Joseph Finder

Anyone who wants to understand what’s going on in Iran must read the terrific new book by Ray Takeyh, Guardians of the Revolution: Iran and the World in the Age of the Ayatollahs. This is a lucid, clear-headed explanation of Iran’s perplexing foreign policy since 1979. Takeyh—a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who fled Iran in 1979 and was, until recently, a State Department adviser on Iran—argues that Iran’s nuclear strategy was forged during its bloody eight-year war with Iraq in the 1980s, during which Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons on Iran with impunity (and with, Takeyh notes, the complicity of the Reagan administration). He also points out that Tehran’s foreign policy is a direct outgrowth of the deep, precarious factionalism within its leadership. Elsewhere, Takeyh warns that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is barely clinging onto power at home and is all the more dangerous because of it.