Ken Timmerman Responds

Ken Timmerman: in an email.

Dear friends,

Ten days ago, I was advised that Council on Foreign Relations staffer Ray Takeyh was reviewing my latest book, Countdown to Crisis: the Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran for the Washington Post, and that he was having problems with my sources.

That same day, I phoned Mr. Takeyh at his office, leaving a voice mail offer to provide him any additional information he might want. I also sent him an e-mail, giving him links to academic papers on the subjects covered in the book I had published elsewhere. (Those links are accessible here.) READ MORE

Not surprisingly, Mr. Takeyh never responded. His review in the Post yesterday (7/31/05) blasted the book as everything from “simplistic and provocative,” “outlandish,” “hyperventilating,” to “pedestrian.”

How you can be “outlandish” and “pedestrian” all at once is beyond me. I guess that makes me all things to one person.

While it’s not the first time the Post has commissioned a review slamming my work (of my last four books, only The French Betrayal of America was treated neutrally by the Post), Mr. Takeyh’s prose belies the very same fixed conceptions that I expose and criticize in Countdown to Crisis.

He calls the information I describe in great detail of Iran’s involvement in the September 11 plot an “outlandish claim.” He then accuses me of having ignored disculpatory evidence provided by “numerous congressional and journalistic inquiries into September 11,” and concludes: “The one independent examination that Timmerman does cite, the 9/11 Commission, is faulted for missing what he considers the all-too-apparent Iran link. The reader gets the impression that Timmerman would rather not bother with facts precisely because they undermine his conspiracy theory.

Either Mr. Takeyh never bothered to read Countdown to Crisis, or he willfully chose to misrepresent the book, which relates in chapter 24 precisely what the 9/11 Commission found about Iran’s connection to the 9/11 conspiracy. (In the book’s Appendix, I reproduce a page and half excerpt from the 9/11 Commission report on the evidence of Iran’s involvement in the plot).

So upset is Mr. Takeyh by the evidence that Iran provided material assistance to eight to ten of the “muscle hijackers,” as the 9/11 Commission report states, that he returns to the theme at the end of his review, reminding readers of “Timmerman’s preposterous claim that Iran plotted the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks…” [my italics]

Mr. Takeyh then belittles my suggestion that the best course for the United States to counter the threat from the Islamic Republic is to help the Iranian people to overthrow the regime. “Given that Iran's genuinely democratic reformers, such as the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Shirin Ebadi, and the political prisoner Akbar Ganji, abjure such aid from America, it is hard to see how such a strategy could work,” he concludes.

While there is much to admire in the actions of Shirin Ebadi and Akbar Ganji, neither is a genuine leader of the pro-democracy movement in Iran. And besides, anyone who has looked seriously at domestic politics in Iran understands there can be no reforming this regime. It has to go, period.

Mr. Takeyh’s writings suggest that he remains wedded to the disproven notion that enough incentives will encourage Iran’s hard-line clerics to significantly reform their regime. On the contrary: what the clerics have proven again and again is their skill at pulling the wool over our eyes here in the West.

Like Fairy Dust, government officials and individuals such as Mr. Takeyh still believe in the illusion of reform. In the meantime, Iran’s ruling clerics keep on building nuclear weapons, killing dissidents, and plotting how they can save their own skins.

For more information about Countdown to Crisis, go to www.kentimmerman.com

You can read excerpts of the book at http://www.kentimmerman.com/countdown.htm and at http://www.randomhouse.com/crown/crownforum/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9781400053681

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