operations and international organizations.  Sanger reviews the actions of the Obama White House regarding Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, North Korea, China and Iran, with a special section on drones and cyberwarfare. He relies on extensive interviews with administration officials, including then-secretary of State, Clinton, as well as State Department cables which were made available via Wikileaks.  He creates a picture of an Obama who -- though mocked for his weakness or aggression, depending on the mocker --  attempted a cautious but efficacious approach  to foreign policy.  Considering Sanger's access -- interviewing heap-big chiefs  as high as as the secretary of state- -   it is perhaps no surprise that the representation rendered here is admiring, on the whole.

Obama encountered no shortage of foreign policy crises during his first time. He began it faced with the deathly tar pit of Afghanistan,  further complicated by the amount of trouble-makers hiding in the western fringes of Pakistan.  Excising the United States from Afghanistan wasn't as simple a matter as cutting losses and leaving, for neither the DC nor Pakistan desired a power vacuum between Pakistan and Iran.  The Arab spring, which forced DC to choose between its interests and its proclaimed values, further muddied the waters. The cascade of populist revolts took everyone by surprise, including the President who was determined to restore the American reputation in the middle east.  To avoid messes like Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama  preferred to use a light footprint approach: if American interests were at risk, then action must be taken --but the action should be swift and precise, using new tools like drones and cyberwarfare.   Diplomacy was preferable to brute force, however: Obama was also a genuine internationalist, who preferred using global organizations to apply pressure to ne'er do wells like Qaddafi, and to effect change.  This was not always possible;  the Iranians didn't trust his intentions and regarded him as timid; the international community remains divided over Syria, with some supporting Assad and others supporting the rebels and ISIS.   Ditto for North Korea: as vexsome as they are to all of their neighbors, China included, they won't just go away. Leaving the north in the hands of the Kim family cult isn't an attractive option for China, but it's more attractive than millions of malnourished and uneducated refugees streaming into China.

Anyone who has followed my reading for any length of time may have picked up on the fact that I am not a fan of DC, in any administration.  I did have a grudging respect for much of  Obama's foreign policy, however,  at least until he began getting the country more entangled with Syria and resurrecting Cold War tensions.   That respect was validated here, as Obama seems to have approached DC's expanse of empire with the desire to do as little damage as possible. I don't know how strong willed and idealistic someone would have to be to sit in the One Chair of the west wing, surrounded by the whispering host of the DC establishment,  faced with a neverending series of crises and commitments, and say "To hell with you, I'm not playing this game", and start manipulating the Titanic of state  away from its inevitable course of empire.  Obama seems to have resisted it for several years: agreeing to escalate in Afghanistan, but only with a pre-determined date to cut losses and run;  continuing Bush's development of the Olympic Games project, which would give him  more options in Iran;  and using drones instead of conventional bombing and strike team, because those were the only options DC produced. (The targets were 'terrorists', of course.  DC wouldn't casually assassinate just any reichsfeinde. That would never happen, no sir.)

Cantankerous sarcasm aside,  Confront and Conceal was a varied and endlessly fascinating history given the range of topics and their (unfortunately) continued relevance.  The Kims are even more problematic now than they were;  Syria continues to exact a morbid fascination for the establishment, and China...well, it's still there. So too are the opportunities for mischief the digital world has opened, as this weekend's crippling wave of digital attacks (chiefly in Britain) have shown all too well.   I would take its general admiration for the establishment with no small level of salt, however.  Foreign-policy wise, I think it's especially helpful for the material on the US-Pakistan relationship.

Related:
Playing to the Edge, Michael Hayden. Another keyhole light inside  the establishment.

The Twilight War

The Twilight War: the Secret History of America's Thirty-Year War with Iran
656 pages
© 2013 David Crist

 In the presidential campaign of 2008, John McCain made plain what kind of aggressive foreign policy he would pursue by half-singing a chipper little ditty called “Bomb Iran”, to the tune of the Beach Boys classic, “Barbara Ann”. His malice was not even creative, for the song originated as a parody in early 1980. That parody, though, was close to being reality, for throughout the 1980s.  American ships engaged in a quasi-war against Iran, ostensibly to protect the free flow of oil amid the Iraqi invasion of Iran. In The Twilight War, Kevin Crist documents the complete diplomatic and military history of the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran, from the Carter administration to the the frustrated diplomacy of Barack Obama. Written by the son of a CENTCOM general, it approaches being the American equivalent of Iran and the United States, written by an Iranian aide who appears here in interviews. The Twilight War goes into much more detail on military operations, however.

The essentials of the failed Iran-American relationship are known to most everyone: in 1953, the United States and Britain collaborated to oust Iran's democratically-elected president, Mossadegh, and later militarily supported the increasingly authoritarian shah until he was thrown out in 1978. Most Americans were blissfully unaware that anyone in Iran had reason to cry foul until student revolutionaries seized the American embassy and held over a hundred American citizens, some of them civilians doing aid work, for over a year. The water was thus poisoned from both wells, leading to bumperstickers and Beach Boy bombing threats in America, and cries of “Death to America!” in Iran. Yet the power-caste in D.C cares little for principle; for them, what mattered about Iran was not that it had abused Americans, or that it had previously been manipulated by the American government: what mattered to the fellows in the Pentagon and Langley field was that Iran stood between the Soviet Union and the oil wealth of the Persian Gulf region. If Iran could be enlisted as an ally against the godless Soviets, huzzah; if not, well...no revolutionary government stays popular, and the invasion plans were already on the books.

Thus the initial approach to Iran was framed within not its Islamic status, but within the frame of the Cold War. The CIA accordingly passed in information to their newly avowed enemy, Khomeini, to help him exorcise the communists and other Soviet sympathizers from his rank. At the same time, however, the CIA and other military intelligence agencies attempted to create networks of informants and agents on the ground Iran, who would lay the groundwork for an invasion if that ever became necessary. What no one expected was Saddam Hussein's invasion of Iran, which wasted over a million lives over an eight-year period. After Iran survived Hussein's invasion and prepared to mount its own, the west –- organized by the United States – obliquely but purposely supported the Iraqi cause by selling war material to Saddam and interfering with Iran's ability to purchase in European markets. More directly, the United States took on a military role in the Persian gulf, protecting oil tankers and other neutral ships from the Iranian military – and ignoring Iraqi movements, as they did when an Iraqi fighter fired a missile at the USS Stark. As with the USS Liberty incident, in which Israel nearly destroyed an American ship, the blood in the water was quickly covered over in the interests of diplomacy. Such was the American commitment tin the Gulf that a separate global command, CENTCOM, was created to watch the middle east, and two mobile sea-bases were created in the Gulf itself to respond to Iran's “guerilla war at sea”.

Later on, after the Soviet Union collapsed, there were moments that the United States and Iran might be able to build upon.The United States' growing commitment in the middle east, prompted by the Gulf War, created no small amount of resentment and fear in Iran, however. For decades, Iran had been the plaything of the British and Russian empires, then the target of both the American and Soviet spheres of influence, and now the Americans weren't even settling for fighting through proxies: their tanks were right there, in Saudi Arabia. Terrorism became an increasingly large factor in foreign relations, and the American commitment to both Saudi Arabia and Israel – Iran's most unfavorite neighbors – continues to be a barrier. More recently, through the Bush and Obama administrations, the prevailing official reason for Iran's designation as classroom pariah has been its pursuit of nuclear energy and the possibility of that pursuit also allowing Iran to manufacture nuclear arms.  Frankly, I no longer trust the official reasoning of anyone coming out of D.C --  coming of political age in age of Iraq's phantom WMDs, and continuing to see the United States talk about both sides of its mouth in Syria  -- but the growth of the genocide in a bottle club is a serious issue.  Still, as Crist's account shows, there have been numerous instances when Iran and the United States were making headway, and then one party of the other decided not to follow through in good-faith arrangements.    

Although The Twilight War's detailed account of military operations and aborted diplomatic deals can sometimes appear overwhelming  in its thoroughness, Iran is not fading in importance.  To the contrary: only recently, an army of Russian, Iranian, and Syrian troops were able to surround ISIS and its allies in Aleppo.  When the United States toppled Hussein's regime in Iraq in the hopes of creating a democratic opponent of Iran,  Iran's influence in Iraq instead swelled.  They're not going away, and after sixteen years of constant war in the neighborhood, Americans aren't particular enthusiastic about more nation-building games.   This book is a good resource for understanding what has happened so far.  In the light of the seemingly unpredictable Trump, however,  who knows what will happen? (Given Trump's business ties in Saudi Arabia and his avowed support of Israel, my guess is that he's more likely to be antagonistic towards Iran than now.) 

Related:

Iran and the United States: an Insider's View, Seyed Hossein Mousavian   

All the Shah's Men: An American Coup,Stephen Kinzer

Laughing Without an Accent

Laughing without an Accent: Adventures of a Global Citizen
© 2008 Firoozeh Dumas
256 pages

In 2003, Firoozeh Dumas charmed readers with stories about her transoceanic childhood, unfolding in both in Iran and the United States in the 1970s. This sequel to Funny in Farsi uses the same basic approach, blending funny stories about her relatives with reflection on the immigrant experience and the human experience in general.  Here, though, a third culture has entered the picture -- that of her French husband's -- and, with more stories about her life as a parent, she is more serious at times.

 I remember her familial caricatures fondly from last year, especially that of her frugalistic father. Here we find him mystifying his son-in-law by presenting him Christmas gifts wrapped in on-sale "Congratulations, graduate!" and "Happy birthday!" wrapper paper --  subjecting the family to various misadventures after attempting to bring home several  "bargain-priced" tables in a purple hatchback, Her mother's enthusiastic but creative use of English also features again. As a parent Dumas writes more seriously, recording her personal triumph in showing the family TV the door; not only did she create precious space for imagination and rest in her home, but her children were spared thousands upon thousands of commercials.  Imagination is important to Dumas; as a college student she is dismayed to realize her fellow students think getting drunk and gyrating is a good time. She'd much prefer a morning walk accompanied with literary conversation. (Her mother attempts to warn off the future husband, stating that Firoozeh never stops reading.) Through the humor and reflection readers are allowed to experience the warmth of her extended family, gathering frequently as they do -- even if it's just to watch The Price is Right and yell at Bob Barker. (Her father's love of bargains makes Price his absolute favorite bit of American television programming.)  

As with Funny in Farsi, I found this simultaneously educational, funny, and cozy.

Lost Enlightenment

Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia's Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane 
© 2015 S. Frederick Starr
618 pages

Lost Enlightenment takes readers back to a time when Central Asia was the crossroads of the world, a hub of both commercial and activity. Here are celebrated the lives of cities which, in this time, were hosts to capitals, universities, and more.  Now they are dust, at best eroded columns in a desolate landscape. In Lost Enlightenment, readers follow Starr east to Baghdad, Merv, and a few other jewels. Though he touches on the political highlights of the region between the Arab conquest and the death of Tamerlane, they are important here only as far as their role in fostering the  arts and sciences.    Although diminished slightly by the complete lack of maps -- and in Central Asia, surrounded by the great mass of Eurasia, there are precious few borders to define the area --  Lost Enlightenment is a weighty accomplishment.

Most readers have heard of the 'silk road', though much more than silk traveled its routes. The sheer bounty of thinkers and creators here, many of them polymaths and 'renaissance men'  -- though with no need for the renaissance bit.  Starr marks the beginning of this enlightened period with the Arabic invasion, but not because the Arabs came bestowing wisdom among the poor benighted natives. The area was already culturally rich and commercially sophisticated, and its geography frustrated any attempt at sustained conquests. Thus the Islamic Arabs and Central Asians of diverse ethnicities and religions --  Buddhists, Christians ,and Zoroastrians just for starters --  lived with and engaged with one another, iron sharpening iron.   There, philosophies and religions from across Eurasia came together, drawn to the trade cities of Central Asia like a savanna water hole. (They were, literally, water holes -- most were near oases). Long used to weighing opposing ideas against one another, Central Asia even tolerated (at times) freethinkers who spoke out against virtually everyone. Here, in this intellectual marketplace of ideas, this constant mental competition, the arts and science flourished -- for a time.

What caused their end?  Something as complex as a society doesn't lend itself to easy answers, and there's no shortage of little things going wrong for the area of central Asia. The most obvious agent of downfall were the Mongols, who didn't merely raid civilization: they often destroyed it utterly.  Some regions lost an estimated 90% of their population, and those who were not murdered were driven away in fear.  Genghis Khan should be condemned by all mankind if only for his destruction of Baghdad,  then a shining city upon the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, but he cut a bloody path jut getting there, leaving behind him ashes and blood-soaked dust. Khan emptied Central Asia, but even before that the arteries were hardening, people receptive to arguments made by theologian-intellectuals like al-Ghazali, who rebuked philosophical materialism in his Incoherence of the Philosophers.  This hardening meant that even when the leaders stumbled upon something revolutionary, like the printing press, it never flared into potency as it did in Europe.

Lost Enlightenment is a considerable survey, mostly intellectual and cultural with a pinch of politics. I certainly welcomed it,  knowing virtually nothing about this area. It is astonishing to hear of places like Afghanistan being hubs of civilized thought, but such is the way of history. Civilizations rise and fall, flower and perish.


* "Central Asians" seems as clumsily artificial as "Yugoslavians" , but the author uses it in lieu of anything better. I suppose it's easier than "Iranian-Turkic peoples".

Jasmine and Stars

Jasmine and Stars: Reading More than Lolita in Tehran
© 2007 Fatemeh Keshavarz
180 pgs

Fatemeh Keshavarz's Jasmine and Stars: Reading More than Lolita in Tehran rebukes Azar Nefisi and other writers for contributing to a 'new Orientalism' that looks at Iran only as a place inferior to the west. The author opens Jasmine and Stars with a reminiscence of her summers spent in Shiraz. Growing up, Keshavarz's family spent the nights outside, bringing out wooden cots so they could fall asleep to the view of the glittering stars above, and wake up to the smell of jasmine flowers that her grandmother used during her morning prayers. As exquisite as these summers could be, there was a moment of gloom: the annual migration of grasshoppers. Their migrating mass blocked the starlight and threatened the fields, and some lollygaggers would fall from the skies and litter the yard. Most of the literature westerners read about Iran or the middle east -- Reading Lolita, Tehran Honeymoon, The Kite Runner -- focus on the transient grasshoppers, with nary a mention made of the beauty around them. In response, Keshavarz simultaneously provides tales of jasmine and stars -- recollections from her youth, mixed in with reflections on Persian literature -- and directly critiques the substance of Reading Lolita in Tehran.

Her greatest problem with RLT is the depiction of literature as something foreign, as though Nefisi's literature circle created the only opportunity for her students to ever encounter thoughtful literature. Keshavarz holds that there is no culture on Earth more passionate about its literature, or literature in general, than the Persian people. As illustration, she discusses many works, only one of which (Rumi's poetry) has any name recognition in the west. She also points to the enormous popularity of particular authors and poets, most of whom have produced literature the authorities would not endorse, but do not oppress. The Persia of her youth, and the Persia she visits regularly today, is one that engages with literature and arts constantly -- filling public theaters. Similarly, Keshavarz contends that the depiction of Iranians in literature like RLT is simplistic: the women are naive, and the men all knuckle-dragging tyrants. As a counter, she recalls many stories about extraordinary men and women she knew in Iran, and continues to visit - stern military officers who spent their nights painting, and of an illiterate peasant farmer who so loved a particular poet that he committed her every verse to memory.

Jasmine and Stars is a fascinating little mix of literary reflection, criticism, and memoir that provides readers with a welcome view of Iran beyond its political structure.

Related:
Interview with the author on NPR's Speaking of Faith/On Being, covering "The Estatic Faith of Rumi".

All the Shah's Men

All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror
© 2003 Stephen Kinzler
272 pages

On one  dismal  night in 1953,  a conspiracy destroyed both Iranian democracy and American honor.  At the dawn of the 1950s, Iran was struggling to free itself from British domination, a  precursor to the bloody colonial revolutions that would mark the mid-20th century.   Despite being a product of colonial rebellion itself, the United States would betray its own history and one of amiable relations with Iran to  assert itself on the world stage.  All the Shah's Men is an admirably executed mix of espionage, history, and politics,  brimming with passion.

Iran arrived at the 20th century in a sorry state;  ruled by monarchs who were either corrupt or incompetent, it fell under the influence of both Russia and Britain, whose great game of tug-of-war used Iran as the rope, plundering its resources. While Russia would collapse into civil war in 1917, Britain proved a far more formidable opponent, securing a long-term monopoly over the harvesting of Iranian oil and natural gas, and virtually taking over the country in the 1940s during World War 2.  For fifty years, Iran's mineral wealth was literally siphoned out and shipped away:   Iranians were denied the opportunity to learn and master the industry,  granted only menial labor and a token share of the profits.

The forced abdication of the shah in 1943 meant that the Iranian parliament and its democratic offices were free to grow in legitimacy and authority. Increasingly, the parties running for office called for an end to British imperialism in Iran, and one Mohammad Mossadegh was particularly famous for his attack on the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.  He called for better working conditions for laborers, the inclusion of Iranians in the engineering and administrative aspects of the oil business, and a more equitable division of profits between the British company and Iran.  Britain would have none of it.

Mossadegh achieved office several times championing the cause of an independent Iran as the Truman administration gave way to Eisenhower's.  The change of American leadership was important, for while the British government wanted to take action in Iran, it wanted American support, in part because of D.C's previous help in securing Iran against German interests.  Truman had no interest whatsoever in going to bat for British petroleum, but Eisenhower had witnessed the fall of China to Communism and the unraveling of Korea, and -- with help from Winston Churchill, no stranger to mideast debacles --  he was sweettalked into seeing red in Iran.   There would be no Persian Mao, not on Ike's watch.    While Britain considered and dismissed the idea of simply invading Iran, this was decided to be more trouble than it was worth. Far better to take the country from within, by using the lingering authority of the shah's successor-prince to dismiss Mossadegh, and back him with the Iranian and Allied militaries as need be.

Although the coup initially seemed to be failing disastrously -- arrests of conspirators were made, followed by the fleeing of the shah  to Iraq -- the American man on the ground was able to turn things around. Kermit Roosevelt was the son of Teddy Roosevelt,  one of the first American executives to dream of the United States having a 'place in the sun', stretching its wings across the globe.  Using the economic depression that followed Britain's economic war against Iran, Roosevelt  stirred up dissent and paid people to form an anti-Mossadegh mob that would march on the man's house.  He was arrested, his  government fell, the shah returned, and-- well, things just went downhill from there. Emboldened by outside support, the shah grew ever more tyrannical against his own people, until he was ousted by a religiously authoritative regime that was hostile to Mossadegh for its own reasons.

  
All the Shah's Men succeeds brilliantly in part because of the connections Kinzler draws to broader Iranian history. The Iranians had thrown off another resource monopoly sixty years before,  and in the process they established a constitutional government. While weak against the traditional authority of the shah, and his control of the military,  it steadily acquired its own moral authority -- increasingly seen as more legitimate than the shah, who was a creature of the outside world, forcing its designs on Iran, from control of Iranian resources to the forced adoption of Western suits and hats.   Mossadegh's championing of Iranian independence was not merely freedom from outside manipulation, but freedom from the unjust and arbitrary rule of the shah.  The coup didn't simply topple Mossadegh's government: it and Anglo-American support  of the shah thereafter sabotaged and reversed the trend toward Iranian self-government.

The coup not only derailed Iran' development as a democratic and humane society, but has caused no end of trouble for both Britain and the United States, mostly the Americans who did the dirty work.  When the shah was ousted in 1979 and sought refuge in the United States, Iranians who remembered 1953 thought they were about to re-witness history. Hadn't the shah fled  before, only to be returned under the aegis of the Americans?   Such was the spark of the hostage crisis, leading to decades of hostility and cold fury between the powers in which Iran and the west continue to wage war against one another's interests;  in Iran's case, this has taken the form of funding terrorist organizations.

All the Shah's Men is one of the more outstanding books I've ever read; though  principally about the conspiracy,  Kinzler does a terrific job in explaining the historical context.  But the book doesn't read like a lecture; at times it has the feel of investigative journalism or a spy thriller. Kinzler isn't just summarizing news articles, but relies on interviews with those who remember Mossadegh, for whom the man is a memory of a time when Iran's destiny seemed its own to make, when the law was being strengthened as a redoubt against arbitrary authority instead of being used to execute it.


Related:

• Nehru: the Invention of India, Shashi Tharoor.
• Tehran and the United States, Seyed Mousavian

The Persians

The Persians: Ancient, Mediaeval, and Modern Iran
© 2009 Homa Katouzian
452 pages

Come, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings. It'll take a while, because there's been a lot of them.The Persians: Ancient, Mediaeval, and Modern Iran is a sweeping  political history of Persia, and of the modern Islamic Republic of Iran. The author quotes a Persian proverb which asks -- six months from now, who alive? Who dead?  --  and argues that Persian history is established proof of the thin line between arbitrary authority and chaos. While technically  a survey, its density and focus on a list of rulers rather than the general trends within Persian history makes it a formidable challenge to the beginning student.

The Persians is largely modern, reaching the 20th century in less than two hundred pages.  What follows beforehand is essentially a long list of men killing men.  It’s nearly biblical – just replace “begat” with “who was killed by”, and you’ll get an idea. Oh, there’s some variety; sometimes the potentates settle for blinding one another instead of killing, which does get passé, and some Turkic and Mongolian fellows are offed, too.   Although Persia looms in the background of western history, invading Greece and lopping off Roman consuls’ heads, even marching on Jerusalem,   those episodes of strength seem to be the exception rather than the rule.   The tediously recorded butchery may actually be intentional, for the author’s main contention is that arbitrary tyrants have been the norm of Persian history, and that not until the 20th century has any work been put into creating a state beyond the will of one man, in forming a civil society that checks the ambitions of a solitary tyrant.


Even once the text moves to the 20th century and becomes more fulsomely detailed and varied, it’s still a little odd in what it dwells on. The author mentions, for instance ,that the 1953 coup has been studied in detail, and so...he bypasses it. If you didn't know that coup was executed by Britain and America to shore up their client-king’s absolute authority over the the Iranian people, too bad. If you're in the dark, you're staying there, because one minute Mossadegh is in power and the next he's in prison. Trends within Iran which bear significant fruit, like the  development of the Shiite clergy,  are barely present, or are  like the poetry buried under the mounds of executed kings.

That's not to say there isn't material of interest in here. I didn't realize that Alexander the Great is actually claimed by the Persians as one of their own, a half-Persian lord who appears in the Shahnameh, a massive work of legendary history.  The Great War and World War 2 take on a different light from Iranian eyes: because Britain and Russia spent the late 19th and early 20th century playing tug-of-war with an increasingly frayed Iran,  Iranians admired and sympathized with the Germans in both conflicts. The closer the author draws toward the present day, the more communicative he is about Iranian culture in general:  in the final hundred pages there is a good section on the evolving role of women in Iranian society, which -- while not as good during the Shah's forced modernization -- is not as bad as it was in the early 1980s.  

While there's no shortage of useful information to be mined here, beginners should probably look for something less mountainous and less dry.

Related:

• The War of the Three Gods: Romans, Persians, and the Rise of Islam,  Peter Crawford
• Iran and the United States, Hossein Mousavian

In God's Path

In God's Path: the Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire
© 2015 Robert Hoyland
303 pages

A Roman author referred to the Roman and Persian empires as the two eyes of the world -- but they didn't see the Arabs coming. In the span of a hundred years, a people from the desert wastes between Egypt and Mesopotamia had traveled from Spain to the Indus, bringing together a diversity of nations under one banner and laying waste to empires. History texts usually present a map of expansion as the sudden creation and explosive growth of Islam, but Hoyland argues that's premature.  Instead, he examines the Arab conquests as...the Arab conquests, in which Islam is first the means of an alliance between Arab tribes that allows them to sack two ailing realms, and then is the means of forging their own empire that transcended tribal bounds.  Instead of merely attributing the Arab spring into empire as one motivated by religious zeal, Hoyland examines the Arabs as actors on the historic stage, and dwells on their political skill.

The result is a history that overturns elementary assumptions.  For instance, conquest and conversion were two completely different processes: even a province absolutely integral to the nascent Islamic civilization, Persia, was not majority-Muslim until the 14th century.  (Islamic provincial governors were by no means eager to force conversion:  non-Muslims were taxed by the government.) By preserving the structure of the societies they were conquering -- relying on Christian and Persian scribes, civil officers, etc to retain their roles --  and offering completely secular benefits for joining the Arabs on their globetrotting campaigns, what began as a local city-state quickened into a global phenomenon.  Eventually, the religion of the Arabs, who had become the ruling class, would become the religion of a multitude, evolving along the way. Towards the end Hoyland dips into religious history,  reflecting on how the century of war, mixed defeats and triumphs, and the assimilation of various cultures shaped it. For instance,  he views the bar against images as a way for the Arabs to distinguish themselves against the decadent empires they had supplanted, but especially against the Romans, whose Constantinople twice defeats sieges here.   While there were some brief spots in the strictly historical narrative that rivaled Numbers for being a list of names and places without story to them, Hoyland's insightful commentary more than makes for it, This is a history that illustrates not only the beginning of the Islamic world, but shows some of the shared machinery of empires in general. For a book on conquests, there's comparatively little about the actual execution of battles; for that, a source like Crawford's War of the Three Gods might prove a complement.



Related:

• War of the Three Gods: Romans, Persians, and the Rise of Islam, Peter Crawford
• Destiny, Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes, Tamim Ansary

Iran and the United States

Iran and the United States: An Insider's View on the Failed Past and the Road to Peace
© 2014 Seyed Hossein Mousavian
368 pages

The United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran have not been on speaking terms since the hostage crisis of 1979 - 1981,  in which students drunk on revolution seized the American embassy in Tehran and held scores of American workers captive for well over a year.  This was not a random outburst of anti-American violence, but a carefully planned demonstration designed to spurn the United States' foreign policy in Iran.  The revolution in which these students played their part  had before thrown a US-installed dictator out of power -- and they would not accept his return.  The old relationship having been rejected, neither American nor Iranian leaders have been able to establish a new one -- but, according to this briefing by Sayed Mousavian, it's not an impossible task.  Both sides have attempted to come to some level of rapprochement, but misunderstanding, inconsistency, and timing problems have destroyed every trial balloon.  Iran and the United States reviews the whole of Iranian-American foreign relations, identifies the issues which are most problematic, and finishes by proposing a path to concord.

Once upon a time, the United States government was not a world power, but an idealistic Republic that held to a path of nonintervention. The Persian people looked at America as the shining light of the west: unlike the British and Russian empires, the Americans had no desire to  manipulate or force their will on the middle east. Even when Iran attempted to stay out of the West's way, as it did by declaring itself neutral during the Great War, the imperials insisted on dragging Iran into it -- as they did when Britain and Russia used Iran to attack the Turks, turning Iran into a warzone and reducing many of its people to refugees or worse.  During the Second World War, Iran became even more important for the west as a route for supplies to the Soviets, and a source of oil to power the legions of airplanes, tanks, ships, and service vehicles that supported a global war.   WW2 cost the United States the last vestiges of its innocence: it landed troops in Iran and thereafter would take a very active interest in Iranian politics.  When the Iranians attempted to resume control over their oil from Britain in the early 1950s, Britain and the US worked together to throw out the Iranian government and replace it with one that would do their bidding.

That government, the Shah's, was the one the Iranian revolution so forcefully rejected -- and not merely because he was foreign-imposed and allowed imperial powers to harvest the majority of Iran's oil wealth, but because he used brutal methods like the secret police to support his reign.  After the revolution, an overtly Islamic  government was installed, and thereafter relations with the outside world went steadily downhill. The Islamic nature of the government was in part religious, and in part a defense of Iranian traditions which had been supplanted by western mores.  The nuclear program that Britain and the United States had once encouraged in Iran was now forbidden, in part because of Iranian's militant rebuke of the decades of coercion endured from Britain, Russia, and now the Americans.   The new government's hostility extended to Israel, as the creation of the west in response to its own tragedy.  Iran would support militias fighting against Israel in Syria and Lebanon, and thereby earn a reputation for itself as a sponsor of terrorism -- even though some of the attacks attributed to it were actually perpetrated by the same Saudi terrorists who would later attack the United States.  The Islamic Republic had been founded on rejection of foreign meddling, and would spend its first decade fighting for its very life against Saddam Hussein -- a man who opportunistically invaded Iran, aided and armed by the Americans.  Although Iran was able to take back land stolen by Hussein's army, when it began an offensive into Iran it was warned discretely that the west would never allow it to 'win' the war by sacking Hussein, and the west has continued low-level hostilities since: destroying an Iranian fleet during the Iraqi invasion, assassinating its nuclear engineers, and even inaugurating cyberwar to disable its reactors.  Little wonder Iran regards the west with deep suspicion.

  Previous attempts at restoring connections have been marred by the gap between American and Iranian culture:  when a hostile American media sneers at Iranian leadership,  this is perceived as being the opinion of the American president.  When Congress and the president take opposing stances on the subject of Iran, this is seen not as a quirk of the American political process, but deliberate misleading on the part of the president.  On the other side, Americans fail to understand how deep the scars of the early 20th century go:  the Islamic Republic's entire raison d'être is reaction against western humiliation. Iran would rather perish than cave to the threat of violence. If concordance with the Iranians is to be achieved, it must be by appealing to their interests. One especially potent source of collaboration is counter-terrorism.  While Americans might include Iranian leadership in the ranks of 'Islamic extremism',  Iran's status as the center of Shi'ia Islam makes it an target to Sunni groups like ISIS.  Iran's leaders have acute interest in developing their economy further,  the sort of interest that makes stabilizing parts of the middle east a potential shared goal as well.  Other past attempts at patching together a peace have been hindered by misalignment between the nations' respective leadership: when the Iranians feel chatty, the Americans are bellicose, and vice versa. The Bush-Ahmadinejad years were a perfect combination of idiot dancing, as both men sent messages indicating they wanted to talk, then referred to the other party as the Great Satan the next week.

This is a fascinating volume, in part because it's by an Iranian who, until his arrest for treason by Ahmadinejad, faithfully served the Iranian government as its ambassador to Germany and on the nuclear negotiation team. He is not hostile toward the United States, despairing of both governments' talking past one another, and is able to understand the American side of the story.  The combination of his amiability and his experience as a journalist (later editor for the Tehran Times)  results in a thorough but approachable history and analysis of Iranian-American relations.  There certainly seems to be reasons for hope,  though the ramifications of the nuclear deal arrived at with the Iranians just recently are has yet unclear. The White House is very proud of the deal ,but the White House is also very proud of the ACA website.  Hopefully what little progress made can be sustained through the next president, though this is stretching it given that a proven warmonger is most likely to win.   At any rate, for Americans and Europeans attempting to get a handle on Iran, this is a commendable beginning.  The fact that we continue to attempt to control mid-east politics when every previous attempt has backfired and created larger problems is awe-inspiring in its historic obliviousness.

This week: science, the middle east, and a duel

Dear readers, I'm beginning to suspect books are a racket.  Today I began reading one and within fifty pages, I'd already written down four  more titles that I wanted to investigate.  No wonder people read fiction -- it's far less addictive.  Anyhoo, May is off to a promisingly interesting start, with more science and middle-eastern politics coming up.  Speaking of --

 A few weeks ago,  I read Reading Lolita in Tehran, and apparently didn't mention it.  It's a curious mixture of literary discussion and revolutionary memoir, as the author, Azar Nafisi, discusses great books of the western canon (and Lolita) with her classes in Iran as the country heaves with revolution.  Ms. Nafisi was a leftist revolutionary in her youth, at least during her time in America: imagine her surprise when she returned to Iran and got one, just not the one she expected. While opposition to the Shah's regime drew from both the secular-Marxist left and the reactionary-Islamic right, it was the latter which prevailed.  Feeling irrelevant by the new regime, and appalled by its puritanical culture,  Nafesi would seek sanctuary first in her classroom, and then in a private class taught from her home, teaching to a select group of girls.   Throughout their discussions they sought to apply the themes engaged by Nabokov,  James, Fitzgerald, and Austen: for instance, as Humbert from Lolita turns a young girl into an object of his own interests, to be molded by his own proclivities, so the government of Iran has turned them into objects to be molded by its desires.  While I haven't read most of the books discussed by Nafisi's class or her reading group,  I found it very interesting as a memoir of the revolution. I'm particularly interested in following up with The Republic of the Imagination,  as Nafisi -- having fled Iran  -- seeks her true city via the literary world, engaging with minds across the ages.

 I'll also be having a little fun with titles later. You may remember when I read Into Thin Air, followed shortly by Into Thick Air,  or my reading two books entitled Kobayashi Maru back to back.  Well,  another dueling duo arrived in the mail today, and the only thing preventing me from diving right in is...all the other books I'm intent on reading. We'll have to see what  I cram in where...