2010-09-07 16:39:11 -

The Hoover Institution today released The Myth of the Great Satan: A New Look at America's Relations with Iran, by Abbas Milani. In this book, Milani reviews the history of America’s relations with Iran and discredits the myth of the United States as the “Great Satan” — a necessary first step in establishing a new relationship between the two nations.

“Since June 12, 2009, the attention of everyone who seeks a more secure and democratic world has been riveted by the convulsion in Iran,” Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of the New Republic, said. “But the situation there is as obscure as it is inspiring, and there is no more reliable guide to its meanings and its implications than Abbas Milani.

Milani

has a rare gift for combining the mind and the heart, analytical detachment with moral engagement. He reminds me of the great dissident intellectuals who destroyed communism by understanding it.”


In The Myth of the Great Satan, Milani examines U.S.-Iranian relations beginning in the early twentieth century, moves to the revolution of 1979, and covers the Iranian election of June 2009. He explains why the founder of the Iranian regime, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, used the Quranic moniker of the Great Satan to refer to the United States, fueling the construction of a myth that portrays it as evil. He details the regime’s continued animosity toward the United States, pointing out that the regime’s leaders and their allies have tried every tool of repression at their disposal without success. Milani claims that democracy is the inexorable future of Iran. But, as he explains, meaningful and equitable relations between the two nations can only begin if they reach a common, critical, and accurate reading of the past.

Abbas Milani is a research fellow and codirector of the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution and the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University. He has published more than twenty books; the most recent of which is Eminent Persians.

The Men and Women Who Made Modern Iran, 1941-1979 (Syracuse University Press, 2008).

For more information on The Myth of the Great Satan, visit HooverPress.org : .
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