Book Excerpt: On "The Cold War Between Washington and Tehran"

It’s another year, and therefore yet another book published by Noam Chomsky critiquing US foreign policy. The new book is titled Interventions (amazon link here) and Common Dreams has been thoughtful enough to provide its readers with a substantial excerpt here discussing what the author describes as “the cold war between Washington and Tehran.”

Here’s an excerpt from the excerpt that I found particularly interesting:

Despite the saber-rattling, it is, I suspect, unlikely that the Bush administration will attack Iran. The world is strongly opposed. Seventy-five percent of Americans favor diplomacy over military threats against Iran, and as noted earlier, Americans and Iranians largely agree on nuclear issues. Polls by Terror Free Tomorrow reveal that “Despite a deep historical enmity between Iran’s Persian Shiite population and the predominantly Sunni population of its ethnically diverse Arab, Turkish and Pakistani neighbors, the largest percentage of people in these countries favor accepting a nuclear-armed Iran over any American military action.” It appears that the U.S. military and intelligence community is also opposed to an attack.

Iran cannot defend itself against U.S. attack, but it can respond in other ways, among them by inciting even more havoc in Iraq. Some issue warnings that are far more grave, among them by the respected British military historian Corelli Barnett, who writes that “an attack on Iran would effectively launch World War III.”

The Bush administration has left disasters almost everywhere it has turned, from post-Katrina New Orleans to Iraq. In desperation to salvage something, the administration might undertake the risk of even greater disasters.

Meanwhile Washington may be seeking to destabilize Iran from within.2 The ethnic mix in Iran is complex; much of the population isn’t Persian. There are secessionist tendencies and it is likely that Washington is trying to stir them up-in Khuzestan on the Gulf, for example, where Iran’s oil is concentrated, a region that is largely Arab, not Persian.

It’s a bit of a surprise to me just how bearish Chomsky is on the possibility of a US military strike against Iran given the rapidly growing body of evidence, like this for example.

It’s only fair for me to point out that “Interventions” is not a new book per se, but rather a collection of some of Chimsky’s recently published (post-2002) shorter articles and Op-Eds. I can’t review this book as I have yet to purchase it, let alone read it, but if it comes anywhere close to his other recent publications (Hegemony or Survival, Failed States, 9/11, etc) in erms of its research and scholarship, then it likely qualifies as “worth reading”. I do plan on reading it in the next few months, as the excerpt has succeeded in piquing my interest.

On the downside, Chomsky is not the best writer in the world . . . in fact, I would say he falls in the bottom 20% in terms of diction and style, and he is repetitive as hell. But he fills a unique role in the world of Western geopolitical analysis: He does a tremendous amount of research using primary sources and his bibliographies and footnotes thus represent a fertile resource for one’s own further research and analysis.

In other words, it is not a rare occurance for me to take exception to the conclusions Chomsky reaches, and I would strongly recommend to any reader that he or she should carefully and skeptically consider any conclusions reached in his works. But if you want to do further research on these topics, Chomsky’s books are the very best points of departure that I know.