BOOK REVIEW
The Last Shah
America, Iran, and the Fall of the Pahlavi Dynasty
By Ray Takeyh
Yale University Press
The Shah’s Undoing
By DAVID PRYCE-JONES
The National Review
The Iran of Mohammad Reza, the last shah, was traditionally authoritarian. The shah was in a strong position. The army was loyal. SAVAK, the secret police that he had recruited, dealt with security issues in its own unlawful way. The opposition of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was a one-man performance that seemingly had no chance of success. An elderly Shiite Muslim cleric wearing robes and a turban that complemented his grimly austere features, he nonetheless imposed on Iran a constitution designed to serve God’s purposes as he saw them. Universal peace would follow when everyone accepted these purposes. There was now a doctrine that whoever disagreed was guilty of corrupting the earth and so faced summary execution. Here was a religious version of the secular Bolshevik accusation of Enemy of the People.
This unusual variant of tyranny broke up the present. Traditionally, Shiite Muslims have thought that they and the Jews had a shared fate as minorities living in the midst of the Sunni Arab majority of the Middle East. Iran is now waging war on several fronts against Sunni and Israeli neighbors who have other views of God’s purposes. Apologists for Iran maintain that Mohammad Reza made such a hash of ruling that he is really responsible for the upheaval. Alternatively, America is an imperial power, and is paying the price for sponsoring the shah as a vassal. Ray Takeyh, a well-known scholar of Iran at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, gives a scrupulous account of the shah’s performance and above all his relationship to American administrations. First the facts, then the moral judgments. This is narrative history at its clearest and its best.
Mohammad Reza Shah was 22 in 1941, when he was thrown into a life of crisis on the Peacock Throne. His father had thought that Hitler could and should complete the conquest of the Soviet Union and go on to win the war. As a strategic precaution, the British and the Red Army occupied parts of Iran, afterwards pulling out reluctantly. The shah’s principal anxiety was that the Soviet Union might repeat its wartime invasion and occupation. Tudeh, the Iranian Communist Party, was slavishly obedient to Moscow.
Containment of the Soviet Union was the global policy of the United States throughout the Cold War. The shah was a more-than-willing ally. Presidents and ambassadors told the shah that his security rested on economic reforms, whereas he kept pestering them to provide him with the latest weapons.
Iran’s internal politics were “poisonous.” Plots, conspiracies, and coups were always in the air. High-ranking officials were assassinated. Paid mobs controlled the streets and the streets controlled the spoils. The Rashidiyan brothers, for instance, bossed the guilds in the bazaar, “which enabled them to deploy street toughs to stage demonstrations or attack . . . government offices.” Those who went into this snake pit were mostly careerist aristocrats, and one such was the prime minister Mohammad Mossadeq. In Takeyh’s generous opinion, “he was a man of probity with a genuine commitment to the constitution and the rule of law.” Educated in Europe, he belonged to the generation who had taken nationalism as the core feature of identity, with the added benefit that it was a complete rejection of the West.
For several decades, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company had a concession that gave it control of Iranian oil, the country’s major asset. The British were seen to be profiting at the expense of the Iranians. Here was an offense to nationalism, and Mossadeq and his National Front party made a cause célèbre of it. “Obstreperous and stingy,” the company rejected every proposal of reform. Eccentric and paranoid, Mossadeq gave press conferences in his pajamas and wept in public. He preferred to speak French even in New York. Not a communist, he nonetheless appealed for support to Moscow. The company was duly nationalized in 1951. Although the shah had come through this crisis more or less unscathed, Loy Henderson, American ambassador at the time, reported that the shah felt “steps must be taken in the near future to have Mossadeq replaced.”
In March 1953, the CIA and MI6, the British intelligence service, discussed an “operation” to be rid of Mossadeq. President Eisenhower and Winston Churchill authorized it. Kermit Roosevelt, grandson of Theodore, was chosen to be the leader of a “gentlemen’s coup,” meaning there would be no violence. He spoke no Persian and spent his time sunning himself by the pool and playing tennis. A dubious shah asked for some sign that Eisenhower really approved the coup. Roosevelt arranged for this and the shah sacked Mossadeq. The colonel commanding the Imperial Guard went to arrest Mossadeq and was himself arrested. The mobs began to assemble and shout, “Death to the treacherous shah.” Supposing the coup to have been a failure, the shah escaped to Rome as he always did when the going was rough. The final stages of the coup are not clear, but it seems that Mossadeq changed his mind and gave himself up to other officers.
Sentenced to three years in prison for treason, he spent the rest of his life in house arrest in the countryside. In the era of Nasser and Sukarno, Mossadeq became a nationalist hero. To give just one example of this disguised anti-Americanism, Stephen Kinzer (of the New York Times) wrote All the Shah’s Men, an account of the nationalization of Iranian oil, in which he bowed to Mossadeq as a titan, a towering figure, “one of history’s most gifted visionaries.”
The worst that can be said of the shah is that his drive to industrialize didn’t fit the society. A Western model was disrupting the settled order. “It was a dynamic country that few wanted to live in” is Takeyh’s neat aphorism. The book the shah published celebrating his so-called White Revolution, a series of reforms aimed at modernization, was an unrealistic fantasy. Takeyh attributes to him a “typical mixture of arrogance and self-pity.” There were a number of capable politicians who could have headed off the revolution, but the shah would not appoint them for fear that they might seize power. He preferred sycophants. A celebration of the 2,500-year anniversary of the Achaemenid Empire was held in ancient Persepolis and cost between $200 and $300 million. The watching world thought of him as a superannuated playboy. His private life is almost never referred to by Takeyh, so it comes as a surprise that in his palace “he stewed more than he schemed and passed the time with card games and detective novels. He slept with a pistol and frequently changed bedrooms. His wife worried that he might suffer a nervous breakdown.” Missing from this account is some comment on the Pahlavi Foundation, often said to consist of a very large sum of ill-gotten gains.
Ayatollah Khomeini appeared from nowhere. He denounced the shah in this style: “You wretched, miserable man, 45 years of your life have passed. Isn’t it time for you to think and reflect a little, to ponder where all this is leading you, to learn a lesson from the experience of your father?” Left-wing intellectuals, students, women denied their rights, the educated, and the illiterate were a coalition of the discontented. In 1963, Khomeini was arrested and exiled to Turkey and then to the Iraq of Saddam Hussein, where he was to spend 13 years, followed by some final weeks in France. Assassination would have brought revolution to a stop; there was no known plan for it. Khomeini specialized in sending cassettes to Iran, promising to bring human rights and democracy to the people, many of whom he was shortly to murder as corrupters of the earth.
The White House, the Pentagon, and the CIA concluded that there was nothing much that any of them could do. The shah most probably would survive, just as he always had done. Takeyh quotes an exchange in a book by Marvin Zonis, another authority in this field, between the shah and Asadollah Alam, a former prime minister, who said it was time for the army to act. “You mean open fire?” says the shah. “That is the only way, Your Imperial Majesty.”
On the last night of 1977, President Carter stopped over in Tehran and at dinner in the palace said, “Iran, because of the great leadership of the shah, is an island of stability.” On the streets, the slogan was already “Death to America, Death to the Great Satan.” William Sullivan, then the ambassador, has been blamed for advising the shah to give way. The record shows that the shah told him that if the army were to use force, Khomeini “would call for a Jihad and there would be a bloodbath.”
Many a dictator in the Middle East would have ordered the army to put down the revolution regardless, and that is what the clerical regime will surely do one fine day when it too faces a revolution. It speaks well for Mohammad Reza that he refused to do so. He brings Shakespeare to mind. “For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings.”
DAVID PRYCE-JONES is a British author and commentator and a senior editor of National Review.
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