Iran

Inroduction

Robert Baer's, in his new book “The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower” states that

The conventional wisdom in the Middle East is that Iran is a rogue state the situation is much more complicated and subtle and dangerous. He says we must deal with reality with "The Devil We Know". The problem isn't so much the author, a former CIA agent who worked in India, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and Lebanon, but that he writes solely about what he knows, and he doesn't know much about Iran. He spends most of his time dwelling on Iraq and mounting Iranian influence there, on Lebanon and, to a lesser extent, on Syria, but most of all on Hezbollah. The amount of actual discussion on Iran, discounting Baer's mostly baseless speculation, is incredibly threadbare and rationed sparsely throughout the book.

Worse, when he discusses Iran, Baer is contradictory and confusing. In one case he declares that Iran knows that it cannot beat American conventional military arms and that it learned from the Iraqi invasion that there are no safe hiding places from American surveillance and missiles. Then, just a few pages later, he says that Iran can, in fact, hide its equipment from American surveillance and that Iran can, in fact, beat the American military conventionally. In another case he ends a chapter on the very succinct point that Iran doesn't care if there is peace in Palestine and doesn't particularly care for the plight of Palestinians.

Discussion Perhaps the most confusing bit of speculation in the book is when Mr. Baer says that countries lie about their declared oil reserves, which is a fair point. He also says that OPEC sets national quotas based on a country's declared oil reserves, which is technically accurate. Baer then says that the best ...