As the current U.S. administration begins to hope that it can strike a deal with the Iranian government, and others look on with varying degrees of apprehension or anticipation, it makes sense for all parties to reflect upon the reasons for the abysmal relations between the United States and Iran over the past few decades. Implicit in such a process is the idea that the present cohort of decision makers can avoid some of the mistakes of the past, but also that they can, through a more empathetic understanding of the other's perspective, build some common ground for negotiation.

This seems to have been the impulse behind the decision to hold a workshop in 2008 at Musgrove, Georgia, the proceedings of which form the content of this book. It was an exercise intended to encourage strategic self-reflection in the United States at a time when it was fairly clear—other than to die-hard, if confused, Republicans—that a very different administration would soon be taking power in Washington. Any possibility of a similar change happening in Iran was to be snuffed out in the notoriously rigged elections of 2009. However, the election of Hassan Rouhani as president of Iran in 2013 has allowed U.S. and Iranian representatives to hold substantive talks once again about Iran's nuclear program.

It was appropriate, therefore, that the workshop should have focused on the U.S.–Iran relationship during the long and bloody years of the Iran–Iraq war—the “imposed war,” as the Iranian government calls it, not without good reason. It was then that the relationship broke down to such an extent that by 1987–88 the Iranian leadership became convinced that it was in effect fighting a war against the United States that Iran could not possibly win.

Equally important for present concerns about Iran's possible ambitions for a nuclear weapon, was the fact that during those years the Iranians had watched as the UN Security Council refused to support Iran's claim that Iraq had launched a massive invasion in September 1980 and thus refused to act against Iraq. Of similar significance for Iranian thinking, the UN Security Council, driven largely by the U.S. government's interests, took no action against Iraq when it began to use chemical weapons against Iranian forces (and against Iraqi citizens). Indeed, the United States tried to pin at least some of the blame on the Iranian high command. In light of these experiences, it would not be surprising should the Iranian leadership have seen the need to develop an independent deterrent.

This is the ground covered, fairly comprehensively, by the participants in this workshop. Unusually, however, the organizers have not presented us with an edited volume of the academic papers that are generally the fruit of such labors. Instead, they have reproduced, for six out of the seven chapters, verbatim reports of the discussions of the assembled experts and practitioners—I say “verbatim,” but the transcripts suggest a quite exceptional eloquence and coherence of all concerned, unless the participants did indeed speak in such faultlessly formed paragraphs of prose.

Nevertheless, it was clearly the intention of the organizers to capture the spontaneity of these interventions, not only to enliven the book, but also perhaps to lend a certain authority to the account. They sought to achieve this by bringing together a number of officials who had been responsible for carrying out or advising on aspects of policy during the Iran–Iraq war (three from the CIA, three from the U.S. State Department, and one—Giandomenico Pico—from the UN), with eleven scholars, including the five co-authors/co-editors of the book, who work on aspects of international relations, U.S. foreign policy, and/or Middle East politics. The role of the academics was to stimulate the discussions, but also to give them a critical tone by questioning those involved in U.S. policymaking during those years.

In some respects, this approach succeeds. There is a feeling of immediacy to the exchanges. The scholars use their wider knowledge of events, as well as hindsight, not only to frame critical questions for the practitioners, but also to follow these up and thus to give shape and edge to the discussions. In some cases, they manage to spark a degree of self-reflection and even regret amongst those who were engaged in some of the more distasteful aspects of U.S. support for Saddam Husayn's Iraq in its prosecution of the war against Iran.

This is all to the good since revisiting these decisions and policies can help to illuminate the bases of suspicion, mistrust, and enmity on which the current U.S. and Iranian administrations will have to build if they are to reestablish any kind of relationship. However, I ended up not wholly convinced that this format was the most productive way of doing it. Apart from anything else, it confines the discussion entirely to the individuals brought together at this one place and time. Knowledgeable as they were, and influential though they might have been at certain junctures, it always seemed that there was a higher level of decision making, political calculation, and outright prejudice that was not being interrogated here. Yet this was the level of executive decision making from which the officials were receiving their orders.

Had this been a more conventional edited volume of papers dealing with the U.S.–Iranian relationship, one would have expected the contributors to have cast their nets much wider, interviewing policymakers not only in the United States, but also in Iran and amongst those Iraqis who were part of the process but have no voice here. It may be for this reason that I felt I did not learn much here that has not already been covered in the now extensive literature on the Iran–Iraq War and on the U.S.–Iran relationship. This is a pity, because it was an original idea to present the workshop proceedings in this way and the volume was certainly a lively read—but it did raise a host of questions that could not be easily answered in such a format. Yet these are precisely the questions that might be asked both by those generally acquainted with the topic and by those who are coming to it for the first time. In many respects, therefore, this is a book mainly for readers who already have detailed knowledge of these events and who can supply the background to these very specific aspects of policy implementation.