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Both Your Houses

Iran, America, and the Wages of Unchecked Power

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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, systems scientist and Iranian-born American scholar Massoud Amin turns four decades of work on how complex systems fail toward the deadliest cascade of our time: the war between Iran, Israel, and the United States.

He traces the chain of decisions that made each step inevitable to those who made it and inexplicable to those who paid for it: the 1953 coup, the destruction of the JCPOA after eight IAEA certifications of compliance, the deliberate engineering of economic collapse (later admitted under oath before the Senate), and the bombing of a diplomatic breakthrough just three nights after Oman announced it, including the killing of 168 girls of Minab who were in school that morning.

The book keeps civilians at the center of the story and asks the questions most accounts avoid: What was the war really about? Who paid for it? What did diplomacy almost achieve? Grounded in public record, historical depth, and lived witness, Both Your Houses, is a moral and structural reckoning with what happens when power, under any flag, stops answering to human dignity.

Description

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.

Product Details

PublishedApril 26, 2026
ImprintWisdom Editions
LanguageEnglish
Print length315
ISBN-13978-1962834742
Dimensions6 x 0.79 x 9 inches