Both Your Houses: Iran, America, and the Wages of Unchecked Power

A reckoning with the Iran war from the Persian-American engineer who has spent a career studying how complex systems succeed or fail.In Both Your Houses: Iran, America, and the Wages of Unchecked Power, Massoud Amin confronts the war between Iran, Israel, and the United States, and the civilians caught beneath it.Writing from a dual vantage as an Iranian-born American trained to see how systems break, Amin traces the chain that led to catastrophe. Iran's thwarted democracies. The 1953 coup. The architecture of sanctions was designed to inflict economic pain rather than produce diplomacy—the destruction of the JCPOA while the IAEA was certifying Iranian compliance. The deliberate engineering of economic collapse was admitted under oath before the Senate. The bombing of a diplomatic breakthrough three nights after Oman announced it—the girls of Minab who were in school that morning and were not there by the afternoon.This is not a partisan brief. It is a moral and structural reckoning with what happens when power, under any flag, stops answering to human dignity.Drawing on Middle East history, geopolitics, energy infrastructure, human rights, and diaspora witness, Both Your Houses asks the questions most books avoid. What was the war really about? Who paid for it? What did diplomacy almost achieve? What might a just future for Iran still require?For readers of Iran, U.S. foreign policy, the Israel-Iran war, sanctions, war powers, democracy, and the politics of the modern Middle East and beyond. Read more