IRAN WARBookshelf: the U.S. Has a Long History of Getting Iran Wrong
On New Year’s Eve in 1977, US president Jimmy Carter hailed Iran as ‘an island of stability in one of the more troubled regions of the world’, which he credited to Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s leadership and ‘the admiration and love which your people give to you.’ It was not the first, or last, time the United States demonstrated a misunderstanding of Iran.
On New Year’s Eve in 1977, US president Jimmy Carter hailed Iran as ‘an island of stability in one of the more troubled regions of the world’, which he credited to Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s leadership and ‘the admiration and love which your people give to you.’ In his speech, Carter made no reference to Iran’s deep economic and social divisions and seemed unaware that the shah was widely reviled in his own country.
Within weeks, these divisions exploded into mass demonstrations, forcing the shah to flee the country a year later and paving the way for the Islamic cleric Ruhollah Khomeini to return from exile and establish the hardline theocracy that remains in power today.
Assessments by senior officials within the Carter administration were equally off the mark. The US ambassador to Iran, William Sullivan, envisaged Khomeini returning as the spiritual leader of a new regime, but ‘shorn of any political power’. Just weeks after Pahlavi fled, America’s UN ambassador, Andrew Young, told journalists that Iran was too Westernized to become a fundamentalist Islamic state. He suggested that Khomeini would in time be hailed as ‘a saint’.
And when the US press reviewed Khomeini’s aggressively anti-Western writings, the State Department rushed to his defense, suggesting that Iran’s clerics were turning towards moderation.
In King of Kings, Scott Anderson provides a detailed account of the ‘hubris, delusion and catastrophic miscalculation’ that permeated the United States’ relationship with Iran during the shah’s 38-year reign, culminating in a major foreign policy disaster for the US. Anderson is a historian and novelist who has published widely on the Middle East, including an acclaimed biography of Lawrence of Arabia.
In 1941, Britain and the Soviet Union invaded Iran and replaced shah Reza Khan, whom they suspected of having Nazi sympathies, with his 21-year-old son crown prince Mohammad Reza, who was expected to be more compliant. Iran was strategically located as a military conduit, and the allied powers wanted to secure for themselves a steady flow of Iranian oil. In the 1950s, Britain’s key role in Iran was taken over by the US.
