Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

When the world was disputing about how best to deal with Saddam Hussein along came Kenneth Pollack with The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq. In the heat of that venomous debate, Pollack presented a very coherent argument for military intervention to achieve disarmament and regime change. Now Pollack is back with The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America and again he's arguing for change but with the significant difference that he regards all the options available to the US as bad.

Still, the growing row about how best to deal with the mullahs does sound eerily familiar? You know: hawks calling for strikes to prevent an enemy from acquiring WMD, exiles providing intelligence about secret weapons programs and the Europeans demanding a diplomatic solution. And it's not only recently familiar; it's old familiar.

In Chapter 9, "Collision Course", Pollack looks back at the first Clinton administration's policy towards Iran called "Dual Containment", which was designed to "constrain Iran's ability to make trouble in the Middle East". However, America's Dual Containment ran smack up against Europe's policy towards Iran called "Critical Dialogue". Writes Pollack:

"The Critical Dialogue reflected a fundamentally different philosophy from the American approach... Europe's approach, or so its diplomats claimed, was to show Iran that there were rewards for acting as a good citizen of the world. Whether anyone believed this is just unclear. In practice, the Critical Dialogue was little more than a façade for European trade with Iran despite Iran's persistence in taking actions that Europe found distasteful or abhorrent."

Such "actions" included the death sentence against the author Salman Rushdie, the 1991 assassination of ex-Prime Minister Shapour Bakhtiar in Paris and the brutal murder by Iranian agents of four Kurdish dissidents at the Mykonos Restaurant in Berlin in September 1992. In the end, says Pollack:

"Dual Containment failed to change Iranian behaviour because it was a policy that relied only on sticks and, especially early on, rather small sticks at that. Critical Dialogue similarly failed (if it ever was truly meant to try to change Iranian behaviour) because it was a policy of nothing but enormous carrots that were provided regardless of what Iran did."

Talking of carrots and sticks, in yesterday's Guardian, Timothy Garton Ash was telling readers to "First know your donkey" in a piece subtitled "Ukraine is the right way to spread freedom, Iraq the wrong way." Referring to Iran, he wrote: "If another crisis of the west is to be avoided, Europe and America have to agree a joint approach, with more European sticks and more American carrots." That's right, more sticks, more carrots. And if the old diet and discipline don't work, what then? Sheaves of corn from Nebraska? Buckets of potatoes from Idaho? The Irish cudgel? The English truncheon? Maybe the donkey has a better memory than Timothy Garton Ash and it won't budge, just as it didn't budge a decade ago. What then?

AUSCHWITZ We have marked the week of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz here with a series of diary entries from those who chronicled what happened some six decades ago. To finish, then, this observation by Nella Last:

6 May 1945 "Last week I would not go to see the Belsen horror-camp pictures. I felt the ones in paper quite dreadful enough. They were shown again tonight, as requested by someone. I looked in such pity, marvelling how human beings could have clung to life: the poor survivors must have had both a good constitution and a great will to live. What kept them alive so long before they dropped as pitiful skeletons? Did their minds go first, I wonder, their reasoning leaving nothing but the shell to perish slowly, like a house left untenanted? Did their pitiful cries and prayers rise into the night to a God who seemed deaf and pitiless as their cruel jailers?"

Nella Last (1909-1966) was a housewife from Barrow in England. She started a diary in 1933 and continued it for almost 30 years. Her writing became part of the "Mass Observation Archive", a project set up to record "the voice of the people". She left a detailed account of her life, comprising over two million words, part of which the BBC has made available online as The War Diary of Nella Last.