Review: Let the Swords Encircle Me: Iran - A Journey Behind the Headlines

Let the Swords Encircle Me: Iran - A Journey Behind the Headlines by Scott Peterson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is was an engaging and enlightening history of modern Iran but I one immersed in the culture on the ground. One feeling I came away with that is the the U.S. and Iran are more alike than perhaps either would like to admit and are (or at least were) natural allies for the Mideast region. Both seem themselves as special, superior civilization with a polar, black and white view of the rest of the world. I feel Iran is at the post the postbellum U.S. was - especially if the U.S. had no separation of church and state. This brings up obvious missteps on the U.S. side such as the usurping of Mohammad Mosaddegh, when his government was overthrown in the 1953 Iranian coup d'état orchestrated by the United States' Central Intelligence Agency and the United Kingdom's MI6. Whatever the benefits then, it seemed only to tilt the nation toward revolution and anti-American sentiment all made worse with the reverberating echoes of the Iran-Iraq war (with the U.S. mostly on the Iraqi side) and effective civil war. Wrestling beneath the theocratic state burgeoned by militant purists and vested veterans youthful, freedom-loving revolutionaries spread via samizdat From Dictatorship to Democracy. Then you have further missteps like Dubya's "Axis of Evil" that badly damaged the progressive rule of Khatami nudging the nation back to election-rigging and Apocalypse craving with Ahmadinejad.

Also helpful in this book is the explanation of the politic and cultural expression of Shia beliefs especially with the impending millennial-like view of the return of The Hidden Imam.

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