OFIRA SELIKTAR, Failing the Crystal Ball Test: The CarterAdministration and the Fundamentalist Revolution in Iran (Westport, Conn.: Praeger,2000). Pp. 266. $65.00 cloth.

Extract

In Failing the Crystal Ball Test, Ofira Seliktar, a political scientist at Gratz College, seeks to account for the “policy and intelligence debacle” (p. x) associated with the pre-eminent crisis of the Carter years. It is her hope that by understanding what went wrong with policy toward Iran, future policy-makers will be able to reduce the risk of similar disasters elsewhere in the relatively unstable conditions of the post-Cold War world. To achieve her objective, she focuses on the three-year period from the beginning of 1977 to the seizure of the United States embassy in November 1979. Seliktar, whose previous work has centered on Israel, bases her study on the multi-volume series of American documents seized at the embassy and published in Iran during the 1980s. These materials cluster around the last several years of U.S.–Iranian relations prior to the takeover of the compound. In addition, she has relied on an extensive list of secondary works in English.