About Iran Today
Rich in oil and gas, Iran is the most strategically important country in the Middle East. Yet, since its Islamic revolution in 1979, it has become an enigma to most Westerners.
U.S. President Bush has branded Iran part of the "axis of evil" and has refused to rule out military action to prevent its suspected development of nucleur weapons. Action has already been taken against Iran for its failure to cooperate on site inspections through the IAEA's report to the United Nations Security Council in February 2006. Furthermore, Iran's President Ahmadinejad has declared his wish to see Israel wiped "off the map".
Iranian politics is repressive on the one hand and competitive and participatory on the other, as the June 2005 poll showed. While young people face harassment by the morality police, they can embrace the latest in music and fashion. The civic institutions are feeble, yet personal, professional, religious and political networks engender a lively society.
Dilip Hiro, who has been writing on Iran for the past quarter-century, illuminates the Iranian kaleidoscope with his customary lucidity and even-handedness. He focuses on key institutions and offers revealing profiles of recent Iranian leaders, royal and clerical. In the process Hiro provides an enlightening background to the ongoing tensions between Iranian conservatives and reformers, and between Iran and the West on the nuclear issue.
'Hiro is a model political analyst. His approach is as incorrigibly non-partisan as it is methodical' The Sunday Times
Dilip Hiro is a journalist, historian and broadcaster and is the author of Blood of the Earth, the bestselling Secrets and Lies: The True Story of the Iraq War and Iran Today.
