Scott Anderson’s thoroughly engrossing account of the Iranian revolution, King of Kings, is a welcome refresher for many in the West, whose perception of US-Iranian relations is no doubt coloured by the hostage crisis and the subsequent mutual vilification by the two countries.
Anderson provides ample nuance in his account of the prior relationship between Washington and Tehran, one that the Americans were not automatically giving up on after the advent of the mullahs.
Popular resentment in Iran against the US for its role in the 1953 coup that overthrew Mohammad Mosaddegh and for its steadfast support for the Shah fuelled the revolution from both the secular left and religious right. In reality, however, as Anderson points out, Washington was fairly hands-off after 1953, probably a bit too much for its, and Iran’s, good.
The most striking thing we learn from King of Kings was how negligent Washington was of Iran. The country was America’s most important ally in the region, according to Anderson (I am presuming he is not counting Israel), and yet, right until the fall of the Shah, employed barely any Farsi-speakers at its Tehran embassy and was far too content to listen to, and relay, the good news it wanted to hear from Iran.
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This was true of successive administrations but it became particularly acute under Jimmy Carter, when competing egos in his cabinet, the worst offender being Zbigniew Brzezinski, engendered an institutional sclerosis that resulted in the rare warnings from seasoned Iran hands, such as Farsi-speaking consular official Mike Metrinko, and head of the State Department’s Iran desk Henry Precht, going unheard.
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When the revolution did come, being almost instantly usurped by the supremely vicious and obscure Ruhollah Khomeini, the White House was as taken aback as were American expatriates in Tehran, blissfully ignorant in their sociolinguistic bubbles and suburban homes.
Admittedly, many Iranians, even Khomeini’s more moderate revolutionary allies, were caught equally unawares by the grim ayatollah, whom few had heard of until a few months before the Shah’s fall, forgotten as he was in his Iraqi exile since being expelled by the regime in 1964. But they didn’t have the resources Washington had, and the US assumed that the Shah, as the successor of a monarchy that had survived 2,500 years, was eternal and unassailable.
Washington also made the mistake of giving far too much credence to the Shah’s own conviction that communism, and not Islamism, was the greatest threat to his rule. Anderson wryly notes that a “red” Iran, unlikely as it was, would have in the long run been far less of a headache for the US.
One of the great pleasures of King of Kings is the portrayal of the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, a man as fascinating as he was fatuous. He resembles stars of 1960s TV in being one of the world’s most famous men in his day while now being largely forgotten.
Praised by foreign nationals for his sharp intelligence (at least by royal standards), he was also a workaholic with a risible tendency for self-regard and an adamantine obliviousness to how Iranians regarded him (his younger wife Farah was a lot more sensitive to this).
Pahlavi’s eldest son and heir Reza has been touting himself in recent weeks as a potential transitional leader in the event of the US once again effecting regime change, no doubt reasoning that four decades spent in Paris and suburban Washington can’t make him any more out of touch with Iranians than his father was in the Niavaran Palace.
Which brings me to a major flaw in Anderson’s book: his overly Washington-centric outlook. While fair in his assessment of the Shah and his regime, Anderson is rather too wistful about its passing. There is no doubt that the Islamic Republic is an infinitely worse entity than its imperial predecessor, but that was not a historical inevitability. And while Anderson is correct to say that the Shah’s regime was considerably less bloody than that of Arab dictators in the region, why should that be a concern of the Iranian people, any more than citizens of liberal democracies should be content with their rights being rolled back simply because other countries have it far worse?
The source of Iranian anger at the Shah, be it from the educated middle classes or the more religiously devout poor, was far from illusory. If the United States lost a good ally in the region, maybe it should have been a bit more attentive. That said, King of Kings is well worth a read.
If the fall of the Shah in 1979 was unexpectedly rapid, the toppling of Bashar al-Assad in December last year by comparison took place in the blink of an eye, albeit after a protracted conflict that had stagnated for about six years. With Assad’s Iranian, Russian or Lebanese allies either in disarray or occupied elsewhere, the Syrian army was overrun in the space of a week and the president fled to Moscow hours before Damascus fell to insurgents led by former al-Qaeda member Ahmad al-Shaara.
Western governments, which had long since reconciled themselves to Assad as better the devil they know, moved quickly to meet the new Damascus government, even as Shaara and his group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, were still designated terrorists.
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Not since the days of the Mujahideen fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan have jihadis (or in HTS’s case, former jihadis) been so readily courted by western countries. Of course, foreign governments probably felt there was little else to work with if Syria were to remain stable after Assad’s departure. There were also some among them, Germany and Austria in particular, who cynically saw the moment as an opportunity to finally send home the Syrians they had taken in as refugees.
Even so, it is a fact that Shaara and HTS were a much less radical force than they once were, even a relatively respectable one, given the group had its origins in al-Qaeda in Iraq (Shaara spent most of the war there in Abu Ghraib and other prisons before returning to Syria to wage jihad against the Assad regime in 2011).
Shaara’s Al-Nusra Front split with al-Qaeda in 2016, and then in turn splintered to form HTS a year later. Since then, HTS has moved inexorably towards the centre of the Islamist spectrum.
Patrick Haenni and Jerome Drevon’s impressive study of the group, based on a wide range of detailed interviews, including with Shaara and other figures in HTS, charts this deradicalisation, which the authors contend was born of pragmatism to survive in the ever-fragmented insurgent landscape of mid-2010s Syria.
No doubt cognisant of the popular revulsion in Syria at the excesses of the largely foreign Islamic State, HTS focused instead on coalition-building with more moderate groups and battles for hegemony against more radical ones. Overseeing the Salvation Government in Idlib from 2018 gave it experience of ruling, and conferred popular legitimacy on it.
Though HTS has remained authoritarian, it is far more tolerant of dissent and criticism than its antecedents. It also eased sectarian tensions in Idlib, reaching out firstly to mainstream Muslims, particularly Sufis, whom Salafis generally view as suspiciously similar to Shiites, with further tentative openings-up to Christians and Druze. For this reason, Syrian commentators, secular ones included, were less panicky than foreign observers, although still cautious, about the rise to power of HTS and Shaara last December.
Nonetheless, HTS, however mellowed and more tolerant they might be, are still an Islamist group and intend to implement sharia law in Syria. Haeeni and Drevon also doubt it will undergo any further liberalisation. But, given the collapse of civil society and the Balkanisation that Syria has undergone over the past decade, an illiberal if non-capricious government is probably the best anyone can expect for now.
Haenni and Drevon are also no less circumspect than many other observers about how long this more moderate stance of HTS’s will last. They acknowledge that detractors of the group view this moderation as a strategic deception, but they themselves feel that HTS being overtaken by radical popular sentiment is a more likely outcome.
With Syria now awash with weapons and battle-hardened soldiers, there have already been questions over the interim government’s ability to rein in sectarian violence by Sunni militias, such as massacres of Alawites in April and deadly attacks on the Druze, also in April and in July. The authors see HTS as now potentially swimming against the tide of popular opinion; where there was previously “deradicalisation from the top”, Syria’s new rulers must grapple with “reradicalisation from below”. This could entail another “transformation by the people”, in a far less benign direction than the one that prompted them to pitch towards the centre.
Transformed by the People is by its nature a book that will have a particularly select readership but it is probably the best of its kind in English to date on the subject and is essential reading for anyone with an interest in Syria in the post-Assad era.
Further reading
Shah of Shahs by Ryszard Kapuściński (Penguin, 1982)
The great Polish foreign correspondent published this account of the Shah’s Iran three years after the revolution, but it is remarkably seminal in the way it has preserved the anachronistic absurdity of Pahlavi rule and the pervading atmosphere of dread in the imagination of readers.
Islam in the World by Malise Ruthven (OUP, 2006)
Updated in its third edition to take in 9/11 and the various tumults that have cascaded from it, Ruthven’s study of the intersection of Islam and politics remains an essential read.
The Age of Jihad: Islamic State and the Great War for the Middle East by Patrick Cockburn (Verso, 2017)
Veteran Middle Eastern correspondent Cockburn’s account of the 21st-century wars between the West and the Arab world, which culminated in the rise of the Islamic State, is a superb synthesis of reportage and analysis and reads like a cautionary tale that will no doubt be disregarded time and time again by western leaders.
