King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution—A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation by Scott Anderson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Note: This is a dense book. It's so dense that I'm surprised Soy Boy gave it 5 stars as well. (That said, his review was relatively light.) It's a serious and detailed book.
You're forewarned.
It's also a great book, which I expected from Anderson. You'll get a long review, but not with spoiler alerts. Rather, I'll reserve more comments, along with bits of analysis, for my site.
With that, let's dig in.
In his preface, Anderson talks about the importance of good history putting forth a thesis and defending it. Bonus point right there.
Next, he notes that many American insiders and Iranian ones as well still aren’t sure why the Revolution succeeded, and think it, by surface lights, shouldn’t have.
From there, picking up serious threads in 1977, with detailed diversions back to Khomeini’s first being sent into exile and both secular and religious dissidents forming various degrees of attachment to him, Anderson narrates a tale of how a mix of hypocrisy, incompetence and careerism in the governments of both Iran and the United States indeed brought this to happen. Per what I said about analysis? For the US, I'll pick up on this at my site.
The little things that make good history?
On page 54, Anderson notes that a young 24-year-old Shah had to practically beg to briefly see FDR during the Tehran Conference. Even then, Roosevelt only slotted him in during a break between meetings with Stalin and Churchill, and nobody bothered taking notes. On the next page, he continues:
“(T)he nakedly parasitic nature of so much of the West’s dealings with the kingdom produced intense hostility. The end result was a complex love-hate relationship with the West born of equal parts attraction, envy and deepest distrust.”
Anderson ties this to the Shah’s Persepolis blowout to celebrate Persia's 2,500 years..
He then moves us forward to Nixon and Kissinger stopping in Tehran after going to Moscow to sign the ABM treaty. Nixon’s last words to Pahlavi? “Protect me.”
Next? A 1972 deal by the pair with the shah to cut him blank checks on arms sales.
Meanwhile, the run-up to the first Arab oil embargo — made worse domestically by Nixon first removing some domestic oil support then foreign import quotas — and its actual happening made Iran and the shah mega-rich. So, defense contractors and Pentagon brass hats swarm Tehran. Anderson notes “5 percent” was considered the standard lagniappe.
And, at the same time, SAVAK, the royal police and spy force, is getting tighter.
Next, getting back to the foreshadowing above? Anderson says that the revolution succeeded in part due to lots of incompetence by lots of people. He’s already mentioned the American embassy, the arms vultures, the CIA for its sloth.
I will insert here that Anderson doesn’t mention the shah’s lymphoma until more than two-thirds through the book. (I was wondering if he might get a mild ding for not mentioning it at all.) This is surely a deliberate framing issue; Anderson doesn’t want to present a shah with any excuses for his dithering and vacillation.
As with previous Anderson books, he gets below the top level of people to tell his story. On the American side, the two biggies are George Braswell, a Baptist missionary in the early 1970s and Michael Metrinko, a Peace Corps volunteer who eventually joined the State Department and was consul in Tabriz during the revolution, was twice briefly seized there in early 1979, moved by State to the embassy in Tehran after his final release, only to become one of the captives in the hostage crisis. Neither one has a Wikipedia page. (The unevenness of who merits Wikipedia entries is often worse than actual or alleged inaccuracies on the site, in my opinion.) Braswell has two books listed in the bibliography; Metrenko nothing. See this Politico excerpt from the book about him.
This observation by Metrenko in early 1979 sums up how the shah’s dictatorship had atrophied independent decision making: “The generals? I knew a lot of them, and most of them wouldn’t have been able to maneuver their way through a grocery store check-out line.”
Meanwhile, Anderson notes Carter shooting himself in the foot in late 1978. He demanded that Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and CIA Director Stansfield Turner coordinate Iran brain-trusting better. Rather, since, as Anderson notes, the first whiff of failure was drifting over Iran, the trio, of different sentiments and takes on Iran, start engaging in bureaucratic CYA. As part of this, they start siloing from each other.
Also of note are the Iranians who attached themselves to Khomeini only to find that, before, by or after Nov. 6, 1979, that “the ayatollah, he’s not for changing.” The first and biggest of these was Ebrahim Yazdi.
The match, probably with literal matches, that lit the fire of revolution, was the Cinema Rex fire in August 1978, along with the shah’s horrible non response and Khomeini’s non-disavowal. Years later, a person confessed that he and associates, the rest killed in the fire, indeed started it as a red flag to hopefully create some sort of reaction to Khomeini by the shah that would backfire and be beneficial to the ayatollah. This person repeatedly refused to change his statements and was executed in the 1980s.
Alt-history thought: Anderson notes that in September 1978, Saddam Hussein told Khomeini to “tone it down.” He then offered to kill him and told the shah that. The shah, in his dithering, declined.
Boy, that's a change of history, eh? It wouldn't be hard to make it look like a 78-year-old had a heart attack, eh? Food poisoning — if Khomeini didn't have a personal taster and Hussein could bribe a chef. That said, given Hussein, he might not have been that subtle. And, if not, he would have had to kill Khomenei's entourage. Morally, not a problem for him, Empirically? Might have been. Ditto on the political science side, if he kills Khomeini's whole entourage. Sadr and other Iraqi Shi'ite leaders might have caused trouble.
Still, the alt-history? If the shah does tumble, it's a mix of mild clerics and secularists who replace him. Would we avoid the Iran-Iraq war, or would Hussein see this as an even greater temptation to attack? There definitely wouldn't have been a hostage crisis.
And, in France, Yazdi was, if not a liar, at a minimum a prolific “spinner.” Many of Khomeini’s more off-base pronunciamentos simply weren’t translated for the Western press at his pressers, and Yazdi’s outreach to western officialdom was an oversell to put it politely. I'll address this in detail below. (This almost gets into a second alt-history, kind of like that above.)
Add in Khomeini’s clerical “frenemy” during the last years of the shah, Ayatollah Mohammad Kazem Shariatmadari, and the actual liberal and leftist types who were not the shah’s “Islamic Marxists,” and you had a run-up to the revolution that could have broken half a dozen different ways.
It is just barely possible that the hostage seizure could have been avoided. In mid-October 1979, Metrinko was home on leave, and was asked to meet with State officials. He said yes. He gets to the meeting, only to find its security classification has been made so high he can’t attend. Generic stupidity? Bureaucratic ineptness? Or was he getting the risotura treatment so high State officials didn’t have to hear him?
In all of this, Anderson spins well the contingency of history, with a particular contingent event here continuing to ripple today.
The detail? WHY? Why did people like Yazdi think they could control or domesticate Khoumenei? Wikipedia notes, in its article on his years in exile, that Khomenei had called for an Islamic state as early as his first book, in the 1940s. It notes that he already then talked about the vilayet-e-faqih and Islamic theocracy. He followed that up with a book while in Iraqi exile, written in Najaf in 1970, with that as its subtitle, that further explicated this.
Per Anderson, no, the CIA wouldn't have known this. But, politically active Iranians who were more moderate clerics certainly should have, and arguably, so should have secularists.
They would have known that people like a prime teacher of Khomenei, Husayn Burujardi — mentioned in Anderson's book for his "Pepsi fatwa" — held broadly similar views. That said, he was more quietest, and banned Khomenei from political involvement — which ended with his death.
Interesting side note? Per the "red-black alliance" between clerics and Communists that the shah kept pushing? Per that book, Khomenei actually envisioned a Communist-like worldwide revolution of fundamentalist Islam, even if it was Islamism in one country at first. This is also, while calling out Israel for making Gaza an open-air prison, and for helping create Hamas, we should still keep eyes on Hamas and Hezbollah, and their Iranian backers.
Mohammad Kazem Shariatmaderi, profiled throughout the book as a more moderate, more quietist and less confrontational alternative, certainly recognized this, which is why he would never directly challenge him. But he also, for the same reason, would never openly endorse him until just before his return, which he called for.
Did the likes of Yazdi think no revolution could succeed without Khomenei, at least that, if it did topple the shah, it couldn't hold power on its own?
Alt history No. 2: Why didn't the shah imprison Khomenei, rather than exiling him?
For those who scoff at alt-history, it's one way to internalize Santayana's dictum and learn from past mistakes of history.
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For more background, see the following Wikipedia articles:
Ashura anniversary of Husayn's death at the Battle of Karbala) and the broader Mourning of Muharram. A broad parallel is various "Penitentes" movements in Catholicism. (I have seen an outdoor, public version of mourning that looked to include mild self-flagellation in Dallas, at the John F. Kennedy Memorial Plaza, many years ago. It appears to be still held there.)
Arba'in (the 40th day after this, and to a lesser degree, 40-day observances in Islam in general and Shi'a in particular)
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