An interesting and insightful piece. Whilst I am more supportive of the Trump administration (mainly due to the hope that Trump can somehow help to defeat the reactionary plans of Labour in the UK to destroy freedom of speech and because his administration is more likely to be supportive of European states that pursue policies of restricting immigration), I am also concerned about what happens next. It does feel as if some of these foreign policy adventures are motivated by a need to achieve some "victories" whilst Trump's domestic agenda is getting bogged down by lawfare.
With the Right and the whole "war for oil" slogan, I have often felt that one of the greatest weaknesses of those on the Right who opposed the war in Iraq was their inability to create their own comprehensive narrative to explain their opposition to it. Instead, it feels as if the anti-war narrative of the Left was just accepted whole-heartedly by many on the Right, which has since then helped to spread anti-Semitism and Third Worldism among the Right.
Thank you. Three years to see where things shake out with Europe; we're all hoping for the best. Totally agree with you that the current Right's absorption of the Leftist narrative over Iraq is an important factor in where the movement has gone. There's an irony at work there, given MAGA World's hostility to intelligence agencies ("the Deep State" and whatnot), because a lot of that narrative's success can be traced to the CIA's media war for institutional vindication after 2003.
The one thing I have found most fascinating when reading your articles is learning about how incompetent the CIA actually are. The other thing that keeps churning around my head is the question of why we have even arrived at the situation we have. Please correct me if I am wrong, but it increasingly feels that, in the period in the 90's when the US did run a unipolar world, there was a failure of the US to properly pursue its imperial duties in regard to Iran. How realistic would it have been for some form of regime change if, say, in the period 91-95, the US had more aggressively pushed against the Islamic Republic? Whilst I am sure that there still would have been issues with Islamic fundamentalism, I still can't shake the feeling that a lot of the problems could have been averted earlier. What books would you recommend on this topic?
It's an underlying problem that the US has never really been as aggressive with the Islamic Republic as some of the rhetoric suggests. Reagan tried outreach to "moderates" that ended in the Iran-Contra morass, Clinton apologised for Mossadeq and bought into the Khatami "Reformism", Bush II would not even strike the factories inside Iran feeding the EFPs into Iraq, and of Obama, well what can one say ...
The 1990s specifically is an interesting one because clearly more could have been done. To give you a sense of the policy atmosphere of the time, around 1997 or 1998, after Khobar Towers, John Brennan, then-a CIA officer in Riyadh (later Obama's DCI), knocked on the window of a car with some VEVAK officers in it and this was considered a tremendously bold move.
Iran had certain vulnerabilities at the time, above all that it was recovering from the war with Saddam's Iraq, which had caused not only economic trouble and ravaged the Guards Corps, but wounded the regime's prestige. Khomeini had rejected all the peace offers after 1982, when Iran had taken back its territories, and continued the war trying to install a sister republic in Baghdad. It meant the formal "draw" in 1988 - the return to the status quo ante - was really an Iranian loss.
On the other hand, Rafsanjani secured Khamenei's succession seamlessly and the external terrorism reached a peak in the 1990s - one reason being that the most serious opponents were in exile. The election of Khatami at the end of the decade was not only a mirage in America. Most Iranians at that time still believed in the possibility of reform, albeit the reasoning was partly motivated - it seemed a preferable path to another upheaval with the Revolution and the war so fresh in memory. The failure of the Khatami gambit was important in convincing Iranians that the Islamic Revolution per se was the problem.
The point being, US efforts at regime change in the 1990s would probably have been working against the consensus in Iran, rather than with it as they seem to be at the present time. Doesn't mean it should not have been tried, obviously: the very act of trying could have changed things, if the opposition knew it had an ally in the US.
In terms of books on Iran in the 1990s, another good question.
"Iran: Dilemmas Of Dual Containment" gives a sense of the West's view at the time and it's also a sort of meta-explanation of why there's a bit of a dearth of Iran-1990s books. The Iran issue seemed less pressing than the Saddam problem. The Iran debate as we have it now, and at the level we have it now, is mostly a post-2003 phenomenon.
A slightly strange one, but interesting I think is "Know Thine Enemy" by Reuel Marc Gerecht (under the name "Edward Shirley"): he was a CIA officer who dissented from the consensus of the time on Iran and jihadism broadly.
An interesting and insightful piece. Whilst I am more supportive of the Trump administration (mainly due to the hope that Trump can somehow help to defeat the reactionary plans of Labour in the UK to destroy freedom of speech and because his administration is more likely to be supportive of European states that pursue policies of restricting immigration), I am also concerned about what happens next. It does feel as if some of these foreign policy adventures are motivated by a need to achieve some "victories" whilst Trump's domestic agenda is getting bogged down by lawfare.
With the Right and the whole "war for oil" slogan, I have often felt that one of the greatest weaknesses of those on the Right who opposed the war in Iraq was their inability to create their own comprehensive narrative to explain their opposition to it. Instead, it feels as if the anti-war narrative of the Left was just accepted whole-heartedly by many on the Right, which has since then helped to spread anti-Semitism and Third Worldism among the Right.
Thank you. Three years to see where things shake out with Europe; we're all hoping for the best. Totally agree with you that the current Right's absorption of the Leftist narrative over Iraq is an important factor in where the movement has gone. There's an irony at work there, given MAGA World's hostility to intelligence agencies ("the Deep State" and whatnot), because a lot of that narrative's success can be traced to the CIA's media war for institutional vindication after 2003.
The one thing I have found most fascinating when reading your articles is learning about how incompetent the CIA actually are. The other thing that keeps churning around my head is the question of why we have even arrived at the situation we have. Please correct me if I am wrong, but it increasingly feels that, in the period in the 90's when the US did run a unipolar world, there was a failure of the US to properly pursue its imperial duties in regard to Iran. How realistic would it have been for some form of regime change if, say, in the period 91-95, the US had more aggressively pushed against the Islamic Republic? Whilst I am sure that there still would have been issues with Islamic fundamentalism, I still can't shake the feeling that a lot of the problems could have been averted earlier. What books would you recommend on this topic?
It's an underlying problem that the US has never really been as aggressive with the Islamic Republic as some of the rhetoric suggests. Reagan tried outreach to "moderates" that ended in the Iran-Contra morass, Clinton apologised for Mossadeq and bought into the Khatami "Reformism", Bush II would not even strike the factories inside Iran feeding the EFPs into Iraq, and of Obama, well what can one say ...
The 1990s specifically is an interesting one because clearly more could have been done. To give you a sense of the policy atmosphere of the time, around 1997 or 1998, after Khobar Towers, John Brennan, then-a CIA officer in Riyadh (later Obama's DCI), knocked on the window of a car with some VEVAK officers in it and this was considered a tremendously bold move.
Iran had certain vulnerabilities at the time, above all that it was recovering from the war with Saddam's Iraq, which had caused not only economic trouble and ravaged the Guards Corps, but wounded the regime's prestige. Khomeini had rejected all the peace offers after 1982, when Iran had taken back its territories, and continued the war trying to install a sister republic in Baghdad. It meant the formal "draw" in 1988 - the return to the status quo ante - was really an Iranian loss.
On the other hand, Rafsanjani secured Khamenei's succession seamlessly and the external terrorism reached a peak in the 1990s - one reason being that the most serious opponents were in exile. The election of Khatami at the end of the decade was not only a mirage in America. Most Iranians at that time still believed in the possibility of reform, albeit the reasoning was partly motivated - it seemed a preferable path to another upheaval with the Revolution and the war so fresh in memory. The failure of the Khatami gambit was important in convincing Iranians that the Islamic Revolution per se was the problem.
The point being, US efforts at regime change in the 1990s would probably have been working against the consensus in Iran, rather than with it as they seem to be at the present time. Doesn't mean it should not have been tried, obviously: the very act of trying could have changed things, if the opposition knew it had an ally in the US.
In terms of books on Iran in the 1990s, another good question.
"Iran: Dilemmas Of Dual Containment" gives a sense of the West's view at the time and it's also a sort of meta-explanation of why there's a bit of a dearth of Iran-1990s books. The Iran issue seemed less pressing than the Saddam problem. The Iran debate as we have it now, and at the level we have it now, is mostly a post-2003 phenomenon.
A slightly strange one, but interesting I think is "Know Thine Enemy" by Reuel Marc Gerecht (under the name "Edward Shirley"): he was a CIA officer who dissented from the consensus of the time on Iran and jihadism broadly.