If you like Iraq, you'll love Iran

When word first got around that Ken Pollack was writing a book on Iran, a lot of people responded, "Uh-oh, time to strap on the combat boots again." But you're advocating a very different approach. Why?

If I thought invasion was the best answer for Iran, I would recommend it in a heartbeat. But there are very important differences between Iran and Iraq. The first of them is intention: Saddam Hussein wanted nuclear weapons, as best as we understand it, to enable aggression. He willfully disregarded deterrent threats and information that should have caused him to pause. He did everything that would make you think that he would be hard, if not impossible, to deter.

The Iranians aren't like that. Since the death of the Ayatollah Khomeini, they've been aggressive and nasty and anti-American, but they're not irrational, and they're not as reckless as Saddam Hussein was. They recognize deterrent threats and they pull back when confronted with superior force. That's not to say it's a good idea for them to have a nuclear weapon, but the threat is of a different category than Saddam's Iraq or North Korea.

With Iraq, we'd thought the combination of sanctions and inspections weren't stopping the progress of the Iraqis' nuclear program. With Iran, we haven't tried sanctions and inspections yet, and there's a lot of evidence that if we did employ a multilateral diplomatic approach to Iran, it would have real benefits. You always go for the diplomatic options before you reach for the sword.

Also, in Iran, the military options don't look very good. Against Iraq, it was entirely conceivable for us to invade the country and rebuild it properly. We didn't rebuild it properly; instead we decided we'd listen to Ahmed Chalabi and fuck things up. Iran would be a very difficult country both to occupy and rebuild. We could invade it, but that would be a lot harder than Iraq. It's a much bigger country, with much bigger problems in many ways. And there may be a better way to handle this.

"The Persian Puzzle" is largely a history of Iran in the 20th century that points out errors repeated by both sides. What have we gotten wrong about Iranian politics, and what have they gotten wrong about our foreign policy?

Iranians, by and large, are steeped in history, or their version of it. They blamed the United States for the 1953 coup -- which they're right to do -- but also for the oppression they felt during the Shah's era, which they believed we were behind. And so the leaders who came to power during the revolution defined themselves as being anti-American. Today, their support for Syria, their support for terrorism, a lot of their opposition to Israel, stems from that. There's nothing particularly incompatible about our current strategic positions, but so much bad blood has been institutionalized within Iranian domestic politics.

Iranians can't get past their history, and Americans mostly don't know that history. There is an imbalance of attention, for lack of a better term. Iranians are very focused on the United States, even obsessed, and they think that the United States is obsessed with them. In point of fact, it's exactly the opposite. A lot of our mistakes have come from trying to pretend that Iran can mind its own business. We're constantly being bitten in the ass when we try to do that.

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