Treacherous Alliance - the Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States

A couple of days ago, Tony Karon featured a guest blogger at Rootless Cosmopolitan: Dr. Trita Parsi, author of Treacherous Alliance: the Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States (Yale University Press, 2007).

The post, Iran - The inflatable bogey, was so interesting that I’ve ordered the book.

My five point summary of Parsi’s article:

1. Israel hasn’t always treated Iran as an enemy. In the 1980’s Israel was actually delivering weapons to Iran on behalf of the Reagan Administration.

2. Most Israeli strategists recognize that Iran is not an existential threat to the U.S., Israel, or the Arab regimes.

3. During intelligence assessments of Israel’s security environment in the 1990’s, there was a heated debate within the Israeli government about whether or not Iran posed a risk to Israel’s security. In an unprecedented move, the Prime Minister Netanyahu rejected the military’s position that Iran was a risk and adopted the intelligence service’s position that it wasn’t and that Israel should tone down its rhetorical escalation with Iran.

4. When Iran dismissed Israel’s conciliatory signals for nine months, Netanyahu concluded that Iran’s primary objective was to mend fences with the U.S. and didn’t really care about Israel.

5. Because Israel believed that Iran’s rapprochement with the US would lead to its diminished support for Israel, Netahanyu gave up on courting Iran and reverted to vilifying Iran and seeking its international isolation.

My goal with this brief post is to tempt you to read the whole article.

(photo of Dr. Trita Parsi – The Washington Note)