Inspired by hate and surrounded by fundamentalist leaders in a country that may soon possess nuclear weapons, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad poses the most serious threat to world peace, even while he shrewdly manipulates public opinion at home. Until now, Americans have known little about him. Since his election in June 2005, Ahmadinejad has accelerated his country's nuclear research; called for the elimination of Israel; and failed the Iranian people, who elected him on a since-neglected domestic platform. In this first book about him, we see the forces that are bringing the world to the brink of another war in the Middle East. Written by an Iranian-born insider and a world-renowned intelligence expert, it offers the first full portrait of this former mayor of Tehran whose rural roots and vituperative populism catapulted him from obscurity to national leadership.
He stands only 5-foot-4 and smiles incessantly. But behind that charismatic persona beats the heart of a genocidal terrorist. Meet the World’s Most Dangerous Man In his provocative, well-researched exposé of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, prophecy expert Mark Hitchcock unveils the insidious agenda behind this radical Shiite’s regime: Ahmadinejad plans to hasten the return of the Islamic messiah by ushering in his vision of the apocalypse. His ultimate goal–driven by his fanatical ideology–is to bring the Mahdi, or Twelfth Imam, out of hiding. And he plans to do so by arming his country with nuclear weapons, then exporting the Iranian revolution to the world by destroying Israel and the United States. But there’s a bizarre twist to Ahmadinejad’s nightmarish intentions: This ardent zealot may well be part of God’s plan to set the stage for a scenario prophesied more than 2,500 years ago. Hitchcock presents compelling evidence that Ahmadinejad’s actions, including his alliances with Russia and many of Iran’s neighbors, have placed his nation–and the world–on a collision course toward the war of Gog and Magog. Discover the truth about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, his role in biblical prophecy, and what it means for the world–and you.
They usually start out as ordinary people, doing their best to deal with mixed messages in a complex world. What they donOt realize is that they may be the target of a violent system that is building an obedient workforce. One day theyOre enjoying a few laughs with buddies, and seemingly the next day, they wake up as human killing machines. And they allowed it to happen. Addressing one of the most serious threats to the world today, Human Killing Machines applies the model of systematic indoctrination to case studies of brutality in Iran, Nazi Germany, Al Qaeda, and Abu Ghraib. The book reveals how these transformations take place_how systems redefine morality to turn ordinary people into torturers, terrorists, and genocidal killers. Analyzing the key differences between these cases also helps to identify the safeguards which limit violence. Lankford demonstrates the weaknesses of indoctrination, the ways heroic individuals have resisted its influence, and the potential for countermeasures. Based on these examples, he offers recommendations for how we can begin to reform the U.S. military and increase its accountability, reduce Al Qaeda terroristsO commitment to their missions, and spark an awakening in Iran so that the oppressive regime goes out with a whimper_not with a bang.
This book presents the first full and systematic account of Iran’s nuclear program from 1979 to 2015. Throughout this time, foreign policy makers, intelligence experts, and scholars on the subject have repeatedly failed to understand the internal dynamics behind Iran's nuclear project and have underestimated the depth of the regime’s commitment to develop nuclear weapons. The author presents an account of little-understood episodes in the history of the nuclear project, including an analysis of the decision making process of the “nuclear sanctum.” A full account is given of the organizations that ran the project and a listing of the suppliers that made the project possible. Finally, the book offers a detailed analysis of the international sanctions placed on Iran, including the induced anomie and legitimacy crisis which expedited the decision to rollback.
This paper explains how Iran developed its nuclear programme to the point where it threatens to achieve a weapons capability within a short time frame, and analyses Western policy responses aimed at forestalling that capability. Key questions are addressed: will the world have to accept an Iranian uranium-enrichment programme, and does having a weapons capability mean having the Bomb? For nearly two decades, Western strategy on the Iran nuclear issue emphasised denial of supply. Since 2002, there has also been a demand-side dimension to the strategy, aimed at changing Iran's cost-benefit calculations through inducements and pressure. But the failure of these policies to prevent Iran from coming close to achieving a nuclear-weapons capability has promoted suggestions for fallback strategies that would grant legitimacy to uranium enrichment in Iran in exchange for intrusive inspections and constraints on the programme. The paper assesses these 'second-best' options in terms of their feasibility and their impact on the proliferation risks of diversion of nuclear material and knowledge, clandestine development and NPT break-out, and the risk of stimulating a proliferation cascade in the Middle East and beyond. It concludes that the risks are still best minimised by reinforcing the binary choice presented to Iran of cooperation or isolation, and strengthening denial of supply.
The Iranian nuclear crisis has dominated world politics since the beginning of the century, with the country now facing increasing diplomatic isolation, talk of military strikes against its nuclear facilities and a disastrous Middle East war. What is Iran's nuclear programme all about? What is its genesis? There is little real understanding of Iran's nuclear programme, in particular its history, which is now over fifty years old. This ground-breaking book is unprecedented in its scope. It argues that the history of Iran's nuclear programme and the modern history of the country itself are irretrievably linked, and only by understanding one can we understand the other. From the programme's beginnings under the Shah of Iran, the book details the central role of the US in the birth of nuclear Iran, and, through the relationship between the programme's founder and the Shah of Iran himself, the role that nuclear weapons have played in the programme since the beginning. The author's unique access to 'the father' of Iran's nuclear programme, as well as to key scientific personnel under the early Islamic Republic and to senior Iranian and Western officials at the centre of today's negotiations, sheds new light on the uranium enrichment programme that lies at the heart of global concerns. What emerges is a programme that has, for a variety of reasons, a deep resonance to Iran. This is why it has persisted with it for over half a century in the face of such widespread opposition. Drawing on years of research across the world, David Patrikarakos has produced the most comprehensive examination of Iran's nuclear programme - in all its forms to date.
This book analyzes the process of evaluating Iran’s nuclear project and the efforts to roll it back, resulting in the 2015 nuclear agreement known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPA). Despite its aura of scientific exactitude, nuclear intelligence is complex and susceptible to methodological disagreements and political bias at the international oversight level—the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)—and within the countries involved in the rollback project – Israel and the United States. To highlight both the technological problems of assessing compliance and the politicization, each chapter in the book uses a real-time comparison of the nuclear developments in Iran, and the perception of Israel and the United States. This methodology yielded some significant results. Essentially, two camps had formed in each country; those who were pushing for an agreement with Iran and those who opposed it. The Israeli intelligence agencies – the Mossad and the Military Intelligence – as well as the highly secretive Israeli Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC) which advised them considered the program to be weak and slow moving. The right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu suggested that Iran was steps away from the “point of no return,” making it an existential threat to Israel. A virtually identical split emerged in Washington. While the intelligence community and the advising scientists from the National Nuclear Laboratories, considered Iran progress to be relatively modest, the Republicans and the Israel lobby - the Jewish organizations and the Christian Zionists— warned of the imminent danger of a nuclear Iran. With the Obama administration pushing for the JCPOA, a fierce debate took place in Congress. The Israeli intelligence and military chiefs led by the Mossad chief Meir Dagan, which had previously blocked Netanyahu from a preemptive action, quietly supported the agreement. In Washington, the Israel lobby, and the Republicans, helped by Netanyahu, mounted an all-out effort to defeat the deal in Congress. The pro-deal coalition fought back by mobilizing the scientific community, military and intelligence officials, the business lobby, and grassroots Democrats. The JCPOA represents the first successful effort of peaceful counterproliferation. At the same, excessive politicization has clouded its legitimacy and cast doubt about its future.
Why did the CIA overthrow Iran's democratically elected government? And why has the United States treated Iran as one of its biggest enemies for four decades? Is the Trump administration’s “Maximum Pressure” campaign working, or will it precipitate a war with Iran? In The CIA Insider's Guide to Iran: from CIA Coup to the Brink of War, former CIA Officer John C. Kiriakou and investigative journalist and historian Gareth Porter explain how and why the United States and Iran have been either at war or threatening such a war for most of the forty years since Islamic Republic of Iran was established. The authors delve below the surface explanations for the forty-year history of extreme U.S. hostility toward Iran to blow up one official U.S. narrative after another about Iran and U.S. policy. Against the background of Iran’s encounters with heavy-handed British and Russian imperialist control over its resources, this book shows how the U.S. began its encounter with Iran by clearly siding with British imperialism against Iranian aspirations for control over its oil in its 1953 overthrow of the Mossadegh government, then proceeded to actively support the Saddam Hussein regime’s horrific chemical war against Iran. The book shows how a parade of politically-motivated false narratives have taken U.S. Iran policy progressively farther from reality for three decades and have now brought the United States to the brink of war with Iran. It explains how Donald Trump’s trashing of the nuclear deal with Iran and seeking to cut off Iran’s oil exports creates a very high risk of such a war, demanding major public debate about changing course. The CIA Insider's Guide to the Iran Crisis also includes appendices with key official documents on U.S. policy toward Iran, with particular emphasis on the major official statements of the Trump administration’s “Maximum Pressure” strategy.
This book argues that the nature of counterproliferation strengthens the effect of cultural factors in policy choices, and illustrates this by focusing on US and Israeli policy toward the Iranian nuclear program. The United States and Israel have been the two states most active in opposing Iran’s nuclear ambitions; however, the respective strategies of each of these states have changed repeatedly. This book explores how competing cultural schools of thought on grand strategy within each state inform and shape the key policy decisions in their attempts to prevent a nuclear Iran. Drawing on numerous interviews conducted with former high-level officials in each country as well as published memoirs, this book first describes in detail the belief systems of the competing schools and then analyses the internal debates and key decisions on policy toward the Iranian Nuclear Program, while critically assessing the extent to which these beliefs influenced policy in the face of material-structural pressures. This in-depth analysis of the internal debates and dilemmas within the national leadership of the two states most prominent in the effort to prevent a nuclear Iran constitutes an indispensable guide for scholars and policymakers who will inevitably face similar dilemmas in dealing with this ongoing challenge and additional cases of nuclear proliferation around the world. This book will be of much interest to students of nuclear proliferation, US and Israeli foreign policy, Middle Eastern politics and IR in general.
