The Struggle for Iran

Since the late 1990s, Christopher de Bellaigue has been reporting from Iran for The New York Review and other magazines. This collection of his essays and reviews traces the country's political upheavals during that period, from the failures of the reformist efforts led by former President Muhammad Khatami to the hard-line Islamist ideology of current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and profiles the ongoing role of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Bellaigue pays particular attention to the motivations behind Iran's nuclear program and evaluates the likelihood of efforts by the West to halt it before the Iranians can build a nuclear weapon. But beyond the political maneuvering, he investigates the prospects for liberalization and even democratization as a nation composed heavily of young people confronts the restrictions of Islamic rule, and is caught between the lure of the West and its attachment to a culture very much its own.
Though the focus of the book is primarily on politics, Bellaigue also deals with questions of the arts and society as well. He managed to join a private study group dedicated to the thirteenth-century mystical poet Rumi, and to gain insights on why the poet still matters so much to Iranians. And he writes both of the art of ancient Persia and of the paradoxes of an exhibition of modern art in Tehran, which displayed the large collection assembled by the Empress Farah Diba before the revolution, still owned by the state but unlikely to be seen again in public under the Islamic regime. Bellaigue's acute insights into today's Iran and the international dealings with it are an essential guide to a country that will present the most pressing problemsfor US foreign policy in the near future.
Table of Contents:
1. Introduction
2. The Struggle for Iran
3. Who Rules Iran?
4. The Loneliness of the Supreme Leader
5. Big Deal in Iran
6. Stalled in Iran
7. Bush, Iran, and the Bomb
8. New Man in Iran