NORMA PERCY has ways of making you talk. Persuasiveness served the American-born, London-based television producer well in the past, with such films as “The Death of Yugoslavia” and “Israel and the Arabs: Elusive Peace”. She has done it again in her newest venture, a three-part series on Iran's tricky relationship with America and Europe.

AFP

The man who started it all

“Iran and the West” will be broadcast in Britain by the BBC, starting on February 7th, although it is not clear yet whether it will also be shown on the corporation's new Persian TV channel, which was launched last month. The series has been sold in 13 countries and will be aired in the coming weeks in America, Japan, Canada, Australia and much of western Europe.

Ms Percy's model is to persuade the main participants—presidents, foreign ministers, generals and close advisers—to describe what they did at crucial moments of political crisis. The key lies in obtaining the first interviews. After that, few want to be left out. The main players have their say and viewers get a good idea of how those involved come to make complex decisions about foreign policy and realpolitik and then undo the damage they cause.

Three years in the making and finished just days before the 30th anniversary of Ayatollah Khomeini's return from exile to Tehran on February 1st (see article), “Iran and the West” shows how Khomeini changed the world by taking Iran and making it the inspiration for a new and uncompromising strand of Islam. It conveys the strains, for both Iran and America, of dealing with the daily tumult of the Islamic revolution and the long siege of the American embassy in Tehran. And it goes on to analyse the fallout from the Iran-Iraq war, the crucial role Iran played in creating Hizbullah, the Shiite militia's wrongdoings in Lebanon, as well as Iran's more recent meddling in Iraq and its ambitions to join the small club of nuclear nations.

By the mid-1980s the hatred between Iran and the West was so strong that the normal rules governing how states behave towards each other were set aside. Europe and America armed Iran's foe, Saddam Hussein, and turned a blind eye when he used chemical weapons on Iranian troops as well his own people. Yet, far from being an anti-Iranian polemic, “Iran and the West” chronicles three decades of mistakes, misunderstandings and missed opportunities, especially in the relationship with America. Two long interviews—with Hashemi Rafsanjani, Iran's reformist president from 1989 until 1997, and his successor, Muhammad Khatami—obtained at the eleventh hour and in the face of disapproval from the Iranian Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, add depth and crucial detail to a narrative that could so easily have been too Western.

The film highlights several vital events. Two Iranian revolutionary guards describe organising the takeover of the American embassy and confirm what others maintain, that, contrary to rumour, the current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, refused to be involved in the siege. Sheikh Subhi al-Tufeyli, Hizbullah's first secretary-general, recounts how the release of three French hostages from Lebanon in 1988 had been delayed for two years at the behest of the French right-wing opposition parties who wanted to destabilise President François Mitterrand's Socialist Party and help Jacques Chirac become prime minister. Vladimir Putin, then Russia's president, describes how, after the assassination of Ahmad Shah Massoud, an Afghan warlord, in early September 2001, he telephoned the American president, George Bush, to warn him that al-Qaeda was planning “something big”. The attack on the twin towers happened the next day. Documentary-making at its best.