A fragile peace currently exists between the US, Israel and Iran after June\u2019s 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\u2019s guess how long this ceasefire will last. <\/p>\n
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\u2019s new book is a good place to start. King of Kings<\/em> recounts how imperial Pahlavi Iran went from a hyper-rich, secular-leaning \u201cPeacock\u201d 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. <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s circle of naive revolutionaries; and one American who did see it coming, but whose sounding of the alarm was ignored. <\/p>\n 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 \u201cgroupthink\u201d, diplomats the world over are cautioned against \u201ccrying wolf\u201d. Intelligence agencies too are only really tasked to spy on the centres of power, not the street, where revolutionary ideas circulate and breathe. \u201cAs US-Iranian relations grew steadily closer, so did the desire of successive American ambassadors to stay on His Majesty\u2019s good side, and the more they discouraged their underlings from consorting with malcontents,\u201d writes Anderson. Why let the truth get in the way of a good policy?<\/p>\n In December 1977, US President Jimmy Carter visited Tehran and gave a speech in which he praised the shah\u2019s capable stewardship of his kingdom, calling Iran an \u201cisland of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world\u201d. 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\u2019s uncompromising message of \u201cthe shah must go\u201d. 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. <\/p>\n Far from palace dinners and the White House, we encounter the humble hero of Anderson\u2019s story. Michael Metrinko, a rather awkward Peace Corps volunteer turned state department official who not only spoke Farsi \u2014 unlike his colleagues \u2014 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 \u2014 the shah\u2019s all-consuming obsession with buying US weapons and his regime\u2019s staunchly pro-Washington stance at the height of the cold war \u2014 was to be protected at all costs.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s power was in no way threatened by street protests, strikes or the angry rhetoric of an obscure exiled cleric called Ayatollah Khomeini.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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.)<\/p>\n 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\u2019s canny stewardship of the Opec cartel and America\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n![\"Book](\"https:\/\/www.ft.com\/__origami\/service\/image\/v2\/images\/raw\/https%3A%2F%2Fd1e00ek4ebabms.cloudfront.net%2Fproduction%2Fd0760183-8002-446b-b0e1-4f396efcc6fe.jpg?source=next-article&fit=scale-down&quality=highest&width=700&dpr=1\")
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