The Project on Defense Alternatives has a long list of links on Iran, from all sides of the debate and all of the issues that have been in the news lately — the nuclear program, intervention in Iraq, regional ambitions as well as the inner political debate in Iran and the US and an assessment of US media coverage.
You’ll find tons of interesting stuff there, such as this short article by Barry Rosen of MIT titled We can live with a nuclear Iran [PDF].
I like Carl Conetta, and you’re right that he has amassed a good reading
list here, but you’re wrong that this represents all sides of the debate. If
you think any policy-makers read the London Review of Books or the NYRB or
that what’s written in those pages makes its way into policy debates, you’re
crazy. (Confession: I subscribe to both.) There is a strong case from the
“hawks” being made in DC and in Tel Aviv/J-lem that is unrepresented here.
Carl only treats their arguments through secondary analysis, such as the
(highly entertaining) Craig Unger article in Vanity Fair. This is not the
whole spectrum of the debate, just the spectrum the left can bring itself to
read. Speaking of the LRB, why on Earth Carl thought Tony’s Judt’s rant on
the American Left was relevant to the policy debate on Iran I have no idea.
He would have been better off linking to something written by Patrick
Clawson, Michael Ledeen, Michael Rubin, or Raymond Tanter. Then the
compilation would have represented all sides of the debate.
Of course you are right in a way, but perhaps Conetta intended to show the “responsible” side of the debate. What do I mean by responsible? Well, exclude all the people who argued that the Iraq war had to be fought and steer towards the range of arguments you hear among experts in places such as G2K (i.e. mostly not hawks, although Rubin is there). But certainly some of the other arguments should be heard. Here’s a few:
http://www.meforum.org/article/1068 – Patrick Clawson, “Could Sanctions work against Tehran” and here’s his WINEP page that has more links:
http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/templateC10.php?CID=10
And here’s Rubin’s latest Iran post on NRO’s The Corner:
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZjY2YzM1Y2U3NjQzZTdiMDhmNWVkYjkwNmQ4MmQxNjk=
Of course both were important advocates of the invasion of Iraq — I personally believe that this goes a long way to discrediting them. I don’t know what he’s saying about Iran these days, but another person completely worth ignoring this time around is Ken Pollack. I never trusted the above two but paid attention to Pollack in 2002. Boy was that a waste of time. (Pollack’s post-war apologetics notwithstanding.)
Thanks for signaling all these resources, Issandr. I think we need to pay attention to the arguments made even by people who were horribly wrong about Iraq, because they certainly have not been publicly discredited within the US discourse– indeed, they continue largely to dominate it, and those of us who argued against the war from before the war are still a distinctly embattled minority in it.
However, it’s also good to be able to widely disseminate some of the new (critical) resources that are more widely available on ME issues… Btw, I think that’s Barry Posen, not Rosen… A longtime realist and a good person to have making that particular argument. (One that’s worth giving good consideration to, though I think denuclearization of all parties, as per Article 6 of the NPT, is a far, far better goal.)