Ex-presidents are as bad as Bush

photo credit: Michael Heilemann

To listen to the experts moaning on about America’s mistakes in Iraq you’d think their previous record in the Middle East had been a triumph. What short memories people have:

• Jimmy Carter, for instance, now writes books condemning Americas foreign policies, yet he was the president who bungled the Iranian hostage crisis and started arming the jihadists in Afghanistan. The record of his successors is little better.
• Reagan was bewildered by Islamic extremism and pulled US troops out of Lebanon after Hezbollah murdered 241 marines, thereby helping to energise a new terrorist movement that has spread havoc ever since. He then presided over the Iran-contra affair, when US agents secretly sold missiles to Tehran.
• Clinton, for his part, passed up an offer from Sudan to hand over Osama bin Laden and generally turned a blind eye to terrorism over eight years of escalating attacks.

Before we give up in Iraq and revert to the expedient policies of the past, let’s at least remember what those policies were: Democratic appeasement of terrorists, interrupted by cynical Republican business with terrorist-sponsoring regimes.

What you can do

Buy, Confronting Iran: The Failure of American Foreign Policy and the Next Great Crisis in the Middle East

Preoccupied by Iraq, America paid little attention to its vastly larger and wealthier neighbor until Iran announced resumption of its nuclear program in the past year.

This scholarly but lucid account by a prominent British historian begins with the Persian empire’s 19th-century decline, as it lost territory to Russia and economic independence to Britain. Iran-American relations remained friendly until after WWII, when the U.S. aligned with British policy. After Mohammad Mosaddeq nationalized his nation’s oil industry, the CIA engineered his 1953 overthrow—an event remembered in Iran as an outrage similar to Pearl Harbor.

There followed 25 years of rule by Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, who sent an avalanche of oil money to the U.S. to finance a high-tech military force that proved useless in the revolution that ousted him. Humiliated by the revolutionists’ 1979 takeover of our embassy, the U.S. supported Saddam Hussein during the brutal 1980–1988 Iran-Iraq war.

As vividly as he portrays American blunders, Ansari does not ignore Iran’s tortured politics and its national myth of victimization. American readers may wince at Iran’s wildly distorted view of Western culture, but those who persist will realize the enormous barriers to understanding that both nations face.