TRITA

Just over three years have passed since President Barack Obama extended a hand to the Islamic Republic of Iran in the hope of stopping its quest for nuclear weapons. Today his policy of engaging Tehran is judged by many to be a disaster. The headlines daily reinforce this conclusion: As Iran's nuclearization drive hurtles to the point of no return, the governing mullahs plot assassination on U.S. soil and threaten American aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf. A diplomatic resolution to the nuclear issue remains as elusive as it was when the Obama administration first assumed power.

In A Single Roll of the Dice, Trita Parsi tries to account for this failure. But rather than re-examine U.S. policy and its underlying assumptions, Mr. Parsi spends much of the book casting blame on a wide range of actors for Mr. Obama's inability to disarm the clerical regime through diplomatic means. Such blame-shifting is not surprising. The author has spent years, as president of the National Iranian American Council, advocating for engagement with Iran; he is now determined to explain away the policy's inherent flaws.

Although Mr. Parsi is far from disinterested in the ultimate outcome of the engagement debate, "A Single Roll of the Dice" is written with an ersatz air of objective analysis, employing a coolly neutral tone and a prose style straight out of a diplomatic press release. ("Even on the third day, when the negotiators were reaching a point of exhaustion, the atmosphere remained respectful and constructive.") There are also no less than 98 unattributed quotations, with a "senior European official" reliably presenting views that would no doubt go down well at the National Iranian American Council.

Beneath the book's slick presentation, though, political animus simmers. Mr. Parsi accuses a remarkable number of countries, organizations and individuals—including Sunni-Arab states, the European Union, the U.S. Congress and even members of the Obama administration—of having deliberately undermined the president.

Predictably, Israel and American Jews with an interest in U.S. policy are subjected to the harshest criticism. Israel's perception of the Iranian threat, Mr. Parsi says, has long "resembled prophesy more than reality," impelling the Jewish state to frame its conflict with Iran's clerical regime "as one between the sole democracy in the Middle East and a theocracy that hated everything the West stood for." Mr. Parsi rejects that perception. Beneath the Iranians' viciously anti-Semitic and anti-American sloganeering, he contends, lies a legitimate demand that their "security interests and regional aspirations" be recognized. Meet the demand, he thinks, and Iran will no longer be a threat.

Israel and its allies in the U.S. were determined to prevent such an exchange of strategic respect, according to Mr. Parsi. Thus was closed a rare diplomatic opening represented by the election of an American president with a persona well suited to peacemaking and without "the baggage of previous administrations."

Quick to ascribe irrationality and bad faith to opponents of engagement, Mr. Parsi is charitable when it comes to examining the motivations of the Iranian side. But he must frequently sift the obviously belligerent content of the theocrats' statements to find signs of goodwill—signs invisible to unsophisticated "hawks" and "elements on the right" in the U.S.

Consider Mr. Parsi's treatment of the bizarre note sent by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to congratulate Mr. Obama on his election victory in 2008. The letter brimmed with Mr. Ahmadinejad's typically venomous rhetoric: "The nations of the world expect an end to policies based on warmongering, invasion, bullying, trickery" and so on. Yet Mr. Parsi sees a bright side: "The content of the letter was less important than the fact that the letter had been sent in the first place . . . showing Iran's interest in dialogue and willingness to take political risks to begin engagement with America."

Or take Mr. Obama's first video postcard to the Islamic Republic on the occasion of the Persian New Year, where the American president made it clear that the U.S. no longer intended to undermine the Iranian regime. "This is not a change," Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's Supreme Leader, had sneered in response. "This is deceit." In the same speech, Ayatollah Khamenei had declared that "the divine laws and the world will change [America] if it doesn't do so willingly." Mr. Parsi does not quote this passage. Instead he tells us that the mere fact of Ayatollah Khamenei's response was "a sign of the success of Obama's move, because no other U.S. president had managed to compel Iran's Supreme Leader to act in this manner."

It is only in his account of Iranian protesters' post-election uprising in 2009 and the regime's crackdown on them that Mr. Parsi strays from this narrative of Iranian earnestness and Western folly. Readers may find it difficult to reconcile his portrait of a regime that "showed no mercy" at home but is also a rational negotiating partner eager to engage the West.

Yet the author concedes that "the election fraud and ensuing human rights violations" strengthened the case against U.S. engagement with Iran and "dealt the biggest blow to Obama." But Mr. Parsi does not follow his concession to its logical conclusion: that enmity between the West and Iran is based on ideological differences, not strategic ones.

Mr. Obama's engagement policy failed not because of Israeli connivance or because the administration did not try hard enough. The policy failed because the Iranian regime, when confronted by its own people or by outsiders, has only one way of responding: with a truncheon.

First published Wall Street Journal.

AUTHOR
Mr. Ahmari is an Iranian-American journalist and a nonresident associate research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society.