Sound thesis, weak facts

An author's cogent argument for liberating Iran is marred by glaring errors.

By RAYYAN AL-SHAWAF, Special to the Times
Published November 11, 2007

According to Michael Ledeen, "Iran is at once the world's leading supporter of international terrorism and one of the cruelest oppressors of its own people." The Iranian Time Bomb is at once a call for greater American resolve in confronting Iranian designs "to drive the United States out of the Middle East and destroy Israel" and an error-ridden account of Iran itself.

Given the book's premise that "there is no way to negotiate a reasonable modus operandi with (Iran's rulers), since their war on us derives from ultimate issues, not geopolitical disagreements," it might seem ironic that Ledeen was involved in the 1980s arms-for-hostages scandal known as Iran-Contra.

Nevertheless, the book's thesis is sound; many Iranians despise their country's clerical regime and deserve American aid in their quest for freedom. Significantly, Ledeen, a resident scholar at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute think tank and contributing editor of National Review, rejects military solutions. Instead, he urges the United States to support the Iranian opposition with public pronouncements, funds and media exposure.

Ledeen's distaste for Tehran's "mullahcracy" is wholly justified, but his insistence that Iran is the source of all Islamic terrorism reminds one of Stephen Schwartz's similarly exclusive focus on Saudi Arabia in The Two Faces of Islam: Saudi Fundamentalism and Its Role in Terrorism. In a rare instance in which Ledeen widens the picture, it is in the context of "a strategic plan developed among the three major leaders: (Iran's) Khamenei, (Syria's) Assad, and Saddam Hussein," a plan that is sheer fantasy.

He also wrongly asserts that Iran was removed from the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism during the Clinton administration, and provides no source for his claim that "during the years of Bush the Father the United States had become the largest single market for Iranian crude, and by Clinton's third year we were Iran's number three trading partner."

Ledeen's allegations of Iranian responsibility for the 1979 seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca and the 2003 assassination of Iraqi Shiite cleric Muhammad Baqir al-Hakim are conjectural. Yet Iranian complicity has indeed been proven in several major terrorist attacks, including bombings of the U.S. Embassy and Marines in Beirut (both in 1983), and of the Israeli Embassy and Jewish community center in Buenos Aires (1992 and 1994, respectively).

And kudos to the author for pointing out that "most people have forgotten the 'big news' from the 9/11 Commission, namely that its members were astonished to find various links between the al-Qaida terrorists and the Islamic Republic." Ledeen attributes this unwarranted astonishment to the "near unassailable conviction that Sunnis and Shiites just could not work together," a deceptively comfortable axiom which literally blew up in the face of Western intelligence agencies.

But Ledeen is not an Iran expert, and his knowledge of the Iranian people proves sketchy. In his discussion of disaffected religious minorities, he neglects to mention Sunni Muslims, 8 to 10 percent of the population in predominantly Shiite Iran.

As for non-Muslim communities, Ledeen cites adherents of Zoroastrianism, which he claims is "banned," as "perhaps the largest." Both assertions are incorrect; it is Baha'ism which is banned, and whose adherents constitute the largest non-Muslim group in the country, with Zoroastrians the smallest.

Among Ledeen's other mistakes: the Iranian government has denied - not "announced" - plans to displace the Arabs of Khuzestan; the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah was not created "years before the Iranian revolution" of 1979, but in 1982; Ein al-Hilweh is a Palestinian refugee camp not a Hezbollah center, located not in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley but near coastal Sidon; the secular Palestine Liberation Organization is neither "Sunni" nor an outgrowth of the Muslim Brotherhood, and is not believed to have been involved in the 1983 attack on U.S. Marines in Lebanon.

With every chapter, the moral force of Ledeen's argument is further obscured by such glaring errors. Slipshod research is inexcusable under any circumstance, but all the more so if the author knows that he is a polarizing figure whose work will be mercilessly scrutinized for inaccuracies, and that the American public is wary of yet another foreign entanglement in the floundering war on terror.

Ultimately, Ledeen's cogent rationale for American support in liberating Iran should have been augmented by a meticulous regard for facts. Surely the people of Iran who yearn to be rid of theocracy and oppression deserve as much.

Rayyan Al-Shawaf is a writer in Beirut, Lebanon.

The book

The Iranian Time Bomb: The Mullah Zealots' Quest for Destruction

By Michael A. Ledeen

Truman Talley/St. Martin's Press

288 pages

$24.95

[Last modified November 10, 2007, 21:13:21]