James Traub: Review of David Crist's "The Twilight War: The Secret History of America’s Thirty-Year Conflict With Iran"

Revolutionary regimes, in the grip of a universalist faith, are often prepared to use violence to export their ideology. France did so after 1789, Russia after 1917 and Cuba after 1959. Only one revolutionary state currently poses a serious threat to world order: Iran. Like 18th-century France and 20th-century Russia, Iran has fused the expansionary impulse of an imperial power with an ideological attack on the status quo. But that only makes Iran harder to deal with, above all for the United States, the chief pillar of that status quo.

“The Twilight War” explains the baffled and sometimes hapless and often contradictory response of American policy makers to the Iranian revolution over the last 33 years. We all know the basic outlines of the story: the hostage crisis under Jimmy Carter, the bungled arms-for-hostages deal under Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush’s “axis of evil,” Barack Obama’s “engagement” policy followed by a tightening vise of sanctions. David Crist, a historian for the federal government and a Marine veteran, has tied all these clanking tin cans together. As adversaries go, Iran has proved to be much more bewildering, if until now far less dangerous, than the Soviet Union, its predecessor as America’s Public Enemy No. 1.

Republicans nostalgic for Reagan’s assertiveness will find this account extremely painful. The decade-long war between Iran and Iraq flummoxed Reagan and his team, who tried to fit all events into a familiar cold war framework. Believing at first that it could weaken Baghdad’s ties with Moscow, the administration carried on an elaborate clandestine relationship with Iraq’s military and intelligence apparatus. Senior State Department officials found donor countries to supply Saddam Hussein with weapons, while American military planners in Baghdad provided grid coordinates of Iranian targets to Iraqi pilots....