BOOK REVIEW: "The Trouble to Come" (Review of The Iranian Time Bomb, by Michael A. Ledeen), by Arthur Herman, Wall Street Journal, 7 September 2007, p. W5.

Vonne: Please get me this one. Ledeen's a hard-liner on Iran but in a smart way. He wants us to view Iran, from Khomeinism onward, as an attempt to dominate the region much like the Sovs aspired to and eventually dominated much of Eurasia--a scary, aggressive mix of ideology and nasty authoritarianism and power projection. Unfortunately, Ledeen reaches for Hitler analogies a lot when Herman says Mussolini's brittle brand of fascism is more to the point (thus Herman argues for a naval-focused denial strategy with Iran that leverages the experience and success of the Tanker Wars of 1987-88, which is intriguing, to say the least--the only problem being Asia this time around is a whole helluva lot more than just compliant, silent Japan). Where Ledeen intrigues more is with a connectivity-style counter-the-revolution strategy of seeding the mullahs' downfall from within using dollars and PCs. In principle, this is how we took down the Sovs (infecting them with the hard-currency dollar that revealed the falsehood of their economy and the information revolution, the economic advance the Sovs couldn't command their way through), starting this process with Nixon's brilliant detente. To me, that's getting a lot closer to an appropriate, Cold War-like mix of aggressive soft kill and sensible containment combined with negotiations over those things we need to manage (like nukes) instead of getting all wobbly over them like we've never dealt with them before (some self-confidence, America, please!). Herman (not Ledeen, as far as I can tell, who seems stuck on his Hitler gig) compares the possibility of a Gorby-like decline in the USSR to that of the mullahs, so maybe I'd be happier ordering Herman's non-book instead of Ledeen's book, but I'll take what I can get for now.