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WORK TITLE: War in 140 Characters
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 5/17/1977
WEBSITE:
CITY: Athens
STATE:
COUNTRY: Greece
NATIONALITY: British
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born May 17, 1977.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer.
WRITINGS
Contributing editor with the Daily Beast; contributing writer for Politico; contributor to periodicals, including the New York Times, Financial Times, and Wall Street Journal.
SIDELIGHTS
David Patrikarakos is a Greek writer. He works as a contributing editor with the Daily Beast and as a contributing writer for Politico. Patrikarakos has contributed to a range of periodicals, including the New York Times, Financial Times, and Wall Street Journal.
Nuclear Iran
Patrikarakos published Nuclear Iran: The Birth of an Atomic State in 2012. The account looks into Iran’s nuclear ambitions and its political ramifications both domestically and internationally. Patrikarakos covers the history of the nuclear program from the Shah of Iran’s cooperation with the United States to the current era’s climate of the United States government leading calls for economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation because of Iran’s continuation of their nuclear program. Patrikarakos links the nuclear program to the development of the country over the past fifty years.
Reviewing the book in Middle East, Fred Rhodes observed that the account “sheds new light on the uranium enrichment efforts that lie at the heart of global concerns.” Writing in the London Independent, Paul Rogers commented that “many analysts have written about the recent past and there is a wealth of information in the public domain, yet there have been few thorough studies of the overall history. This is where David Patrikarakos’s Nuclear Iran is such a welcome contribution. Where it really scores is in its long-term perspective, throwing much light on origins and motivations.” Reviewing the book in the Middle East Quarterly, Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi concluded that “Nuclear Iran is a well-researched, highly accessible work for the general reader or academic specialist seeking to understand the controversies surrounding Iran’s nuclear program.”
War in 140 Characters
In 2017 Patrikarakos published War in 140 Characters: How Social Media Is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-first Century. The book looks at the way social media has shaped modern warfare and become a potent virtual weapon. Patrikarakos claims that only those sides who master the use of social media can truly win a war in the twenty-first century. Patrikarakos interviewed a number of scholars and military practitioners of war to get a better understanding of the importance of social media in armed conflict in the current era, from Skype recruiting tactics to manufacturing fake news. In the account, Patrikarakos also examines the consumption of war and the freedom of choice in receiving information about conflicts.
In an article in the Washington Post Book World, Matti Friedman recorded that Patrikarakos got the idea for this book while he was covering the conflict in Ukraine. Patrikarakos recalled: “Whereas in a war as it is traditionally understood, information operations support military action on the battlefield…. In Ukraine it became clear that military operations on the ground were supporting information operations on TV and in cyberspace.”
Writing in Foreign Policy, Sasha Polakow-Suransky commented that “the social media weapons described in War in 140 Characters may soon be out of date, just like the book’s title. … But the profound questions this book raises about the future of warfare will remain relevant for years to come.” In a review in New Statesman, Peter Pomerantsev found the book to be “timely and talented.” Pomerantsev remarked that “Patrikarakos has a provocative thesis. His argument is that social media is transforming both the nation state and war. No longer can we talk of one nation battling another through propaganda: the field is now swarming with individual actors, each a little propaganda state in their own right. And in this post-national landscape, the idea of war is also changed,” appending that “there is no longer any clear dividing line between ‘peace’ and ‘war’, ideas which belong to the logic of relations between nations who have sole authority to wage war and conclude peace. Rather there is a permanent smudge of tension, messy and always unstable.” Pomerantsev pointed out that “Patrikarakos’s book offers no easy answers as to how the present messaging mess can ever be cleared up.” A contributor to Kirkus Reviews mentioned that “the great enemy of social media, it would seem, is any notion of objective truth. This eye-opening book reveals a theater of conflict that aims to destroy reality, waged by all sides.” Reviewing the book in the Washington Post Book World, Friedman admitted that “Patrikarakos has performed a service by giving readers a relatable, even enjoyable, introduction to the way the battlefield has moved onto our phones and laptops, and from there directly into our brains. War in 140 Characters is a necessary read for everyone affected by this baffling state of affairs—that is, everyone.” Reviewing the book in the Financial Times, Hannah Kuchler concluded that “War in 140 Characters is filled with fantastic on-the-ground reporting on how social media is changing war. It is worth reading for anyone trying to comprehend Russian disinformation campaigns—and to help us anticipate the social media challenges of future wars.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Financial Times, December 8, 2017, Hannah Kuchler, review of War in 140 Characters: How Social Media Is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century.
Foreign Policy, April 1, 2018, Sasha Polakow-Suransky, review of War in 140 Characters, p. 63.
Independent (London, England), October 19, 2012, Paul Rogers, review of Nuclear Iran: The Birth of an Atomic State.
Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 2017, review of War in 140 Characters.
Middle East, February 1, 2013, Fred Rhodes, review of Nuclear Iran, p. 65.
Middle East Quarterly, June 22, 2013, Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, review of Nuclear Iran.
New Statesman, January 12, 2018, Peter Pomerantsev, review of War in 140 Characters, p. 42.
Washington Post Book World, December 14, 2017, Matti Friedman, “In War, the Battle Today Is Less on the Ground Than on Social Media.”
ONLINE
LSE Review, http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/ (May 17, 2018), Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, review of Nuclear Iran.
Politico Online, https://www.politico.eu/ (June 2, 2018), author profile.
David Patrikarakos
Contributing Writer
Follow @dpatrikarakos
David Patrikarakos is a contributing writer at POLITICO and the author of “Nuclear Iran: The Birth of an Atomic State.” He is working on a book on social media and warfare.
David Patrikarakos is the author of Nuclear Iran: the Birth of an Atomic State, a contributing editor at the Daily Beast, and a contributing writer at Politico. He has written for the New York Times, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and many other publications. He lives in London.
War in 140 Characters: How Social Media Is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century
Sasha Polakow-Suransky
Foreign Policy. .228 (Apr. 2018): p63.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Foreign Policy
http://www.jstor.org/journals/00157228.html
Full Text:
War in 140 Characters: How Social Media Is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century
DAVID PATRIKARAKOS, BASIC BOOKS, 320 PP., $17.99, NOVEMBER 2017
MANY COMMENTATORS THESE DAYS like to proclaim that conventional military strategy is passe and war is now waged via smartphones and Facebook feeds. But what does that actually mean in practice? Journalist David Patrikarakos's new book chronicles in granular detail exactly how social media has transformed the way that modern wars are fought.
Patrikarakos argues that narrative war has become more important than physical war as a result of new technologies. Crucially, the spread of social media has brought about a "virtual mass enlistment" that gives civilians as much--and sometimes more--power as state propaganda machines. He is clear-eyed about this leveling of the playing field. "The state will always fight back," he writes--and it has.
Patrikarakos goes to great lengths to show both sides of each conflict he covers. His chapter on Israel's 2014 war against Hamas in Gaza, known as Operation Protective Edge, first brings us into the home of Farah Baker, a 16-year-old Twitter activist who became the voice of Gaza during the Israeli bombing campaign. We then follow the author into the inner sanctum of the Israel military and see how the defense establishment adjusted, slowly, to fighting a new enemy and a narrative war.
In Ukraine, Patrikarakos meets a middle-aged mother and former public relations executive who uses Facebook to source boots and body armor and then drives them to the front line in subzero temperatures. The author joins her there, under threat of artillery fire, as she delivers the supplies. On the other side of the battlefield, Russia's state-sponsored trolls wage a concerted counterpropaganda effort. Rather than simply justifying its actions, Patrikarakos writes, the Kremlin's online army aimed to flood the zone with conflicting information and "sow as much confusion as possible."
Virtual mass enlistment can strike a blow at even technologically savvy states such as Russia. It was a group of obsessive internet sleuths who proved that a Russian-made missile likely shot down a Malaysia Airlines jet in Ukraine in 2014. What is most remarkable about this episode, he writes, is that "the Russian government was forced to publicly battle a group of mostly unpaid civilian volunteers ... a battle that would have been both unnecessary and unthinkable just ten years ago."
As Patrikarakos is well aware, the social media weapons described in War in 140 Characters may soon be out of date, just like the book's title (Twitter went to 280 characters soon after the book went to press). But the profound questions this book raises about the future of warfare will remain relevant for years to come.
SASHA POLAKOW-SURANSKY (@Sasha_p_s) is a deputy editor at Foreign Policy.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Polakow-Suransky, Sasha. "War in 140 Characters: How Social Media Is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century." Foreign Policy, Apr. 2018, p. 63. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536092994/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=683715f6. Accessed 17 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A536092994
War by other means: Tweets and memes are the new bullets and bombs
Peter Pomerantsev
New Statesman. 147.5401 (Jan. 12, 2018): p42+.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Full Text:
War in 140 Characters: How Social Media is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century
David Patrikarakos
Basic Books, 320pp. 25 [pounds sterling]
The other week, I was looking at a photograph of a penis-shaped vegetable, wondering about its significance for geopolitics. The picture, and thousands like it, had been posted by a pro-Kremlin Twitter account popular in Germany. But between images of bum-like pumpkins, the handle retweeted horrific photographs of children wounded or killed as a result of the war in East Ukraine, their fates blamed on Kiev and the West.
The amusing vegetables were there to pull in followers; the other images to promote a political cause. Later the Twitter feed transformed, instead retweeting Kremlin state media and far-right parties.
Who was behind the account? The Kremlin itself? Activists? Information war profiteers? I'd come across it when researching foreign (dis)information operations during the German election. The campaigns came from all sorts of places. The German-language arm of Kremlin state broadcaster Sputnik was blatantly biased towards the anti-immigrant, far-right Alternative fur Deutschland party. Pro-AfD (and most likely German) automated Twitter accounts would avidly retweet Sputnik stories, pushing them into social media spaces where Kremlin content sat cozily side by side with locally concocted conspiracy theories about how the vote would be rigged against the AfD. There were also US and European alt-right activists who congregated on the message board 4chan, and more obscure sites such as Discord, to create "meme factories", partnering with German far-right movements to hijack Twitter hashtags. This helped the AfD dominate social media and, ultimately, win seats in parliament for the first time.
The manga-themed, racist memes were then reposted by a network of bots which turned out to be run from Nizhny Novgorod. The hacker behind it said he had done the work for free, as he shared "mutual benefits" with the AfD. He quoted a usual price of 2,000 [euro] for 15,000 posts and retweets. The botnet also specialised in smearing Russian opposition figures and promoting escort services in Dubai. Meanwhile, we found that the Epoch Times--a publication originally created to support the Chinese Falun Gong sect repressed by the government in Beijing--had become one of the more profitable "alternative" media outlets in Germany, with a mix of Kremlin-sourced, German anti-immigrant and pro-Falun Gong stories. Indeed, by the end of our research it was clear that one can't really talk, as one could during the Cold War, of "foreign" information operations launched against a coherent domestic news space. Instead, one has transnational, ever-shifting networks of toxic speech and disinformation, including both state and non-state actors. These can operate for financial, ideological or simply personal reasons, allying and mutually reinforcing one another to pursue quite different agendas. Once upon a time, technoutopians dreamed of a global information village. We have one. But it's nasty.
This new worldwide web of disorder is the subject of David Patrikarakos's timely and talented War in 140 Characters. The author has a suitably global background: as a British-Greek-Jewish-Iranian-Iraqi--and a Poynter fellow in journalism at Yale University--he has the ability to understand local dynamics as he relates stories from the Middle East to the Midlands, Ukraine to the West Coast of the US. He introduces us to the people on the front lines of digital battles, the personalities behind the internet accounts: guilt-ridden Russian trolls; young women groomed online by Isis; Facebook Sherlocks debunking Putin's lies from suburban English bedrooms.
This, however, is not mere information war tourism. Patrikarakos has a provocative thesis. His argument is that social media is transforming both the nation state and war. No longer can we talk of one nation battling another through propaganda: the field is now swarming with individual actors, each a little propaganda state in their own right. And in this post-national landscape, the idea of war is also changed. There is no longer any clear dividing line between "peace" and "war", ideas which belong to the logic of relations between nations who have sole authority to wage war and conclude peace. Rather there is a permanent smudge of tension, messy and always unstable.
One chapter brings out the dynamic between traditional state actors and new players particularly strikingly. Alberto Fernandez was the Arabic-speaking US diplomat charged with tackling Isis online. Before he arrived, US online information campaigns had followed a fluffy approach, trying to convince young people drawn towards Isis that the US held no ill will towards Islam, with videos of "happy Muslims" enjoying life in America. This failed. The reality of the US as a bringer of death and destruction to the Middle East was too strong to override. Isis propaganda showed graphic videos of US soldiers torturing Muslims at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
Isis also used the cultural power of the US against it, with propaganda videos modelled on American computer games and films which enlisted recruits to the terror group's cause. It distributed spectacular execution videos which were then amplified by the mainstream western media, while a seemingly unlimited number of social media activists proliferated its work. On social media, it is more important to have viral material which can spread through horizontal networks of users, rather than the "vertical" power of state-run broadcasters which wielded so much power during the 20th century.
Fernandez believed in taking the fight to Isis. He realised the terrorists' weak spot was the difference between their professed claim of delivering the ideal caliphate, and the grim reality of the society they had created. With a team of48, he created sarcastic videos such as one entitled "Welcome to Isis Land". "Run, do not walk to Isis Land," said the opening line, with footage of fighters throwing bodies of Muslims into a ditch. "You can learn useful skills for the global Muslim community. Blowing up mosques! Crucifying and executing Muslims!" This was followed by close-up shots of blindfolded Muslims tied to wooden stakes and being shot in the back of the head.
The video was a success, being viewed three million times. But Fernandez became frustrated by the logic of government, where messages have to be cleared, where political loyalties meant he could never criticise terrible US allies, where every video was branded with the US government's logo. "We fell between two stools," remembers Fernandez. "My vision was too edgy for government and not edgy enough for the space we were in." He quit.
Patrikarakos's book offers no easy answers as to how the present messaging mess can ever be cleared up. Top-down censorship is both unethical and unpractical. The only way forward, perhaps, is for tech companies, policymakers, civic groups and the media to team up and define what exactly constitutes unacceptable behaviour online, and how they can all counteract it. We are far away from that now, with governments frustrated by tech companies' lack of co-operation. In the UK, MPs are pressuring tech firms to explore covert Kremlin digital campaigns. There have been tantalising if very slim signs of activity around Brexit and the Scottish referendum, which have already led to a slapstick face-off between the UK and Russian foreign ministers. More worryingly, researchers at Cardiff University have spotted Russian accounts which look to inflame ethnic and religious tensions after terrorist attacks.
In the meantime, all one can do is hope that groups who believe in spreading the values of human rights and accurate information become as good at acting online as the far right, the Kremlin or Isis. That will require well-meaning NGOs and a public service-minded media to step into the battles of the digital age, understand how their opponents co-ordinate across borders online, and learn to disrupt and counter them with better messages and ideas of their own. At present they are far behind.
Peter Pomerantsev is the author of "Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia" (Faber & Faber)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Pomerantsev, Peter. "War by other means: Tweets and memes are the new bullets and bombs." New Statesman, 12 Jan. 2018, p. 42+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A525709763/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ea1407bc. Accessed 17 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A525709763
Patrikarakos, David: WAR IN 140 CHARACTERS
Kirkus Reviews. (Sept. 15, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Patrikarakos, David WAR IN 140 CHARACTERS Basic (Adult Nonfiction) $30.00 11, 14 ISBN: 978-0-465-09614-5
We shall fight them on the beaches, we shall fight them on the landing grounds, we shall fight them with our thumbs...."War, a virus, must mutate to survive." So writes political journalist Patrikarakos (Nuclear Iran: The Birth of an Atomic State, 2012), who posits that in at least one manifestation of modern war, what matters is less boots-on-the-ground victory than which narrative about what's happening emerges as the most convincing. In that regard, marketing, public relations, and counterintelligence become as critical as special ops forces. The author finds an example in his own experience in Ukraine as Russian separatists attempted to carve off a portion of the country as well as in a close study of the Islamic State group and other nonstate actors. This kind of warfare is nebulous, fought between nation-states and sometimes not easily identified enemies, and it often involves citizens, individually or in network; it is open-ended, and because of that, it is not easy to determine when and how victory or defeat can be declared. The great avatar of this new warfare, writes the author, is Donald Trump, who "employed Twitter as one of his primary campaign tools"--and continues to do so in office. "This is both a force for good," writes Patrikarakos, "in that it brings greater transparency, and a force for ill, in that it is destabilizing." Destroying any semblance of stability being the great desideratum of strongmen and terrorists alike, social media is now a much-used weapon in the modern arsenal. Traveling from "troll farms" in Russia to jihadi corners of YouTube, the author studies how social media is used to undermine truthful accounts of events, recruit radicals, sow confusion, and overturn old doctrines of warfare. "How do you defeat Islamic State," he writes meaningfully, "when its demands are such that it can never be met?" The great enemy of social media, it would seem, is any notion of objective truth. This eye-opening book reveals a theater of conflict that aims to destroy reality, waged by all sides.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Patrikarakos, David: WAR IN 140 CHARACTERS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A504217631/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d938b0f5. Accessed 17 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A504217631
Nuclear Iran
Fred Rhodes
The Middle East. .440 (Feb. 2013): p65.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 IC Publications Ltd.
http://www.icpublications.com/
Full Text:
5 NUCLEAR IRAN
By David Patrikarakos
Published by I B Tauris
ISBN 9781780761251
Price: [pounds sterling] 25,00 hardback
The Iranian nuclear crisis has dominated world politics since the beginning of the century, with the country now facing increasing diplomatic isolation, talk of military strikes against its nuclear facilities and a disastrous Middle East war.
Behind the rhetoric from all sides there is very little real understanding of Iran's nuclear strategy, and the history behind it, which is now over 50 years old. This book argues that Iran's nuclear programme and the modern history of the country itself are irretrievably linked; and only by understanding one can we understand the other. From the programme's beginnings under the Shah of Iran, the author details the central role of the US in the birth of nuclear Iran. The author's unique access to the father of Iran's nuclear programme, as well as to key scientific personnel under the early Islamic Republic and to senior Iranian and western negotiators, sheds new light on the uranium enrichment efforts that lie at the heart of global concerns.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Rhodes, Fred. "Nuclear Iran." The Middle East, Feb. 2013, p. 65. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A320068317/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8b9e2d02. Accessed 17 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A320068317
Book World: In war, the battle today is less on the ground than on social media
Matti Friedman
The Washington Post. (Dec. 14, 2017): News:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Full Text:
Byline: Matti Friedman
War in 140 Characters: How Social Media Is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century
By David Patrikarakos
Basic. 301 pp. $30
---
In the 1990s, I served as an infantryman at an obscure Israeli outpost in southern Lebanon whose claim to fame was a curious incident one Saturday morning in 1994: A Hezbollah team assaulted the hilltop base, surprised the garrison, planted a flag and ran away.
What made this attack different, in those ancient offline days, was that one of the Hezbollah fighters was armed not with a rifle but with a video camera. Dramatic footage of the flag planting, with echoes of Iwo Jima, was broadcast via newly proliferating satellite dishes and appeared on TV across the Middle East. Hezbollah declared victory. The Arab world cheered. Israelis fumed over a perceived debacle. The narrative tide in the guerilla war between Israel and Hezbollah began to shift in Hezbollah's favor. On the ground, nothing of military importance had happened. But the jihadists grasped first that it didn't matter - that new information technologies evened the playing field and that a great success in the real world mattered less than a great story on a screen.
The revolutionary digital landscape then in gestation, and now in full swing, is the subject of an important and accessible new book by journalist David Patrikarakos, a contributor at the Daily Beast and Politico and the author of an earlier book on Iran's nuclear program. The idea for "War in 140 Characters," Patrikarakos writes, came a few years ago "while lying on my bed in a bleak room of the Ramada hotel in Donetsk, listening to the sound of shelling on the city's outskirts."
Reporting on the war between Russia and Ukraine from that city, he found that Twitter knew things long before traditional media did and that part of the Ukrainian army's supply system was run by a woman who had a Facebook account and no official job. But it wasn't just that: The actual military moves seemed less important than the stories both sides were spinning online. "Whereas in a war as it is traditionally understood, information operations support military action on the battlefield," Patrikarakos writes, "in Ukraine it became clear that military operations on the ground were supporting information operations on TV and in cyberspace."
Reading these lines reminded me of the sharpest analyst of this trend in its primitive stages - Conrad Brean, the character played by Robert De Niro in the 1997 Hollywood masterpiece "Wag the Dog." Brean is a troubleshooter hired by the White House to divert public attention from a sex scandal by creating a fake war on TV. When a presidential aide protests that the American public will discover the ruse, Brean isn't troubled: "What did they find out about the Gulf War?" he asks. "One shot: One bomb, falling through the roof, building could've been made of Legos." No one even knew if it was real.
The war that Patrikarakos was experiencing in Ukraine seemed less about territory than people's perceptions of what was happening. Or as De Niro's character would have put it, the rubble in Donetsk, the tanks - it could all have been Legos.
The quest to figure out this bewildering new world sends Patrikarakos from Ukraine to Siberia, where he interviews a recovering Russian Internet troll, and to France to meet a woman lured to the Islamic State by recruiters from the "virtual caliphate." He tracks down a British video-game nerd who, in 2014, abandoned the fighting elves of "World of Warcraft" to lead a remarkable investigation of the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, undermining Russia's denial of responsibility and becoming an international figure of some significance - all on his computer, without leaving his living room.
To illustrate how the balance of power has shifted, the author interviews Farah Baker, a young Palestinian woman who tweeted the 2014 Gaza war when she was 16, and then interviews her online opponents, kids a few years older in Israeli army uniforms. Baker came to global attention broadcasting a gripping view of the airstrikes in Gaza from her smartphone, and she was able to get the upper hand against the Israelis in part because she was weaker: She was just one person, not part of a big organization with a carefully tailored message. The Palestinian girl had an "inherent authenticity," Patrikarakos writes, and in the new social media world, this "is the advantage that a Farah has over an institution" like the Israeli Defense Forces.
Elsewhere in the Middle East, the author recounts how the tech-savvy militants of the Islamic State rose from the ashes of Iraq in tandem with the rise of YouTube and Twitter. Those new tools allowed them to inflate accomplishments, terrorize from afar and galvanize global attention far beyond the dreams of their predecessors, like that Hezbollah team with its video camera in 1994. The U.S. effort to fight back online doesn't stand a chance: We learn that on the day in 2014 when the Islamic State took Mosul, Iraq, staffers in a State Department office tried to "hijack" the militants' hashtag #CalamityWillBefallUS, furiously putting out their own counter-messages. Tallying the results that night, they found that of the 100,000 tweets using the hashtag, the material being pushed by the superpower accounted for all of 1 percent. "A major arm of the government of the world's most powerful nation," Patrikarakos writes, "simply could not compete with networked individuals operating out of dilapidated buildings in war-ridden Syria or teenagers sitting in their bedrooms creating and sharing content."
This modern form of war may involve tweets and two-minute videos fired off by teenagers with rapid thumbs, but there's something comforting in the fact that explaining it needs to be done the old-fashioned way: in a book, by someone experienced in the real world and trained in the craft of explaining. Patrikarakos has performed a service by giving readers a relatable, even enjoyable, introduction to the way the battlefield has moved onto our phones and laptops, and from there directly into our brains. "War in 140 Characters" is a necessary read for everyone affected by this baffling state of affairs - that is, everyone.
---
Friedman's most recent book is "Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier's Story of a Forgotten War."
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Friedman, Matti. "Book World: In war, the battle today is less on the ground than on social media." Washington Post, 14 Dec. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A518818424/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=80dfb707. Accessed 17 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A518818424
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War in 140 Characters by David Patrikarakos — from trenches to Twitter
A convincing study of how conflict is being reconfigured by social media
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Hannah Kuchler
December 8, 2017
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A 16-year-old Gazan girl armed with Twitter; a Ukrainian mother raising funds for troops on Facebook; French men using WhatsApp to lure a woman from the suburbs of Paris to Isis-occupied Syria. These are actors in a new kind of warfare — one where who wins the war of words is more important than who has the most powerful weapons.In War in 140 Characters: How Social Media is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century, journalist David Patrikarakos meets the people behind these influential social media accounts, building dramatic narratives that show the power of what he calls “Homo digitalis”, the online individual. He argues convincingly that individuals using social media can be more powerful than institutions. In Gaza in 2014, teenager Farah Baker live-tweeted her terror during the 51-day war with Israel, attracting worldwide media attention. As Patrikarakos puts it, “In the sea of the faceless, Farah was Taylor Swift.” Tweets using pro-Palestinian hashtags outnumbered by almost 10 times those using pro-Israeli hashtags, presenting Israel with a problem: “Israel lost the global information war because it did not ‘bleed’ enough, and as long as it maintains its military advantage, it never will,” the author writes.But nation-states are fighting back. Patrikarakos also meets an Israeli army officer charged with winning the social media war. He speaks in terms of ceding space to the enemy and giving ammunition to supporters — but he fights his war with memes. One tweet shows a video of Usain Bolt running the 200 metres, with the caption: “The world’s fastest man can run 200 metres in 20 seconds. During a rocket attack, Israelis living near Gaza only have 15 seconds to reach a bomb shelter.” In the US, the government has tried to produce anti-Isis memes but they are bound by diplomatic rules and lack the same amplification network that makes them go viral.War in 140 Characters is a fascinating tour of how social media is being used in conflict the world over, from the propaganda and recruiting frequently covered in the press, to how informal groups are gathering to fact-check claims online. The tale of Ukrainian Anna Sandalova, who has used a Facebook group to become a “virtual government minister”, replacing a corrupt army bureaucracy, gives us clues about how social media may be used in the future. She has raised $1.3m to buy night-vision goggles, imported army uniforms and even an ambulance.The book is at its most timely when it discusses the Russian approach to disinformation campaigns, so successful that the US Congress is raking over every tweet and Facebook post in the run-up to last year’s US presidential election.Patrikarakos argues that Russia could have defeated Ukraine militarily — but it aimed for destabilisation, not defeat. The author devotes a chapter to the “troll”, a former employee of a Russian troll farm, who describes an operation where people created fake blogs to be reported on by fake websites in a “merry-go-round of lies”. The trolling campaigns and fake news are not designed to win the world’s support for Russia, but to “sow discord and disharmony within the west, to confuse and to obfuscate”. This is a crucial point as concern about Russian online influence in the US election spreads to concern about other elections, including the Brexit referendum.The author’s last book, Nuclear Iran, aimed to demystify that country’s nuclear programme, and War in 140 Characters continues his quest to show how war and diplomacy are evolving. But for all his expertise on conflict, he lacks a deep understanding of how platforms such as Facebook and Twitter work — for example, the role of automated bots in amplifying a message. Nor does he address what the tech companies should be doing to monitor or take down disinformation.Patrikarakos ends with a warning, comparing the present day to the run-up to the first world war, when no one wanted conflict but drifted into it through “miscalculation and error”. While I share his concerns about the “reinvention of reality”, I would have liked him to flesh out his parallel with the years before 1914. Both periods are marked by mass migration, a backlash against it, trade quotas, and new technologies that deepen global connectivity, he argues.War in 140 Characters is filled with fantastic on-the-ground reporting on how social media is changing war. It is worth reading for anyone trying to comprehend Russian disinformation campaigns — and to help us anticipate the social media challenges of future wars.War in 140 Characters: How Social Media is Reshaping Conflict in the Twenty-First Century, by David Patrikarakos, Basic Books RRP£25/$30, 320 pages
Nuclear Iran: The Birth of an Atomic State, By David Patrikarakos
This is a welcome analysis of Iran's self-perception, its nuclear plans and Western responses
Paul Rogers
Friday 19 October 2012 23:00 BST
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Beyond the revolution: Bushehr nuclear power plant, southern Iran Getty Images
For the past ten years there has been tension over Iran's nuclear plans, with deep suspicions by Israelis and conservative Americans that the Islamic Republic is engaged in developing nuclear weapons under cover of a civil nuclear-power programme. The tensions have ebbed and flowed, with a particularly dangerous period back in 2006 when George W Bush had US military forces on a high alert across the Middle East.
In spite of the opening of a new round of talks earlier this year, there is persistent talk of the Israelis going it alone and attacking Iran's nuclear plants and missile forces. Six years ago the Israelis did not command sufficient long-range strike aircraft, but that has changed with the deployment of well over a hundred F-15I and F-16Is. They also have numerous ballistic and cruise missiles, and a large force of armed drones, but they are facing an Iran that has now moved some key facilities deep underground at Fordo near Qom.
For the Israelis, time is running out before Iran becomes so difficult to attack that only the US could do it, so it is still possible that a crisis could develop before the US election on 6 November. Israeli politicians fear that a second-term Obama administration would have far too much freedom of action on Palestine and on Iran – a thoroughly unpalatable prospect.
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At the root of all this is the actual Iranian programme and what it might lead to. Many analysts have written about the recent past and there is a wealth of information in the public domain, yet there have been few thorough studies of the overall history. This is where David Patrikarakos's Nuclear Iran is such a welcome contribution. Where it really scores is in its long-term perspective, throwing much light on origins and motivations.
As to origins, the era of the Shah is key, especially after the huge hike in oil prices in 1973-4, when for a few years Iran was flush with money. Even before that, the Shah's regime was already intent to see Iran leapfrog its neighbours into regional great-power status, and right back in 1957 started the nuclear element of this with the opening of a nuclear training centre organised by CENTO (NATO's ally for the Middle East).
The US provided the Tehran Research Centre's 5MW research reactor, which went critical in 1967. One of the ironies of history is that the original fuel for the reactor, supplied by the US, was 93 per cent enriched Uranium 235, a weapons-grade quality. Fast-forward nearly ten years and plans were being laid for 20 nuclear power reactors, starting with the German-built plant at Bushehr on the Persian Gulf. Questions of nuclear weapons ambitions were left unanswered but, in any case, the Revolution intervened and Bushehr lay half-built for three decades.
The Islamic Republic eventually started to redevelop the industry, but behind this was the question of motivation. In the Shah's era, the belief was that nuclear power was a true symbol of modernity. This may seem odd now, after Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, but back in the 1970s nuclear power was expanding across the world. What is essential for any understanding of current Iranian attitudes is the way that nuclear power remains that symbol of modernity, surviving the Revolution and nuclear setbacks elsewhere. It lies right at the core of Iran's perception of itself as it seeks a return to a status it has not held for millennia.
As Patrikarakos comments: "Spurred by ideology and Khomeini, the programme became a means of appropriating Western technology to help create an identity for Iran in the modern world, but on its own uniquely Iranian and Islamic terms".
It is possible that Iran may permanently eschew nuclear-weapons ambitions and a negotiated settlement may be reached. What it most definitely will not accept is any limitation on its development of nuclear power. Unless the West and Israel come to accept this, the crisis cannot be resolved. Nuclear Iran could do much to hasten that acceptance.
Paul Rogers is professor of peace studies at Bradford University
Review of Nuclear Iran: The Birth of An Atomic State
Drawing on years of research and access to unique sources, journalist David Patrikarakos’ new book, Nuclear Iran: The Birth of An Atomic State, just shortlisted for a International Affairs Book of the Year award, tells the history of Iran’s nuclear programme from its beginning under the Shah until the present day. Patrikarakos spoke about his book at LSE this week and a podcast of his talk should be available soon. Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi offers his review of the book.
By Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi
A day doesn’t seem to go by when Iran is not in the headlines or the op-ed pages aren’t flooded with impassioned declamations of how to tackle the ‘Iranian threat’ and the ‘apocalyptic mullahs’, or conversely, that the deadlock over Iran’s nuclear programme is ‘manufactured’, ‘overblown’, or ‘the Iraq war redux’. Between these two extremes is the less frequented middle ground, which contends that some of Iran’s past research and activities are highly suspect and vigilance is a must, but also that a nuclear armed Iran is far from a foregone conclusion.
It is in the context of this heated, if somewhat over-saturated debate that writer and journalist David Patrikarakos has published, Nuclear Iran: The Birth of an Atomic State. The book proceeds chronologically, charting the Iranian nuclear programme’s inception under the monarchical imprimatur of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi through to the present and its resumption after the Iranian revolution of 1978-9 under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s Islamist theocracy. Nuclear Iran, unlike many other writings on the nuclear programme, starts from the very beginning and thereby offers some much needed historical perspective.
On the 8 December 1953, US President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered his seminal ‘Atoms for Peace’ speech at the UN General Assembly and inaugurated the global non-proliferation regime In 1957, four years after Eisenhower’s speech, but also a CIA / MI6 orchestrated coup d’état which overthrew Iran’s nationalist Prime Minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, the US and Iran signed a bilateral agreement for cooperation on the peaceful uses of nuclear technology. Or as Patrikarakos succinctly puts it, “Nuclear power was born in Iran; the USA was its midwife” (p16).
Iran’s nuclear programme did not, however, begin to make serious headway until the arrival on the scene of a young nuclear scientist by the name of Akbar Etemaad, the first head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI). It is Etemaad who takes centre stage in Patrikarakos’s first 100 pages which deals with the nuclear programme during the Pahlavi era. This part of the book is largely based on interviews and various other exchanges with Etemaad, who currently resides in France and continues to be a vociferous defender of Iran’s civilian nuclear programme.
Etemaad’s perspective is a vital one and Patrikarakos is perhaps the first in English to comprehensively elaborate the views of the ‘father of Iran’s nuclear programme’ and its place in the Shah’s strategic vision for the country. This part of the book will be of great interest to those after some historical perspective on the programme, and it often reads as it is was Etemaad’s personal memoir. Patrikarakos does not engage Etemaad’s account critically in the course of the book, nor seek out much by way of sources which either corroborate or contradict the latter’s narrative. Nor does Patrikarakos even reference an extensive oral history conducted by Gholamhossein Afkhami and Farrokh Ghaffari of the Foundation for Iranian Studies in 1982, and which has since been published in book form as The Memoir of Akbar Etemaad: Iran’s Nuclear Energy Programme 1965-1978. Given that the interview given by Etemaad to the Foundation for Iranian Studies was considerably closer to the events under discussion, it is surprising that Patrikarakos has not checked it to see if the accounts differ in any respect, or whether there is additional information which he might have missed in the course of his own conversations with Etemaad.
A related concern is that one is hard pressed to find reference to any contemporary Iranian press reports from the time and therefore there is no clear picture of how the programme was represented to the Iranian public at the time. Because of its almost memoir format, the programme and thoughts about it remain restricted to the dyad of the Shah and Etemaad, and even here much of the account of what the Shah thought regarding the programme has been relayed by Etemaad to Patrikarakos. Asadollah Alam, the Minister of the Royal Court, and his extensive six volume diary which offers the most extensive account of the Shah’s daily and political life also quite incredibly does not feature anywhere in the book or the bibliography. And even though Patrikarakos has chosen a constructivist approach to frame his narrative, he relies exclusively on the English translation of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s Mission for My Country to make his point.
In any case, there is little doubt that Etemaad was integral to the professionalization of Iran’s nuclear programme, which had previously been headed by bureaucrats with only a superficial grasp of the technical details. Moreover, Nuclear Iran makes clear what many had previously thought. In short, – that the nuclear programme was the Shah’s pet project and in many ways indispensable to his modernizing drive for Iran. “He alone,” writes Patrikarakos, “had made the decision to launch a nuclear programme with almost no government consultation” (p18). The High Council of Atomic Energy Policy and the Committee of Nuclear Energy, which were in theory responsible for the AEOI, met no more than a couple of times and “the government just didn’t interfere” (p23).
While Etemaad would hold regular tutorials with the Shah and instruct him on the ins and outs of nuclear power, he soon came to realise that “he was desperate…for the idea of nuclear energy; at times it seemed that it was not even nuclear energy in itself, just anything…that would modernize Iran as quickly as possible” (p20). As a result of the pride of place assigned by the Shah, the programme had a virtually limitless budget; a budget which became the envy of many Cabinet Ministers. For the most part, this was encouraged by Western powers, with the French Foreign Ministry even creating a Nuclear Attaché for their embassy in Tehran (p36). It was not until 1975, however, that Iran signed a contract with the West German firm, Kraftwerk Union AG to build Iran’s first power plant along the Persian Gulf near the coastal city of Bushehr. It was scheduled to be finished by 1980 and after some discussion it was determined that it would be a ‘turnkey’ project whereby Kraftwerk would simply hand over the reactor once the power plant was completed (p38). Other Western states such as France and Belgium were also eager to cash in on the lucrative business of helping the Shah realise his ambitious plans for Iran’s nuclear industry.
Nuclear Iran is perhaps must helpful when addressing the US’s proliferation fears vis-à-vis the Pahlavi era nuclear programme where “Commercial imperatives were repeatedly subordinated to non-proliferation goals” (p71). Despite bilateral agreements between the two countries such as the June 1974 provisional agreement to supply Iran with two nuclear power reactors and enriched uranium fuel, Washington was keen to convey its opposition to Iran obtaining the full nuclear fuel cycle, even though, in contrast to other developing nations such as India or Pakistan, it had signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in February 1970. Iran’s signing up to the NPT had been done essentially “to keep Washington happy” (p56). As Patrikarakos also makes clear, the US under Nixon, Ford and Carter, was also adamantly opposed to Iran undertaking uranium reprocessing, which has the potential to yield a plutonium route to the atomic bomb. But again the Shah relented under American pressure, and made it clear that Iran would not pursue the reprocessing of its spent uranium fuel. The US even demanded a ‘right of prior consent’ clause, which would compel the AEOI to run all nuclear activities past Washington, but also obtain US approval on what Iran could do with the spent fuel of any reactor Iran purchased from Washington (p76-77).
The historical perspective deftly provided by Patrikarakos makes an important contribution to the public debate over Iran’s nuclear programme when so when many seem to belabour under the misconception that the US simply gave the Shah’s nuclear ambitions blanket support without qualification. In fact, as Patrikarakos makes clear, the relationship between the two allies was at times strained as a result of US non-proliferation policy. Carter’s Non-Proliferation Act of 1978 and the categorical refusal of Dixie Lee Ray, head of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, categorical to accept Iran’s right to the fuel cycle (p79), are two of several examples.
Regarding the Shah and nuclear weapons, Patrikarakos, based on his correspondences with Etemaad, shows that the Shah had entertained the possibility of pursuing weaponization, if other regional states decided upon such a path. This was all the more critical after India’s 1974 nuclear test. However, in reality no concrete steps were taken to weaponize Iran’s nuclear programme (p69) and if the decision were ever to be made it was at least a decade away from a bomb. The Shah instead chose to focus on conventional weaponry, and bought up state of the art armaments like no other autocrat of the developing world in the 1970s. However, given the Shah’s grandiose vision for Iran, the thought of “20 or 30 ridiculous little countries” developing nuclear weapons was more than the Shah could bear. If it ever occurred, he candidly told The New York Times in September 1975, a serious rethinking would be in order (p62, 68). Unlike the Islamic Republic today, the Pahlavi era nuclear programme never developed installations for uranium enrichment, and was focused on building power plants in order to reduce domestic oil consumption, in order to bolster the country’s foreign currency reserves. The Shah’s programme thus never developed a uranium path to a nuclear weapon (p72). In contrast, western, but also regional fears today revolve around the fact that the Islamic Republic has indeed mastered the nuclear fuel cycle, and while Iran is not enriching uranium beyond 19.75%, which technically speaking is Low Enriched Uranium (LEU), a political decision could change all that, in a short space of time. In short, the Islamic Republic’s ability to produce weapons grade uranium is today effectively a political decision, and not a matter of technical know-how, though to do so, would obviously violate its treaty obligations under the NPT.
I have focused more on the part of the book which deals with the Pahlavi era because it is the better researched part of the book, and largely informed by an individual, namely Akbar Etemaad, who knew pretty much everything there was to know about the nuclear programme. This is particularly so as it appears that the programme at the time was under the charge of essentially two people, Etemaad and his boss, the Shah. I also take this part of the book to be Patrikarakos’s most important contribution to the ongoing public debate vis-à-vis the Iranian nuclear programme. By placing it in its necessary historical context, we are able to see that the Islamic Republic is not an anomaly in its almost obsessive clinging to what it claims as its ‘inviolable right to peaceful nuclear energy’, but is in an important respect trying to build on the technological advances and progress made by the technocrats of the Pahlavi era, and claim Iran’s ‘rightful’ place in the regional order.
By chapter six, Nuclear Iran starts to address the Iranian Revolution of 1978-79 and the emergence of the hierocratic, Islamist state led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and it is here that things get more nebulous and difficult to reconstruct. The Iranian officials interviewed are sparse e.g. Ali Asghar Soltanieh, and / or still beholden to the official line we hear every day in the Western press, or arguably of little relevance e.g. Mohsen Sazegara, a low ranking official in the early eighties, a self-styled founder (amongst others) of the Revolutionary Guards, turned Reformist and exiled activist. Patrikarakos’ use of interviews with Western officials is far more illuminating. For example, his extensive reliance on interviews with Ambassador Peter Jenkins, the UK’s ambassador to the IAEA during the Islamic Republic’s negotiations with the EU3, but also other figures such as Ambassador John Bolton, the US ambassador to the UN under the Bush administration, offer a window into Western policymakers’ thinking at the time, and their disparate attitudes and approaches to the Iranian nuclear quandary.
A key point on which Nuclear Iran leaves one dissatisfied is the ideational-constructivist or identity politics approach to understanding Iran’s nuclear programme in the context of both the Pahlavi monarchical regime and the Islamic Republic. The main issue is that in the absence of any real depth in terms of either sources or analysis with respect to the ideational constructs of Pahlavi Iran and the Islamic Republic, it can only leave the intellectual historian bemused, while the often sketchy approach to the two distinct regimes’ actual process of political decision making and policy formation, will leave the political historian demanding greater detail on the thinking of the Iranian elite, beyond rehashed statements at the UN or IAEA denouncing the ‘injustice’ of the international order and ‘American hegemony’. This is especially the case regarding the post-revolutionary regime of the Islamic Republic.
At root, the issue is that while Patrikarakos ably weaves an assortment of official statements into a coherent narrative, they ultimately do not offer much insight into what was actually happening behind the scenes and the discussions which were unfolding at the time within the Iranian elite. For instance, he misses many important details such as the fact that Sadeq Tabatabai, a Deputy Prime Minister and relative of Khomeini, had approached the German Chancellor about restarting work at Bushehr as early as October 1979. Snippets and hints which occasionally featured in the contemporary Iranian press remain underutilized if utilized at all. For instance, none of former President Ali-Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani’s several volumes of memoirs for the 1980s are used, nor are any of his interview collections drawn upon. This is especially curious since by all accounts the role of Rafsanjani, the self-styled ‘Commander of the Reconstruction’, was of great importance to the nuclear programme’s development in the late eighties and early nineties.
Instead Patrikarakos for the most part relies on secondary literature and / or more recent interviews he has conducted with Western officials, many of whom remain anonymous. A good example is when Patrikarakos attributes a quote to the current Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei dating back to 1984, when the latter was President, then a far weaker institution than it is today, stating that “a nuclear arsenal would serve Iran as a ‘deterrent in the hands of God’s soldiers’” (p121). For such a sensitive admission, one would expect a primary source of some description or at the very least the original source as cited in another work. Instead we find a contentious 2012 report published by the Institute for Science and International Security, which while providing some useful analysis of the technical dimensions of Iran’s nuclear programme, is far from conversant in the history of the Islamic Republic. David Albright’s book Peddling Peril: How the Secret Nuclear Trade Arms America’s Enemies, who also happens to be the head of ISIS is then cited immediately after to attribute another quote to Khamenei, the original source for which we are left in the dark.
As many others have argued previously, the Shah saw himself as a benevolent leader and moderniser who sought to ‘restore’ Iran to the glory of its ancient past, while endeavouring to modernize his country along Western lines, as his father had done before him. The Islamic Republic, by contrast was born of a third wordlist, revolutionary Islamist creed, which advocated principles of self-determination and independence against foreign subjugation. Setting out these narratives certainly proves useful for context and Patrikarikos was right to present them, but such an approach becomes problematic when most if not all state and policy elite behaviour is depicted as a function of these overarching narratives. Moreover, while reading Nuclear Iran, one often finds these narratives being used to excuse lack of detail a propos institutional dynamics and political jockeying constitutive of the decision-making process and instead paint broad strokes and more general policy guidelines, which have been recounted countless times in the existing literature.
This is particularly the case in his overview of the nuclear diplomacy of the Islamic Republic, where the overwhelming majority of the theocratic state’s motivations are attributed to the Iranian intellectual, who was not in any straightforward sense a “secular Marxist” (p93) as Patrikarakos states, Jalal Al-e Ahmad. The latter’s conceptualization of ‘Gharbzadegi’ or Westoxification and even the Shi’i juridical and mystical theory of velayat-e faqih or the Guardianship of the Jurisconsult, the governing principal of the Islamic Republic of Iran which underwrites clerical rule, are repeatedly invoked to explain Iranian nuclear policy.
While Westoxification, or the Islamic Republic’s anti-Western ideology is repeatedly mentioned, the former Supreme National Security Council Chief (SNSC), Hassan Rowhani’s 1000 page volume Amniyat-e melli va diplomasi-ye hasteh’i, it is hardly used. There is only a single reference in the entirety of the footnotes, when the source is our best primary account thus far by a senior Iranian official. Even Ambassador Hossein Mousavian’s book, The Iranian Nuclear Crisis: A Memoir, another account by an important former member of Iran’s nuclear negotiating team and foreign policy establishment, hardly makes an appearance.
In fact, the Rowhani and Mousavian memoirs, two key players on the Iranian side, feature together in a single footnote (though Mousavian is mentioned once more in the footnotes), which verifies that in the course of the negotiations which led to Iran’s temporary suspension of uranium enrichment in October 2004, Rowhani, phoned both the Supreme Leader’s office and President Mohammad Khatami (p313), both of whom approved his making every effort to ensure the talks did not break down. Unfortunately, Patrikarakos barely scratches the surface of these sources, above all the Rowhani which is a veritable treasure trove as regards his tenure as head of the SNSC, and really should have made a great deal more use of it. Finally, the absence of a readily available work, former IAEA chief, Mohamed ElBaradei’s The Age of Deception: Nuclear Diplomacy in Treacherous Times, is surprising to say the least, especially since ElBaradei’s book has more chapters dedicated to Iran and his negotiations and discussions with Iranian officials, than any other country.
Patrikarakos is very good at explaining the basics of Iran’s nuclear programme in a way that is accessible to the uninitiated reader,. His presentation of some of the technical questions surrounding the Islamic Republic’s nuclear programme provide ample clarification. He outlines much of the alleged evidence which forms the basis of Western allegations that Iran had in the past engaged in research and experiments indicative of potential efforts to weaponize the nuclear programme e.g. the experiments with Polonium-210 (p203), the contentious laptop putatively handed over to the US by a ‘walk in’ which allegedly contained evidence that Iran had partaken in a number of research efforts aimed at weaponizing the programme. There is surprisingly no mention of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in the book, the scientist affiliated to the Revolutionary Guards who allegedly headed the Iranian weapons programme at the Physics Research Center in Lavizan and now heads the Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research . The weapons programme currently lays dormant and has done so since approximately 2003. More research on this issue will probably elude us for many years to come, exactly because of its highly sensitive nature, but it should have at least been mentioned and perhaps probed further.
The remainder of the book competently traverses the various diplomatic near misses and lost opportunities such as the Vienna proposal of October 2009 and May 2010 Tehran Declaration concluded by Iran, Brazil and Turkey. But to be honest, Trita Parsi’s A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama’s Diplomacy with Iran which is the best and most comprehensive book thus far on Obama’s Iran policy is superior on this score, but also left unreferenced and interviews many more of the personalities who were central to the various diplomatic wranglings in question.
At the end of the book, Patrikarakos tells readers that ultimately Iran is in pursuit of a nuclear capability, which essentially amounts to the ability to build a nuclear weapon in a short space of time if the political leadership deems it necessary. This same conclusion was drawn by most level-headed analysts some years ago. But he also frames the programme well in terms of the Iranian elite’s recurring idea of their country’s ‘rightful place’ in the region and broader world. He successfully illustrates how much of Iran’s so-called “nuclear nationalism” stems less from a drive to overthrow the international order and more from a desire to have Iran’s value as a regional player incorporated into the security architecture of the region, and thereby recognised by the Western powers.
Nuclear Iran is certainly a welcome contribution which should be read by all those interested in one of the most important international deadlocks of the 21st century, but the subject matter, particularly its contemporary nature, militates against the prospect of a fully-fledged history and academic treatment of the subject. Errors in transliteration, media cliches such as regular references to ‘mullahs’ as a shorthand for the IRI establishment, and the regular regurgitation of tropes such as that of ‘hardliners vs. reformers’ give Nuclear Iran the air of being a serious piece of journalism, which is to be superseded in the years to come, rather than an enduring historical tome. It is however a very readable work on perhaps the burning foreign policy issue of the day. Despite the overwhelming amount of sensationalist drivel written on the subject, Patrikarakos has managed to write a largely balanced and fair account of the programme to date. It’s unlikely that we will see a proper history of the programme, particularly under the Islamic Republic, until some years after this impasse has finally been resolved and relegated to the historical archive.
Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi is the editor of Iran Pulse at the New York-based website, Al Monitor. He was formerly an Iran Researcher at Oxford Research Group and is currently a doctoral researcher of Modern Middle Eastern Studies with a focus on post-revolutionary Iran at Queen’s College, University of Oxford. He has published on Iranian political affairs in numerous venues, including Foreign Policy, Al-Jazeera English, The Guardian, Al-Monitor, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Lobe Log, e-International Relations, PBS Frontline: Tehran Bureau, amongst others.
The MEC Blog offers opinion pieces from time to time. MEC does not endorse the content of pieces, nor do they reflect any corporate view of the MEC.
Nuclear Iran: The Birth of an Atomic State
by David Patrikarakos
London: LB. Tauris, 2012. 340 pp. $28.
Reviewed by Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi
Middle East Quarterly
Summer 2013
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Patrikarakos, a London based journalist, traces the history of Iran's nuclear program from the days of the shah up to the months preceding the 2012 U.S. presidential election. He concludes that despite changes in regimes, the Iranian nuclear program is unalterably linked to Iranian identity and fundamentally revolves around a desire to assert what is seen by Iranians as their country's "rightful place" in the world.
For the shah, a nuclear program was foremost a symbol of modernity. Even as he displayed great pride in Iran's ancient history, he also viewed following in the path of the West as desirable and attainable. A nuclear program was just one aspect of that impulse. Under the Islamic Republic, there is the identical goal of garnering respect in the regional and wider international order, but the determination to press forward with the nuclear program, despite sanctions and threats, is meant to signal a rejection of past dependence on the West, or worse,submission to it.
Patrikarakos debunks some common misconceptions. Most notably, while it is often said that the shah sought nuclear weapons, the author demonstrates that he ultimately exercised restraint, opting for essentially a symbolic civilian program, primarily because he did not wish to antagonize Washington, which did not back his pursuit. As for the Islamic Republic, Patrikarakos ably argues that its nuclear program contrasts with the shah's in that, at the minimum, nuclear weapons capability is being sought.
Some problems exist as in the author's use of sources. Although Patrikarakos shows familiarity with primary media sources in present day Iran, this is conspicuously absent from his account of the nuclear program under the shah. More generally, there is a slight overdependence on secondary sources in his post- 1979 revolution account when there is still an abundance of primary Iranian material to explore (e.g., the writings of former president Rafsanjani on the 1980s).
Overall, however, Nuclear Iran is a well-researched, highly accessible work for the general reader or academic specialist seeking to understand the controversies surrounding Iran's nuclear program.