This remarkably well-done book represents a new pinnacle in Bowden’s career as the finest narrative journalist working today. All the skills on display in his previous books, such as Black Hawk Down (1999)and Killing Pablo (2001), are showcased in this one, but Bowden has created a substantially more sweeping and sophisticated work than his earlier projects. In a story that shifts repeatedly between Tehran, Washington, Fort Bragg, and hostage prison cells, and which includes dozens of characters, he is meticulous and detail-oriented without dwelling on the irrelevant or boring, and thorough in his exploration of people and events without sacrificing the pace of the story. Bowden is a virtuoso storyteller.

Bowden does not intend his account of the hostage drama to be read as a political tract or cautionary tale, but it is impossible not to take note of certain lessons. One is particularly pertinent today, when foreign policy is so vigorously debated amidst the Bush administration’s hands-on approach to the Middle East over the last five years. For eight successive American administrations, Iran under the shah exemplified the realist model, the triumph of concern for regional stability and the promotion of American interests over other considerations. The shah was installed in 1953 because in the cold-war calculus of the day, America needed a staunch ally in Iran to act as a bulwark against Soviet expansionism. It didn’t help that Muhammad Mossadeq, the Iranian prime minister elected in 1951, had immediately nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, at the time one of the biggest corporations in the world. (Time promptly named him its Man of the Year.) Under Mossadeq, the thinking went, Iran was drifting toward socialism, economic stagnation, and Soviet cooption—an unacceptable situation—and in the shah, the West, and most importantly America, would keep the Soviets out of the Middle East and cut off from Iranian oil.

But the shah’s rule became increasingly arrogant, strict, and violent. As Bowden recounts, “Oil wealth fed urban enclaves of educated, Westernized, well-connected citizens, loyal to the regime, but the disparity between this small affluent class and the majority of Iranians was vast and growing. By the twentieth year of his reign, the shah was deeply unpopular, reviled by Iran’s educated class as a tyrant and American puppet and by the multitudes of poor and uneducated for his efforts to dismantle their religious traditions.” Despite this trajectory, American support never waned; Iran was stable, it seemed, and its regime friendly.

And then there is the problem of stability, which after all is realism’s lodestar. In a recent article, Jeffrey Goldberg of the New Yorker recounts a tense encounter in 2002 between Condoleezza Rice and Brent Scowcroft, in which they argued about the Iraq war. As Scowcroft told Goldberg, “‘she comes back to this thing that we’ve tolerated an autocratic Middle East for fifty years and so on and so forth,’ he said. Then a barely perceptible note of satisfaction entered his voice, and he said, ‘But we’ve had fifty years of peace.’”

Critics of realism, upon reading those words, hit the ceiling. They noted that the Middle East, with all of its ruthlessly stable dictatorships, has been home to dozens of wars in the last half-century. “Realism of the Scowcroft sort,” retorted Christopher Hitchens, “presided over the Iran-Iraq war with its horrific casualties and watched indifferently as genocide was enacted in northern Iraq. It allowed despots free rein from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan, and then goggled when this gave birth to the Taliban and al-Qaida. If this was ‘fifty years of peace,’ then it really was time to give war a chance.”

In Scowcroft’s doctrinaire assertion of a half-century of peace, by we he is referring to United States soil, not the nations or citizens of the Middle East. That region—one of the biggest realist playgrounds—has been an abject stability failure, and there is arguably no better example of that fact than Iran under the shah and the ensuing revolution. American support of a hated dictatorship fomented an Islamist backlash that ultimately toppled the regime, and the diplomatic and economic isolation resulting from the embassy takeover—and notably, Iran’s inability to import military hardware to maintain its partially Western army—weakened the country sufficiently to invite an Iraqi invasion in 1980.

The resulting Iran-Iraq war lasted for eight years and involved, among other horrors, the slaughter of wave after wave of child suicide conscripts sent, holding hands, marching across minefields. By the end, it claimed close to a million lives, making it the bloodiest conflict since World War II. To fight that war, Saddam Hussein indebted himself to Kuwait for 14 billion dollars, and his desire to avoid having to repay that debt was an important reason underlying his invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

The continued history of war and bloodshed in the region since then occupies the headlines on a daily basis, now culminating in a grand nuclear crisis. So very much of it, Bowden teaches us, is the product not of swaggering American idealism that seeks to refashion the world in its own image, but rather of precisely the kind of amoral, pragmatic realism that critics of American foreign policy love to claim for themselves. If the post-1979 Middle East is an example of the stability that realists seek to encourage, one shudders to think what instability would look like.

Noah Pollak is an Assistant Editor of AZURE.