Challenging the Neocons on Iran

February 27, 2013 | http://consortiumnews.com/2013/02/27/challenging-the-neocons-on-iran/

Despite the Iraq debacle, neocons remain in the driver’s seat setting official U.S. attitudes toward Iran, mixing worst-case assumptions with unrelenting hostility. But national security experts Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett have stood up to this neocon-driven conventional wisdom, says Gareth Porter at Inter Press Service.

By Gareth Porter
Going to Tehran arguably represents the most important work on the subject of U.S.-Iran relations to be published thus far. Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett tackle not only U.S. policy toward Iran but the broader context of Middle East policy with a systematic analytical perspective informed by personal experience, as well as very extensive documentation.
More importantly, however, their exposé required a degree of courage that may be unparalleled in the writing of former U.S. national security officials about issues on which they worked. They have chosen not just to criticize U.S. policy toward Iran but to analyze that policy as a problem of U.S. hegemony.