The Iran Threat: President Ahmadinejad and the Coming Nuclear Crisis

Best known for bringing details of Iran's nuclear program to international attention, Jafarzadeh offers a harrowing portrait of his native country with this sobering blend of history and contemporary politics. Starting with the 1979 revolution that marked the ascendance of the Ayatollah Khomeini, he argues that Islamist extremism has played a central role in the last 25 years of Iranian politics, including the Iraq-Iran War and the 2005 election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which Jafarzadeh believes was orchestrated by the Khamenei regime. All the while, he contends, Iran has maintained a covert nuclear weapons program, threatening to radically destabilize the Middle East and strengthen the reach and scope of the oppressive Iranian regime. Jafarzadeh, a foreign affairs analyst for Fox News who was the U.S. spokesman for the National Coalition of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) until 2003, when it was placed on the State Department's list of international terrorist organizations, has a strong emotional investment in his subject. He dismisses military and diplomatic solutions to the imminent nuclear crisis he foresees, but suggests that international support of Iranian resistance movements could succeed in upsetting the current regime. Highly detailed and compelling, his account is accessible to a general reader but will appeal mainly to students of Middle East politics. (Feb.)