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Confronting Tehran.

Article Excerpt
The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America, by Kenneth M. Pollack (Random House, 576 pp., $26.95)

KENNETH POLLACK has a knack for timing. Two years ago, the former CIA analyst and Clinton administration official published The Threatening Storm, making the case for war in Iraq. The book was well received on both right and left; according to The New York Times Magazine's Deborah Solomon, it "persuade[d] many reluctant Democratic policy makers to support" the war.

Now Pollack gives us The Persian Puzzle, a detailed history of U.S.-Iranian relations. Iran is today's big story, owing to U.S. efforts to bring its nuclear-weapons program to the forefront of international attention. Policymakers and outside experts alike are predicting a perilous standoff, and Pollack promises to illuminate the current conflict by looking at its past.

He begins at Iran's beginning, some 2,500 years ago, but quickly fast-forwards to its first major contact with the West--Britain and Russia--during the period leading up to and including World War I. Pollack writes that Iranians emerged from this period convinced that foreign interference was the source of all their problems; this remains a major theme of Iranian foreign policy.

Iran's first sustained encounter with America began during World War II. Pollack describes this early period in...