Both Your Houses

A timely, deeply informed account of the Iran war-and the civilians trapped inside it.

In Both Your Houses: Iran, America, and the Wages of Unchecked Power, Persian-American systems scientist Massoud Amin brings together history, witness, and political analysis to confront one of the defining crises of our time: the war between Iran, Israel, and the United States-and the terrible price paid by ordinary people.

Writing from the dual vantage point of an Iranian-born American and a scholar of how systems succeed and fail, Amin traces the long arc that led to catastrophe: Iran's democratic aspirations, the 1953 coup, the architecture of sanctions, the destruction of diplomacy, the collapse of public trust, and the human consequences of decisions made far above the lives they shattered. The result is not a partisan brief, but a morally serious reckoning with what happens when power-under any flag-stops answering to human dignity.

Blending Middle East history, geopolitics, foreign policy, human rights, diaspora experience, and eyewitness moral clarity, Both Your Houses asks the questions most books avoid: What was the war really about? Who paid for it? What did diplomacy almost achieve? And what might a just future for Iran still require?

For readers of books on Iran, U.S. foreign policy, Israel-Iran conflict, democracy, sanctions, war powers, and Middle East political history, this is a powerful and urgent work of witness.