![Seyed Hossein Mousavian - a frustrated pro-US Iranian diplomat](https://www.veteranstodayarchives.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Screen-Shot-2014-06-27-at-6.07.03-PM-320x201.png)
A review of Iran and the United States: An Insider’s View on the Failed Past and the Road to Peace by Seyed Hossein Mousavian
by Kevin Barrett, VT Editor
While rushing off to the New Horizon Conference in Tehran last month, I needed something to read on the plane. The latest book on US-Iran relations, Mousavian’s Iran and the United States, jumped off the shelf, slapped me in the face and yelled “Take me! Take me!”
As a latecomer to Iran Studies – my Ph.D. is in Arabic with a focus on Morocco – I’ve been surveying the literature and learning some very interesting things. Mousavian’s book is the most illuminating yet. But before I explain why, consider the competition.
Gary Sick’s All Fall Down (2001) is a decent introduction from a mainstream US perspective. (Listen to my interview with Gary Sick.) In recent years, Sick has begun to understand how Israel and its treasonous American agents have been systematically sabotaging US-Iran relations – an amazing story which emerges from a close reading of Mousavian’s book.
David Crist’s The Twilight War: The Secret History of America’s Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran is another worthwhile US-mainstream account. Its descriptions of little-known Iran-vs.-US naval battles in the Persian Gulf are important contributions to history. But Crist naively accepts conventional American views of various incidents and issues, and those views are almost certainly wrong – as a reading of Mousavian makes clear.
The Zionist-propaganda cartoon version, written and published in hopes of brainwashing American morons, is Mossad psy-opper Ronan Bergman’s The Secret War With Iran: The 30-Year Clandestine Struggle Against the World’s Most Dangerous Terrorist Power. Reading this will help you understand just how stupid the Zionists think Americans are. The fact that books like this actually sell in America – and that the US has been so badly duped by Israel in its Iran and Middle East policies – proves the Zionists aren’t completely wrong.
An excellent revisionist (i.e., relatively accurate) contribution is Flynt and Hilary Leverett’s Going to Tehran. Like Gary Sick, the Leveretts seem to have woken up to the Zionist duplicity that has been wrecking US-Iran relations for more than two decades. But like Sick, they soft-pedal that awful truth in hopes of avoiding a career-lynching by the Zionist mob. Good luck with that.
The most recent entry in the US-Iran relations books, Mousavian’s Iran and the USA, may be the best. Though it is written from an Iranian perspective, the author is no fire-breathing radical. On the contrary, Mousavian is a hardcore pro-West reformist who loathes Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and spent his entire career in the Iranian diplomatic corps trying to repair Iran-US relations and establish lasting friendship between the two countries…but was frustrated by apparent Zionist sabotage at every turn.
Indeed, Mousavian is the most pro-US Iranian you’re ever likely to meet. Many of my Iranian friends and acquaintances even take seriously Ahmadinejad’s allegations that Mousavian spied on Iran for the US – a charge Mousavian hotly denies from his present perch at Princeton University.
Mousavian’s thesis is that US-Iran relations since the Islamic Revolution of 1979 have been plagued by “mistrust, misperceptions and misanalysis.” But the details recounted in his book show that the misperceptions are mostly on the US side. Iran, he writes, simply wants its sovereign independence and has been pursuing that goal through generally reasonable and peaceful means; while the US has been deceived into believing that Iran is a hotbed of militant recklessness and terrorism.
Part of the problem, Mousavian explains, is that some Iranian leaders have taken a dim, even paranoid view of American actions and intentions, and expressed that view in fiery rhetoric. He explains that whenever Iranian moderates get more control over Iran’s foreign policy, “the traditional hawks in the United States in tandem with the pro-Israel lobby ward off any Iranian moves towards rapprochement…”
But Mousavian’s account as well as others suggests that the Iranian hardliners’ view that the US is controlled by the Zionist-militarists, and seeks regime change not accommodation, is correct. In other words, just because the Iranians are paranoid doesn’t mean the US isn’t out to get them.
The most interesting aspect of Mousavian’s book is his suggestion that most if not all of the “Iranian terrorist attacks” that have wrecked US-Iran relations at critical junctures have been false flag operations. While US or Iranian hard-liners may conceivably have played a role in some of these events, a reasonable inference would be that Mousavian knows the Israeli Mossad is the most likely suspect. (Now that we know the extent of Israeli false flag terrorism, from the Lavon Affair to the USS Liberty to the Achille Lauro to the Entebbe Hijacking to the Buenos Aires bombings to 9/11 and beyond, it isn’t hard to see the Zionist hand in all terror attacks attributed to Israel’s enemies that seem perfectly timed to benefit Israel.)
Mousavian’s skeptical take on the 1983 US Embassy and Marine Barracks bombings in Beirut and the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia – as well as his well-founded suggestion that the US intentionally shot down Iran Air Flight 655 in 1988 killing all 290 passengers including 66 children – are a necessary corrective to the lies infesting even otherwise decent mainstream accounts such as Crist’s The Twilight War. (One must read between the lines to see Crist implicitly admitting that the US government’s refusal to apologize for the IR655 shootdown – and the fact that Captain Rogers, who ordered the shootdown in what would have been unbelievable criminal negligence at best, was promoted and given a medal for murdering the 290 civilians – proves that the slaughter was obviously an intentional act of state terrorism by the US high command; its purpose was to terrorize Iran into ending the Iran-Iraq war on US terms, rather than continuing to Baghdad to overthrow American ally Saddam Hussein, who had been mass-murdering Iranians with US-supplied chemical weapons.)
Mousavian, read alongside the other books mentioned above, shows clearly that it has been the Zionist-dominated US – not Iran – that is the terrorist rogue state. The US and Israel (along with their puppet MKO and other terror groups) have murdered 17,000 Iranian civilians in terror attacks since the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Adjusted for relative population, that would be the equivalent of the US losing 75,000 civilians to Iran-sponsored terrorism. (Needless to say, no such Iran-sponsored terrorism exists.)
Mousavian’s credible US-friendly Iranian-insider perspective should have a significant impact in America. Its timing is perfect. Even mainstream liberals and leftists, as well as realist foreign policy pros, are starting to recognize that the problems between the US and Iran are largely the creation of Israel. Gareth Porter’s new book Manufactured Crisis, for example, documents how the “Iran nuclear crisis” was created by the Mossad through a forgery of a “dodgy dossier” just like the one used to fabricate the WMD pretext for war on Iraq.
When will Americans realize it’s time to end their shameful treatment of Iran, and even more shameful enslavement to Zionism? Perhaps sooner rather than later, if enough of them decide to educate themselves. A good start, for those interested in the US-Iran file, would be Mousavian’s book.
![](https://www.veteranstodayarchives.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/kevin-barrett.jpg)
Dr. Kevin Barrett, a Ph.D. Arabist-Islamologist is one of America’s best-known critics of the War on Terror.
He is the host of TRUTH JIHAD RADIO; a hard driving weekly radio show funded by listener donations at Patreon.com and FALSE FLAG WEEKLY NEWS (FFWN); an audio-video show produced by Tony Hall, Allan Reese, and Kevin himself. FFWN is funded through FundRazr.
He also has appeared many times on Fox, CNN, PBS, and other broadcast outlets, and has inspired feature stories and op-eds in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Chicago Tribune, and other leading publications.
Dr. Barrett has taught at colleges and universities in San Francisco, Paris, and Wisconsin; where he ran for Congress in 2008. He currently works as a nonprofit organizer, author, and talk radio host.
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