A fragile peace currently exists between the US, Israel and Iran after June’s 12-day war which brought US and Israeli bombs down on Iranian nuclear sites, military bases and intelligence chiefs; and Iranian missiles thudding into Israel. It is anybody’s guess how long this ceasefire will last.
For those seeking to understand this seemingly endless state of conflict between Israel, the US and Iran, and the blood-soaked rivalries that drive conflict in the Middle East today, Scott Anderson’s new book is a good place to start. King of Kings recounts how imperial Pahlavi Iran went from a hyper-rich, secular-leaning “Peacock” throne, firmly allied to the west, a playground for American oil executives, to the dour, repressive Islamist autocracy we know today, locked in perpetual conflict within and without its borders, isolated and seeking a nuclear bomb.
This is the story of the 1979 Islamic revolution, told from the late 1960s to 1980. It was a revolution that changed the Middle East and the world, bringing politically motivated Islamist violence to all our streets, and yet no one in power saw it coming until it was too late.
War correspondent, novelist and journalist Anderson brilliantly tells this tale of greed, paranoia and hubris from four perspectives: the Tehran court and the US state department, both wilfully blind to the street and paralysed by policy inertia; Khomeini’s circle of naive revolutionaries; and one American who did see it coming, but whose sounding of the alarm was ignored.
Revolutions are notoriously difficult for governments to spot. Those who are closest to the centres of power are often the last to see it coming. Blindsided by policy biases, money blinkers and “groupthink”, diplomats the world over are cautioned against “crying wolf”. Intelligence agencies too are only really tasked to spy on the centres of power, not the street, where revolutionary ideas circulate and breathe. “As US-Iranian relations grew steadily closer, so did the desire of successive American ambassadors to stay on His Majesty’s good side, and the more they discouraged their underlings from consorting with malcontents,” writes Anderson. Why let the truth get in the way of a good policy?
In December 1977, US President Jimmy Carter visited Tehran and gave a speech in which he praised the shah’s capable stewardship of his kingdom, calling Iran an “island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world”. The following year was anything but stable; 1978 brought riots, crackdowns, arson and confusing periods when everything seemed to die down, all against the backdrop of Khomeini’s uncompromising message of “the shah must go”. Which he did, on January 16 1979, after 12 months of dithering, shuffling his cabinet and deciding against unleashing the full force of his military on the people of Iran.
Far from palace dinners and the White House, we encounter the humble hero of Anderson’s story. Michael Metrinko, a rather awkward Peace Corps volunteer turned state department official who not only spoke Farsi — unlike his colleagues — but also dared to venture outside and talk with real Iranians, beyond the bubbles of power. His repeated warnings about the widespread unpopularity of the shah and his corrupt cronies were met with frustration from his more senior, urbane, state-department colleagues for whom the status quo — the shah’s all-consuming obsession with buying US weapons and his regime’s staunchly pro-Washington stance at the height of the cold war — was to be protected at all costs.
On one occasion, Metrinko, who had seen first-hand the ominous Tabriz uprising of 1978, itself a response to similar events in Qom, a city home to clerics and seminaries, urgently reported what he had seen to his ambassador William Sullivan in Tehran. Sullivan reprimanded Metrinko for his temerity, chided him for his hysteria, and assured Washington that the shah’s power was in no way threatened by street protests, strikes or the angry rhetoric of an obscure exiled cleric called Ayatollah Khomeini.
Even more farcical was the time when, at the end of 1978, Metrinko was summoned to Washington to discuss his reporting, only to be told that the meeting’s top-secret classification disqualified him from attending. (Having served in the UK government, I can believe this. Fluency in a language, plus problematic views that test the orthodoxy, equals a threat to be neutralised rather than an asset to be harnessed.)
Revolutions are about dislocation and frustrated expectations as much as they are about high ideals. The petrodollar boom that Iran experienced in the 1970s, a result of the shah’s canny stewardship of the Opec cartel and America’s transition to importing oil, caused both of those things. A stratum of wealth emerged at the top of Iranian society that became increasingly divorced from ordinary citizens, who flocked to the big cities in search of riches only to find unemployment and disappointment.
As oil prices rose, the Pahlavi court went on a spending spree (weapons, art and more weapons), which created a cycle of corruption, excess and venality. Its most famous expression was the opulent 1971 celebrations marking the 2,500th anniversary of the Persian empire (estimated by the BBC to have cost $120mn). All this against the backdrop of an overheating economy that simply could not sustain itself when oil prices dipped.
Accordingly, in the decade leading up to 1979, there was a sense of a lost identity amid the onslaught of modernisation foisted on Iranian people by a greedy elite. There were strikes and bread riots. Khomeini was only one of several secular and religious figures who lamented the loss of a more innocent age, for despite the boom, it benefited only the elites and those lucky enough to be in their orbit.
It was into this dislocated, disappointed, disillusioned space that Ayatollah Khomeini’s simple homespun truths about Islam and the excessive materialism of the shah and his American allies resonated. Khomeini’s radically political views (voiced from exile in Iraq and France) went against the grain of Shia thinking, placing him outside the orthodoxy of his sect.
Yet as the author also shows, Khomeini’s circle of modernising leftists, Ebrahim Yazdi, Sadegh Ghotbzadeh and Mehdi Bazargan, purposefully obfuscated Khomeini’s more blood-soaked and violent views. They saw him as a useful idiot to be shuffled off to Qom once the real business of the revolution was complete. Unfortunately for them, they were the useful idiots who ended up, variously, exiled, executed or sidelined.
Anderson ends his story with the US embassy siege of 1979, in which Islamic revolutionaries held US embassy staff hostage for 444 days. Reading these final pages, I couldn’t help but reflect on where Iran is today in its revolutionary cycle, a quest for stability and prosperity at home and power in the region that began with the constitutional revolution of 1906, itself a strangled attempt at modernisation.
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Instead of the boom and bust of the 1970s, with that decade’s frustrated aspirations and social dislocation, today’s Iran has seen a slow, steady descent into unemployment, cronyism and inflation. And where today is the rising expectation gap, the acute dislocation? Where, crucially, is the strident voice that can credibly challenge the Islamic republic on the terrain of Iranian nationalism, or that can harness the deep strains of cultural Shiism and associated notions of martyrdom and resistance to tyranny that we see in Shia Islam and Persian myth? Nowhere, I fear, despite the millions of Iranians who hate the repressive theocratic kleptocracy that is the Islamic republic.
Yet for all the darkness of revolutions — those violent places where noble ideas go to die — are we now in a darker place, where they are simply out of reach? Autocracies the world over, the most careful students of revolutions, have learnt the lessons of the shah and others like him who sought to reform, who sought compromise and a dialogue with their opponents. The Islamic republic of today, famous for its assassination of opposition figures at home and abroad, is unlikely to make the same mistakes as Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, a humane, insecure and fatally weak leader who blinked first.
King of Kings: The Fall of the Shah, the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the Unmaking of the Modern Middle East by Scott Anderson Hutchinson Heinemann £25/Doubleday $35, 512 pages
Charlie Gammell is a former British diplomat who served across the Middle East and is the author of ‘The Pearl of Khorasan: A History of Herat’
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