Since the Iranian revolution of 1979, no single issue has preoccupied the Iranian leadership as much as the United States, both in quality and quantity. Iran’s conversation about the United States has been both intensive and extensive, engaging various administrations, political factions, leaders and prominent elites. This paper is a systematic attempt to make sense out of this conversation. It identifies four key foundational pillars into which this extensive and diverse conversation can be organized. The paper investigates the genealogy and the evolution of each pillar. All four images of the United States are, in the Iranian narrative, connected to discussions of concrete policy issues that have engaged the two countries, and act individually and collectively as a prism through which US attitudes towards Iran and the Iranian response to it have been depicted and articulated in the public narrative.

The objective of this study is to analyze how Iran’s security policy toward Middle east and its nuclear negotiations have been formulated since 9. 11. In particular, the study focuses on the relationship between Iran’s nuclear policy particularly under the Ahmadinejad administration and Iran’s strategy toward the stabilization of the Middle East. The paper attempts ultimately to hypothesize that Iran’s policy for nuclear negotiations with the IAEA and other stakeholders has been conceived within the context of Iran’s security strategy in the Middle East. The on-going instability and the increasing insurgency in Afghanistan as well as international concern about Iraq’s growing disintegration of state governance have been one of the most significant security concerns for the international community. The so-called nuclear impasse of nuclear negotiations with Iran has also been considered as one of major threats to peace and stability in the Middle East. However, Iran’s nuclear development policy has been often discussed as a separate subject from Iran’s seucirty policy in the Middle East. How has the change in Iran’s internal governance structure shaped Iran’s security policy since March 2003? To what extent the US and Iran have shared their political and security interests in the stabilization in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan? How has Iran exercised its negotiation power in the nuclear negotiations since March 2003 when the US-led military campaign in Iraq started? How has Iran’s strategy in its nuclear negotiations been linked with Iran’s both cooperative and conflicted policy toward the US in the Middle East stability? How has the on-going civil society movements in the Arab countires change the nature and the determinants of the US-Iran relationship? These questions will be answered in this paper. This paper is based on both English and Persian written sources relevant to Iran’s security policy as well as the author’s interviews with Iran’s foreign policymakers that were conducted in the summer, 2008, 2009 and 2010. This study attempts to discuss some prospects for the future relationship between the US and Iran in the changing variables of factors that have shaped and will shape the relationship in the contemporary Middle East politics.

This paper assesses how Saddam Hussein thought that Iraqi acquisition of nuclear weapons would affect Iraq’s behavior toward Israel and the Palestinians. It draws heavily on newly available records from Saddam’s Iraq, including audio recordings of meetings between Saddam and his inner circle. Digital copies of these records were accessed at the National Defense University’s Conflict Records Research Center. The paper also draws on oral histories of senior Iraqi officials and declassified records of US origin. From the time of Saddam’s political ascendancy in the 1960s, Saddam saw Israel as a key threat to his regime. Saddam believed that Israel posed a military threat, prevented formation of a unified Arab state, and provided a base for imperialism. Anti-Semitic tracts such as "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" contributed to Saddam’s worldview in which Jews and Zionists played a role in virtually all of Iraq’s afflictions. Captured recordings of meetings between Saddam and his inner circle reveal that Saddam viewed acquisition of nuclear weapons as a prerequisite to conventional warfare with Israel. Saddam did not intend to attack Israel with nuclear weapons; rather, he wanted a nuclear arsenal to deter Israeli nuclear blackmail (and use), thereby enabling Iraqi liberation of Israel’s post-1967 territories. In the case of Saddam’s Iraq, acquisition of nuclear weapons would have underwritten more aggressive Iraqi policies at lower levels of violence. This paper has important implications for theoretical debates dealing with why states pursue nuclear weapons, the “stability-instability paradox,” and the emerging “nuclear alarmism” literature. It also offers important historical insights and policy implications.