Neighbors, Not Friends

by Dilip Hiro

This highly controversial and topical book provides the first full, balanced account of how Iraq cheated the UN inspectors on disarmament and how the US manipulated and infiltrated the UN inspection teams and other staff to gather intelligence on Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Aimed at the general reader, it follows and assesses the role of Saddam Hussein who became president of Iraq in 1979. Dilip Hiro, an experienced journalist who has written extensively on the region, provides a historical and accessible perspective to the relationship between Iraq and Iran and examines the consequences of internationally significant events such as the death of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran a year after the end of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War and the 1990 invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein. Providing a full account and analysis of events in Iraq since the 1991 Gulf War, he contrasts the long totalitarianism under Hussein with the evolution of the political-religious system in Iran and the development of its internal politics. This is an essential overview to the conflicts in the Gulf, and should be read by anyone with an interest in the region, its politics and its interactions with the US and UN.

432 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

Reviews

[Joseph Stieb · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book covered the internal politics and foreign policies of Iran and Iraq from 1991 to about 2000. Hiro presents these topics in thorough detail, although the sources he pulls from are mainly newspapers. Thus, the book has a sort of "headline to headline" feel to it. It covers the major actors, events, and crises, but there's little overarching structure to the book other than to summarize the news. This book was probably a lot more helpful when it was written.

Hiro's account of Iraq post Gulf War is pretty standard fare. He sees Saddam as a political survivor who finally reaffirmed his domestic power in 1996 after crushing a series of challenges. He views the US as genuinely pursuing regime change, especially early on in the 1990's, which I think is a little bit of an exaggeration. He's generally quite tough on the US, blaming them for the sanctions damage to Iraq without discussing Saddam's culpability and contending that they politicized the inspections process, using it to spy on Saddam (a charge that UNSCOM inspector Richard Butler does a nice job putting into perspective in his memoir). Hiro does a good job showing how the US diverged from the coalition over the course of the 1990's because its goals had always been much broader than US allies in the region and in Europe or Asia. Overall the Iraq section was a decent overview of 90's Iraq politics that might be useful for someone writing a lecture on the topic as long as it is balanced by another source. I'd still say that the Cockburn brothers' book "Out of the Ashes" is better because they do some actual journalistic sleuthing.

The Iran section was more interesting to me even if there was a lot of detail. Hiro portrays Iran as softening the revolutionary fervor of the 80's and focusing on more economic and technocratic problems. His sections on Khatami as a reformer are probably the most interesting of the book. Khatami was part of the religious establishment but he believed that the power of the Council of Guardians needed balance from popularly based institutions like the Majlis and the Presidency. In other words, he wasn't a theocrat in the Khomeini tradition. He pursued lighter controls on the press, economic liberalization, greater freedoms for women, and more cultural and diplomatic openings to the West. Hiro shows that unlike Iraq Iran had genuinely pluralistic politics (democratic is much too strong-sovereignty does not lie in the people in Iran). There's a complex web of balance between at least 5 institutions in Iranian politics, and voters have control over some of these institutions. Hiro goes a little too far in likening the Iranian system to genuine democracies like the US, however. The supreme authority still lies in the Ayatollah and the Council of Guardians in Iran. They can veto legislation, they act as the supreme judiciary, they frequently muzzle the press and jail critics, they relegate women to second class status, and they cancel out candidates for the Majlis. Still, power is not wholly concentrated in their hands, and they usually don't want to provoke popular anger by ruling directly or too arbitrarily. Hiro's account, like many accounts of Iranian politics, gives hope that the educated, bourgeois people of Iran are driving it towards a moderate stance at home and abroad. This tends to be my reading of the trajectory of Iran, which is why I oppose efforts in the US to treat Iran as an unambiguous enemy.

I wouldn't really recommend this book for 2 reasons. One is that I can't visualize the right audience. There's better work on this time period/topic from other writers, and the Iran/Iraq stuff isn't really integrated here. I guess if you are studying Iranian or Iraqi stuff in the 90's you should check Hiro out. The other reason is that the book just isn't that fun to read. There's a lot of repetition (he has about 6 separate sections on the effects of sanctions on the Iraqi people) and a certain tendency to describe events without analyzing them. It also lacks objectivity in its view of the US, who is the big bad villain in this book. Like so many works on Iraq in the 1990's, it portrays Saddam as on the up and up in the late 1990's without asking the key critical questions: Did he still retain a desire for regional expansion? Was he willing to jeopardize his domestic rule to achieve that goal? Did he have the capacity to pursue regional aggression? In other words, was he really a threat to the region and beyond that justified the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act? Hiro, like far too many analysts in this time period (Brent Scowcroft being a noteworthy exception) doesn't even ask these questions.