IF THE UNITED STATES takes military action to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, planning for which has been much speculated about but denied by the Bush administration, who will deserve the blame? The Iranian regime, for its brazen defiance of the international ban on nuclear proliferation? America’s neoconservatives, itching to remake the Middle East? Or Azar Nafisi, the Iranian expatriate author of the 2003 women’s book-club fave ‘‘Reading Lolita in Tehran’’?
Hamid Dabashi, a professor of Iranian studies at Columbia University, would blame all three, but it’s his vituperative attack on Nafisi that earned him a spot this month on the cover of the Chronicle of Higher Education.
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