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The Islamic Republic of Iran is a constant source of anguish for its own people, its neighbors, and the broader world. The government likely executes more people than any state except China. It imposes bizarre restrictions on its citizens, especially women (who are barred from singing solo, cycling, or smoking hookah in public). Its transnational revolutionary Islamist identity is extremely rare for a modern state. Similarly ideological states of the communist variation were mostly either abolished long ago or preserved only in name. Yet the Tehran regime is still here.
How was it that, of all countries, Iran became this Islamic Republic? It boggles the mind, especially if you get to hang out with Iranians. On average, we are less religious than many peoples of the Muslim world, and patriotic to the point of narcissism. How did we become the building block of globally messianic Islamism? In other words, how did the Islamic Revolution of 1979 come to be, and why did its leaders endure?
The revolution was preceded by years of organized opposition to the shah, waged not just by Islamists but by Marxists, nationalists, and liberals. Each group had entered the movement with its own aspirations. Very few advocated for the kind of theocracy that eventually emerged and went on to repress all non-Islamists. The losers of the revolution have spent the years since trying to figure out what went wrong.
The field of Iranian studies sometimes resembles a whodunit, fixated on finding a grand, overarching reason for the revolution. Was it the Marxist left and secular nationalists, fatally allying themselves with devout Muslims in 1979? Was it the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, reforming too rapidly in the 1970s? Was it the U.S., which in 1953 helped overthrow Iran’s democratic government? Or does blame go much further back, to the way Iranians began adopting Islam in the 600s? Or to an authoritarian culture forged in the Persian kingdoms of antiquity? The obsessive nature of such inquiries reveals more about their authors than the question at hand.
Academics often scoff at histories written by journalists, as some surely will at Scott Anderson’s new book, King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion, and Catastrophic Miscalculation. But Anderson succeeds precisely because he eschews structural, quasi-philosophical queries for an energetic account that concerns itself with, as he puts it, “a few core questions”: Why was the shah unable to stop the revolution? Why was the U.S. so oblivious to the dangers facing one of its most crucial allies? And how could Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a mysterious septuagenarian Muslim cleric then little known to most of the world, “establish a theocratic dictatorship with himself as supreme leader?” As a result of this inquiry, Anderson finds an answer at once simpler, more instructive, and truer than those of many scholars.
The book is based mostly on oral-history interviews with Americans involved in making Iran policy during and before 1979, as well as a few Iranians, such as Queen Farah Pahlavi, the widow of the last shah. But to his credit, Anderson has also consulted the best scholarship on the revolution, including historians such as Ervand Abrahamian, Abbas Milani, Darioush Bayandor, and Ray Takeyh.
Anderson thus offers a readable page-turner that’s also attuned to those core questions. The book answers the why and the how of the revolution with a clear conclusion that might frustrate the grand theorists: It was a contingent event, not some historical inevitability but, in many ways, an accident. The key to understanding it, therefore, lies not in queries into the soul of the Iranian nation or the nature of Islam but in studying who did what in the crucial months leading to February 11, 1979.
Much of Anderson’s reporting focuses on the U.S. and the shah; he is weaker in examining the diverse factions of Iranians who opposed the shah and understanding what made them tick. Anderson could have done more to dig into the bizarre kaleidoscope of Iranian revolutionaries in the 1960s and ’70s, showing us why the best and brightest of a rapidly advancing society would line up behind an obscurantist like Khomeini.
But the focus on the U.S. is also helpful for several reasons. First, the American government was central to the course of revolution, although in indirect ways. Anderson’s account shows just how ill-informed and unfocused its approach was to the events of 1978–79. Its inaction was as earthshaking as action can be, especially because both the shah and his opponents were governed by their perceptions of what the U.S. did or did not want. Second, the book helps dispel conspiracy theories, now distressingly common among Iranians, that propose that the shah’s overthrow was secretly planned and carefully orchestrated by President Jimmy Carter.
Anderson’s account of the shah in the 1970s is a familiar story of an Icarus-like figure felled by his own hubris. Buoyed by his rising currency at the Nixon White House and the modernizing Iranian economy, the shah missed the country’s growing inequality, which encouraged snowballing dissent. Anderson explains how the shah’s deft oil-price manipulations and President Richard Nixon’s carte blanche military support helped fuel “massive inflation and social dislocation.” The rich-poor gap grew, and Tehran became surrounded by slums full of unemployed young men. The tinder for a revolutionary movement was there, requiring only the right spark.
American negligence was another undeniable factor, as Anderson shows. Responding to the shah’s paranoia about Americans wanting to undermine him, the U.S. simply stopped tracking systematic opposition to his rule. A National Security Council officer in the ’60s said that the CIA, largely focused on the Soviets, had relied mostly on the shah’s secret police for intelligence about domestic dissent.
In 1978, as the mammoth anti-shah protests grew, the U.S. was unable to respond effectively; different branches of the government worked against one another and didn’t even share relevant information. The shah’s paranoia made things worse. Secretly suffering from cancer, he was meandering and ineffective. Meanwhile, the Carter administration was distracted by other global events: the Panama Canal crisis, the SALT II negotiations with Moscow, the Israeli-Egyptian peace talks. Surely, they thought, the shah wouldn’t simply fall.
As the year progressed and protests didn’t cease, sharply divergent positions developed in the U.S. Some officials, such as National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, pushed for a hard line, clinging to the hope that American-trained Iranian forces could save the day with a coup. Others thought the U.S. had little to worry about with Khomeini because of his non-communism. The Western-educated men surrounding the ayatollah worked hard to strengthen this impression. Having failed to do their homework, few American officials knew about the extremist core of Khomeini’s ideas. This ignorance persisted to the end: Shockingly, not a single Persian-speaking staffer from the American embassy attended the ayatollah’s comeback speech in Tehran on February 1, 1979, one of the most important events in the history of the 20th century. Simply put, the revolutionary camp won because it was able to outsmart the shah and his powerful American backers.
This chaotic U.S. response is evident all the way up to February 11, 1979, the day of the revolution. Fittingly, the top-level Situation Room meeting about Iran that day didn’t include Carter or Secretary of State Cyrus Vance—both were away in Camp David—and it took place at 8:30 a.m. D.C. time, already 5 p.m. in Iran, “too late for the Americans to in any way affect the outcome there,” as Anderson puts it.
The team in the capital wanted to contact the U.S. Ambassador to Iran William Sullivan to get the latest from the ground, but he was busy with more pressing matters. Twenty-six American servicemen were in a bunker surrounded by revolutionaries, and he was trying to get them to the U.S. embassy three miles away.
Yet the calls from the White House persisted, especially an inquiry by Brzezinski, who kept insisting on his fanciful notion of a last-minute anti-Khomeini coup, a “pie-in-the-sky” idea, per Anderson. Sick of having to hear it even at this eleventh hour, Sullivan shouted on the phone: “Tell Brzezinski to go fuck himself!”
It didn’t matter. Khomeini won and the shah was done for good. Iran’s centuries-long monarchical tradition gave way to its first-ever republic. But Anderson doesn’t pin the blame on the U.S.—he hasn’t found a single culprit, and he hasn’t written a whodunit. Different U.S. actions might not have changed much. Sometimes some people just get lucky. A few months later, even when Carter did see the “approaching cataclysm” of the seizure of the U.S. embassy and the ensuing hostage crisis, he was prevented from stopping it by what Anderson describes as “a nearly freakish convergence of circumstances.”
Whenever I teach a class on the Iranian Revolution, I start with a conversation about historical contingency. If there is one event that shows that a freakish convergence of circumstances can make history, this is it. Anderson’s book, one of the best on 1979, won’t be the last word on the subject, but I wish we could move away from a search for neat causal explanations and swallow the harsh truth that Khomeini got a lucky break, and Iran got the rough end of it.
The Islamic Republic has survived only by shape-shifting endlessly while retaining some of the worst impulses of 1979. This is mostly thanks to one 1960s revolutionary, Ali Khamenei, who replaced Khomeini as supreme leader in 1989 and has continued to rule to this day. Now 86 and ailing, Khamenei has lived long enough to see the total failure of his predecessor’s revolution. The old man had promised to offer an alternative to both communism and capitalism that would make Iran into a spiritual heaven. Instead, the Islamic Republic survives as a massively unpopular dictatorship, economically ruined, internationally isolated, and battered by both the U.S. and Israel. As Iranian elites compete to form the post-Khamenei Iran, they are likely to jettison Khomeinism wholesale, even if some hold on to the better ideals of 1979. It has taken almost half a century, but the page is closing on the revolution. Perhaps Iran’s luck will turn again.
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