Customer Reviews

Eternal Iran: Continuity and Chaos (Middle East in Focus)

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This is a very thin book covering a long period of time. The purpose of the book is to lay out the long history of Iran and empires that preceded it in order to help understand current events in context. It is not, nor do I think it was intended to be, sufficiently detailed to give you a solid understanding of any one period of Iran's long history. But it is a great introduction to starting your research. I would not recommend this book unless you follow it up with something that goes into more detail. But I also would not recommend other books that go into greater detail unless you read this one first. This book provides a very thorough and concise context.

This book is well documented (over thirty ages of footnotes and references) but is a quick and easy read (just 162 pages of text). Today Iran has become one of our most important foreign policy problems, and I believe that reading this book is an excellent way to get the historical background required to understand what is going on in that part of the world. Unfortunately it seems to have been proofread by a computer rather than a human being and here and there you will find a word which is obviously not the word the author intended. This is a minor flaw in an otherwise outstanding book.

The image many people have of Iran is of a nation of fanatical Islamic believers. This book comes to put Iranian society in historical perspective, and emphasize how strong the pre-Islamic Persian culture still is in Iran. As Rubin himself says in an interview in National Review, "Iran's history goes back millennia. It is important to recognize the historical patterns that shape Iranian state and society. We wanted to correct the faulty notion that the Islamic Republic is the natural state of things. Too many books written by academics in the year or two after the Islamic Revolution assumed that the Islamic Revolution represented the natural evolution of Iranian politics. It is now clear that the Revolution was an aberration. This raises the policy question: Should we do anything that helps prolong the system, or will we side with the vast majority of Iranians who hope for change? We can only win if the Iranian people win. And that means not striking any deal which will help preserve the status quo and a theocracy anathema not only to many Iranians, but also to so many religious Shiites."

In other words Rubin and Clawson here are echoing the line of Kenneth Timmerman who for some time now has been urging Administration support of dissenting forces in Iran. These by the way are not necessarily democratic forces.

As for the Iranian nuclear danger Rubin and Clawson are convinced that it is real indeed, and not necessarily because Washington is in danger of suffering nuclear attack tomorrow. The authors convincingly paint a picture of an emboldened nuclear Iran able to vastly increase its terrorist activities as it dominates the Gulf and the world oil situation.

This is an important and instructive book about a nation which under its present leadership is a real threat to Mankind.