Two Good Reads on Iran

There's so much rhetoric and overheated posturing going on on Iran these days that it's always a pleasant surprise to read a good, solid, well-argued analysis. To read two in one day is even more unusual, which is why I want to recommend two that I read today (though the first is dated yesterday):

Gary Sick, who was more or less present at the creation of the Islamic Republic, offers "America and Iran: Strikes, Sanctions, and Scapegoats." As usual, read it all, but here's a selected quote:

The key question about Iran today is not whether it will be attacked or collapse under sanctions. It is whether Iran is capable under its present leadership to take a sober decision about how to deal with the outside world. The Revolutionary Guards have established a dominant position in Iran’s military, its economy, and its politics. Iran increasingly comes to resemble the corporatist states of southern and eastern Europe in the 1920s and ‘30s that we call fascist. Iran is conducting an interior battle with its own demons, from the millenarians on the far right who choose to believe that Khamene`i is the personal representative of God on earth, to the pragmatic conservatives who simply want a more responsible leadership, to the reformists of the Green movement whose objective is to put the “republic” back into the Islamic Republic by giving the people a greater voice.

This is a yeasty and unpredictable mix. No one knows what is going to happen next.

And this is the reality that the Obama administration must deal with. The danger is not that the administration will back the wrong horse in Iran. The real danger is that the Obama administration will be so preoccupied with domestic American politics and its constant demand to look tough when dealing with Iran that it will inadvertently rescue this cruel but hapless regime from its own ineptitude by providing a convenient scapegoat for everything that goes wrong in Iran.

While Gary Sick is known as an Iran-watcher first and foremost, most of us associate Rami Khouri with the Arab World, but he's also always good on US policy and he's recently back from Iran, hence his "Resolving US-Iranian Tensions," at Agence Global. Again, read it all, but here's an excerpt to tempt you to click through:

The Iranian sense of history is not about past grandeur only. It is also heavily defined by a sense of being betrayed and exploited by many Western powers in the modern era, especially on nuclear industry issues. Iran -- like Turkey and Israel, but unlike Egypt and Saudi Arabia -- insists on safeguarding its national interests and will not play by the deceitful old double-standard rules set in London, Paris, Moscow, Washington and, more recently, Tel Aviv. This is mainly a demand for dignity and respect, intangibles that are largely missing from the American-Israeli diplomatic lexicon, which is more anchored in power.

I suspect that this can be achieved, though, if the second requirement for a successful negotiation is addressed seriously, which is a restoration of Western and Security Council confidence in Iran’s declarations about its nuclear industry. If Iran is not hiding a secret nuclear weapons program, it should not hesitate to provide all the answers to the questions posed to it by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) -- yet Tehran’s position is that it will not provide such answers in an atmosphere of threats, sanctions and wild assumptions of its nuclear guilt and deviousness by the US-Israel-led camp.