165 CAIRO REVIEW 10/2013 Books By Danny Postel A Case for Rapprochement, Badly Argued Stumbling to Tehran Going to Tehran: Why the United States Must Come to Terms with the Islamic Republic of Iran. By Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett. Metro- politan Books, 2013. 496 pp. I vividly recall the excitement those of us in Chicago’s No War on Iran Coalition felt in October 2007 when Esquire published a proile—as the teaser text read—of two “former high-ranking policy experts from the Bush administration [who] say the U.S. has been gearing up for a war with Iran for years, despite claiming otherwise.” It was one of those moments that left-wingers revel in, when igures from inside the national security apparatus come out of the woodwork and echo what those of us agitating on the outside have been saying, but with a gravitas and on a stage that antiwar voices can only dream of having. The Leveretts were consummate insiders; both had served in the State Department as well as on the National Security Council, and Flynt also had been a senior analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency. Richard N. Haass, a pillar of the American foreign policy establishment (currently president of the Council on Foreign Relations), was the best man at their wedding. They had left the George W. Bush administration in 2003 “because of disagreements over Middle East policy and the conduct of the war on terror,” as Flynt reports on his website. Like many realists, they had locked horns with the administration’s increasingly belligerent neocon faction. On Iran, they had become outspoken critics of the warpath the administration seemed to be on; a course they warned was cataclysmic. The Esquire article went viral in antiwar circles. The leftosphere ate it up. I printed out several copies of it to hand out at meetings of our group. The Leveretts provided intel- lectual catnip for those of us arguing and organizing against a U.S. attack on Iran, which in that inal year or so of the Bush era felt like a very real prospect. Less than two years later, the Washington power couple made waves of a very different sort, and alienated many of their erstwhile admirers. In the summer of