Who’s in Charge?

Ervand Abrahamian

  • Ahmadinejad: The Secret History of Iran’s Radical Leader by Kasra Naji
    Tauris, 298 pp, £12.99, December 2007, ISBN 978 1 84511 636 1
  • The Road to Democracy in Iran by Akbar Ganji
    MIT, 113 pp, £9.95, May 2008, ISBN 978 0 262 07295 3

American officials – without any trace of irony – label Iran as militaristic, aggressive, expansionist, interventionist, even as hegemonic and imperialistic. The media often echo this, depicting Iran as a cross between the Persian Empire and the Third Reich, aspiring to re-establish a Pax Iranica across the region. Neoconservatives go further, claiming that Iran ‘declared war’ on the US in 1979; that the two are in a ‘life and death struggle’; that this is World War Four (the Cold War was World War Three); and that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is at the head of an Islamofascist movement out to re-create the early Caliphate.

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Vol. 30 No. 21 · 6 November 2008 » Ervand Abrahamian » Who’s in Charge? (print version)
Pages 37-38 | 3170 words