Iran's nuclear path.

The Iranian Labyrinth: Journeys Through Theocratic Iran and Its Furies By Dilip Hiro Nation Books. 448 pages. $17.95.

Countdown to Crisis: The Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran By Kenneth R. Timmerman Crown Forum. 392 pages. $25.95.

The current standoff regarding Iran's nuclear program poses a difficult challenge. After the Iranian government decided to proceed again on its path of "nuclear research" by breaking the seals at a key facility on January 10, matters came to a head.

Two recent books attempt to provide details on various facets of the Iranian regime and people.

Kenneth Timmerman is a rightwing hack. He has published anti-Jesse Jackson and anti-France screeds, and Countdown to Crisis: The Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran plays true to type.

The construction of Timmerman's book is so shoddy that I wondered if it went through any editing. His preferred mode seems to be to write in short, choppy chapters that succeed each other in no particular order and make the book almost incoherent.

And the book has so many factual flaws that it's hard to know where to start. The most outrageous is Timmerman's allegation that Iran was behind the downing of the TWA airliner that crashed near New York City in 1996. "Dramatic new evidence--presented here for the first time--suggests that Iran may have been responsible for the destruction of TWA Flight 800 off the coast of Long Island on July 17, 1996," he writes. He claims to have had advance knowledge of the plot and says he tried in vain to alert the authorities. The allegation is so preposterous that even the publisher has decided not to highlight it on the book flap. According to the National Transportation Safety Board, the "most likely" explanation for the explosion was a short circuit outside of the center wing fuel tank.

Equally ridiculous is the allegation that Iran was behind September 11. Not only that, Timmerman alleges that Osama is hiding out in Iran. "Today, Iran's leaders are plotting new attacks on the West with Osama bin Laden, whom they are sheltering inside Iran," he writes.

Timmerman also tries to make a connection between the Oklahoma City bombing and Al Qaeda and the Iranians.

He also has the bad habit of reconstructing private conversations (that didn't include him) verbatim, even thoughts inside people's heads. The effect is that of a bad pulp novel. He has one Iranian cabinet member looking over a folder and smiling to himself. How does Timmerman know? Then there are inappropriate comments, such as "Mohammad Baqr Zolqadr, the dark-skinned fanatic."

Timmerman grinds one ax after another. So, there is the tiresome swing at the Clinton Administration's supposed numerous failures to be firm against the Iranian regime and its nuclear ambitions. He repeatedly vilifies the United Nations and its officials. (There is a chapter about Hans Blix entitled "The Blind Swede.") And there is a constant running down of U.S. government officials, including Richard Clarke, and anyone else who gets in the way of his hawkish approach to Iran. Of course, the French, the Russians, the Chinese, and the Germans get their fair share of drubbing. French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas "had long favored Iran over Saddam Hussein's Iraq anyway," one typical passage goes. "For one thing, the carpets were better; for another, the women were more beautiful." Timmerman's heroes are figures like James Woolsey and John Bolton.

Timmerman does a better job of cataloging the Iranian regime's multiple failures, especially on three fronts: its deplorable human rights record, its support for international terrorism, and its pursuit of a nuclear option. He is right that Iran was involved in the Marine barracks bombing in Lebanon in 1983 that killed more than 200 Americans. Iran also had links with the groups that took several Americans hostage in the 1980s.

But even on these issues he carries it too far. His single-mindedness causes him to engage in hyperbole and distortion. He portrays Mohammad Khatami as, alternately, a secret fundamentalist and an ineffectual moderate. And he asserts that there is virtually no space in Iran for dissent, though Iranian Nobel Peace Prize-winner Shirin Ebadi disputes that. "We have more political freedom now than we did under the Shah," Ebadi said in a 2005 interview. "On the other hand, under the Shah we had more individual and social freedom." Timmerman goes so overboard in his condemnation of the Iranian clerics that he downplays the atrocities of the Shah's secret police. "SAVAK had, in fact, used [torture] quite sparingly, notwithstanding the loud complaints from international human rights organizations," he writes.

On the nuclear matter, he outlines the various clandestine arrangements that the Iranian government set up to get nuclear material and know-how, most infamously the network involving Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan. But he mars this chronicle with the wild assertion that Iran quite possibly already has twenty to twenty-five bombs. (Most intelligence analysts believe Iran has no nuclear weapons and won't be able to have a single one for at least five years.) At the end, he actually constructs a hypothetical nuclear attack on Washington. He says that America is "unprepared for an Iranian nuclear strike," and warns, "We have very little time to get it right."

Curiously then, Timmerman's advice for dealing with Iran is not that bellicose. He rules out military action due to its infeasibility, while at the same time rejecting a conciliatory approach. Instead, he advocates tactics that many people could agree with, at least in theory. He is in favor of engaging with pro-democracy forces in Iran and strengthening their hand. Fair enough. But such a course may have more pitfalls than Timmerman anticipates. As several experts have pointed out, any U.S. association with the dissident movement ends up strengthening the hand of the hardliners since they can then vilify the reformers by association.

Dilip Hiro's book, The Iranian Labyrinth, is a good primer about Iran, and it filled in several gaps in my knowledge about the country, especially its history. (Interestingly, Hiro writes that the name change from Persia to Iran was carried out with the encouragement of the Persian ambassador to Nazi Germany, the name Iran being a variation of Aryan.)

He is also very good at talking to people on the ground and uses his several trips to the country well. Hiro has chapters on Iranian youth and women, the religious establishment, the Iranian bazaar scene, the history of the Iranian parliament, the monarchy, and the oil industry.

Hiro notes the complexity of Iranian society. "Such is the nature of this ongoing battle that pessimists can argue that Iran's sociopolitical system is authoritarian to the core and is beyond redemption," he writes, "while optimists can argue that the conservative-reformist struggle is the dynamic of Islamic democracy that Iran's leaders are attempting to create as a working model for the rest of the Muslim world--the first attempt of the kind."

And Hiro does some invaluable class analysis of the forces behind the Iranian revolution. The coalition that overthrew the Shah contained disparate factions, with the rural and urban underclass, the urban middle class, and the bazaar merchants all forming important strands. Hiro asserts that this has resulted in an incoherent economic policy in mullahruled Iran due to conflicting demands from different pressure groups.

There are several flaws in the book, though.

The biggest is that the writing seldom comes to life. Hiro tries to integrate his eyewitness accounts with more straightforward narrative historical sections, but this doesn't quite work. Examples of clunky writing abound. He says in one place that he feels "like a parched traveler in a desert arriving at an oasis." Elsewhere, he writes that the "iridescent blue" of domes are "conveying a life-enhancing reference to water to the parched traveler as well as paying homage to the heavens above."

On substance, Hiro is too kind to the regime, even though he does mention some of its victims. One big omission, for instance, is the persecution of its religious minorities, such as the country's Baha'is and Jews. And Hiro almost defends the assassinations that the Iranian regime carried out abroad on the grounds that the victims were members of violent groups such as the Mujahedin-e Khalq and the Kurdish separatist movement. But one of the most prominent figures the Iranian government assassinated was Shapour Bakhtiar in Paris in 1991. He was a dissident appointed as the prime minister by the Shah at the very end of his rule in a desperate attempt to save the monarchy and wasn't associated with violence.

The historical section is better. He devotes a chapter to Mohammed Mossadegh, the prime minister overthrown in 1953 by the Americans and the British for his temerity in challenging the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. "The first Iranian leader in modern times who established rapport with common folk, despite his aristocratic origins, and came to epitomize Iranian aspirations for achieving economic and political independence and ending oligarchic rule at home, lies unsung under the floor of his unprepossessing home," he notes. "This reprehensible act of the United States left a deep scar on the minds of Iranians, implanting most of them with abiding animosity toward America."

In contrast to Timmerman's apologetics for the Shah, Hiro states that in the first two years after the Shah's restoration, 5,000 Iranians were killed. And on a single day, September 8, 1978, the Shah's security forces mowed down 1,600 Iranians. Hiro also extensively chronicles U.S. ties to the Shah, ranging from CIA-SAVAK cooperation to economic aid.

Hiro's optimistic assessment at the end of his book about the inevitability of social and cultural reform in the country sadly seems naive in light of the election of hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the presidency. Ahmadinejad recently banned Western music from state television and radio, denied the Holocaust, and threatened Israel with annihilation.

So what needs to be, done to ensure that Iran doesnt become another member of the nuclear club? The American people are already in a bellicose mood. According to a February 1 Zogby poll, 64 percent favor joint U.S.-European military action. But there is a better path.

The United States has to provide security guarantees so as to make Iran confident that it will not suffer the fate of two of its neighbors.

Plus, all the five established nuclear powers have to make good on their commitment under Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and take concrete steps to destroy their nuclear arsenals. The nuclear hypocrisy of the five established powers has been one of the major reasons that Iran's nuclear program has widespread support among its populace. The Iranian public will become less enthusiastic only when countries like the United States stop possessing--and flaunting--nuclear weapons as a symbol of national strength.

And Israel must be part of any solution. In 1975, Israel announced its support at the United Nations for the idea of a nuclear weapons free zone in the Middle East. It has echoed this view several times. Iran is not likely to halt its weapons program while Israel possesses a stockpile of nuclear warheads. (When the International Atomic Energy Agency was considering the issue of Iran in early February, Arab states again urged the adoption of a nuclear free zone.)

The question then arises: Is the current Iranian leadership rational and persuadable enough to renounce the bomb? Iran's foreign policy is not completely irrational. It has shown that it is not implacably opposed to the United States. In fact, it actually cooperated with the Bush Administration in the overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan, as Hiro documents.

There is a logic to its desire to obtain nuclear weapons. Iran saw what happened to Iraq, which had none, and what didn't happen to North Korea, which says it has some. Tehran may have concluded that a relatively speedy requisition of the bomb could spare the country an attack from Washington. But this is a reckless game.

Amitabh Pal is the managing editor of The Progressive.