Iran Unveiled
Modern
Iran P.1, Modern Iran P.2
Iran is the 17th largest country in world.
It measures 1,684,000 square kilometers. That means that its territory is
larger than the combined territories of France, Germany, the Netherlands,
Belgium, Spain and Portugal - Western Europe. Iran is the 16th most populous
country in the world, with about 70 million people. Its population is larger
than the populations of either France or the United Kingdom.
Under the current circumstances, it
might be useful to benchmark Iran against Iraq or Afghanistan. Iraq is 433,000
square kilometers, with about 25 million people, so Iran is roughly four times
as large and three times as populous. Afghanistan is about 652,000 square
kilometers, with a population of about 30 million. One way to look at it is
that Iran is 68 percent larger than Iraq and Afghanistan combined, with 40
percent more population.
More important are its topographical
barriers. Iran is defined, above all, by its mountains, which form its
frontiers, enfold its cities and describe its historical heartland. To
understand Iran, you must understand not only how large it is but also how
mountainous it is.
Iran’s
most important mountains are the Zagros. They are a southern extension of the
Caucasus, running about 900 miles from the northwestern border of Iran, which
adjoins Turkey and Armenia, southeast toward Bandar Abbas on the Strait of
Hormuz. The first 150 miles of Iran’s western border is shared with Turkey. It
is intensely mountainous on both sides. South of Turkey, the mountains on the
western side of the border begin to diminish until they disappear altogether on
the Iraqi side. From this point onward, south of the Kurdish regions, the land
on the Iraqi side is increasingly flat, part of the Tigris-Euphrates basin. The
Iranian side of the border is mountainous, beginning just a few miles east of
the border. Iran has a mountainous border with Turkey, but mountains face a
flat plain along the Iraq border. This is the historical frontier between
Persia - the name of Iran until the early 20th century - and Mesopotamia (“land
between two rivers”), as southern Iraq is called.
The one region of the western border
that does not adhere to this model is in the extreme south, in the swamps where
the Tigris and Euphrates rivers join to form the Shatt al-Arab waterway. There
the Zagros swing southeast, and the southern border between Iran and Iraq
zigzags south to the Shatt al-Arab, which flows south 125 miles through flat
terrain to the Persian Gulf. To the east is the Iranian province of Khuzestan,
populated by ethnic Arabs, not Persians. Given the swampy nature of the ground,
it can be easily defended and gives Iran a buffer against any force from the
west seeking to move along the coastal plain of Iran on the Persian Gulf.
Running east along the Caspian Sea are
the Elburz Mountains, which serve as a mountain bridge between the
Caucasus-Zagros range and Afghan mountains that eventually culminate in the
Hindu Kush. The Elburz run along the southern coast of the Caspian to the
Afghan border, buffering the Karakum Desert in
Turkmenistan. Mountains of lesser elevations then swing down along the Afghan
and Pakistani borders, almost to the Arabian Sea.
Iran has about 800 miles of coastline,
roughly half along the eastern shore of the Persian Gulf, the rest along the
Gulf of Oman. Its most important port, Bandar Abbas, is located on the Strait
of Hormuz. There are no equivalent ports along the Gulf of Oman, and the Strait
of Hormuz is extremely vulnerable to interdiction. Therefore, Iran is not a
major maritime or naval power. It is and always has been a land power.
The center of Iran consists of two
desert plateaus that are virtually uninhabited and uninhabitable. These are the
Dasht-e Kavir, which
stretches from Qom in the northwest nearly to the Afghan border, and the Dasht-e Lut, which extends south
to Balochistan. The Dasht-e
Kavir consists of a layer of salt covering thick mud,
and it is easy to break through the salt layer and drown in the mud. It is one
of the most miserable places on earth.
Iran’s population is concentrated in its mountains,
not in its lowlands, as with other countries. That’s because its lowlands, with
the exception of the southwest and the southeast (regions populated by
non-Persians), are uninhabitable. Iran is a nation of 70 million mountain
dwellers. Even its biggest city, Tehran, is in the foothills of towering
mountains. Its population is in a belt stretching through the Zagros and Elbroz mountains on a line running from the eastern shore
of the Caspian to the Strait of Hormuz. There is a secondary concentration of
people to the northeast, centered on Mashhad. The rest of the country is
lightly inhabited and almost impassable because of the salt-mud flats.
If
you look carefully at a map of Iran, you can see that the western part of the
country - the Zagros Mountains - is actually a land bridge for southern Asia.
It is the only path between the Persian Gulf in the south and the Caspian Sea
in the north. Iran is the route connecting the Indian subcontinent to the
Mediterranean Sea. But because of its size and geography, Iran is not a country
that can be easily traversed, much less conquered.
The location of Iran’s oil fields is
critical here, since oil remains its most important and most strategic export.
Oil is to be found in three locations: The southwest is the major region, with
lesser deposits along the Iraqi border in the north and one near Qom. The
southwestern oil fields are an extension of the geological formation that
created the oil fields in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq. Hence, the
region east of the Shatt al-Arab is of critical importance to Iran. Iran has
the third largest oil reserves in the world and is the world’s fourth largest
producer. Therefore, one would expect it to be one of the wealthiest countries
in the world. It isn’t.
Iran has the 28th largest economy in the world but
ranks only 71st in per capita gross domestic product (as expressed in
purchasing power). It ranks with countries like Belarus or Panama. Part of the
reason is inefficiencies in the Iranian oil industry, the result of government
policies. But there is a deeper geographic problem. Iran has a huge population
mostly located in rugged mountains. Mountainous regions are rarely prosperous.
The cost of transportation makes the development of industry difficult.
Sparsely populated mountain regions are generally poor. Heavily populated
mountain regions, when they exist, are much poorer.
Iran’s geography and large population
make substantial improvements in its economic life difficult. Unlike
underpopulated and less geographically challenged countries such as Saudi
Arabia and Kuwait, Iran cannot enjoy any shift in the underlying weakness of
its economy brought on by higher oil prices and more production. The absence of
inhabitable plains means that any industrial plant must develop in regions
where the cost of infrastructure tends to undermine the benefits. Oil keeps
Iran from sinking even deeper, but it alone cannot catapult Iran out of its
condition.
Iran is a fortress. Surrounded on three
sides by mountains and on the fourth by the ocean, with a wasteland at its
center, Iran is extremely difficult to conquer. This was achieved once by the
Mongols, who entered the country from the northeast. The Ottomans penetrated
the Zagros Mountains and went northeast as far as the Caspian but made no attempt
to move into the Persian heartland.
Iran is a mountainous country looking
for inhabitable plains. There are none to the north, only more mountains and
desert, or to the east, where Afghanistan’s infrastructure is no more inviting.
To the south there is only ocean. What plains there are in the region lie to
the west, in modern-day Iraq and historical Mesopotamia and Babylon. If Iran
could dominate these plains, and combine them with its own population, they
would be the foundation of Iranian power.
Indeed,
these plains were the foundation of the Persian
Empire. The Persians originated in the Zagros Mountains as a warrior people.
They built an empire by conquering the plains in the Tigris and Euphrates
basin. They did this slowly, over an extended period at a time when there were
no demarcated borders and they faced little resistance to the west. While it
was difficult for a lowland people to attack through mountains, it was easier
for a mountain-based people to descend to the plains. This combination of
population and fertile plains allowed the Persians to expand.
Iran’s attacking north or northwest into
the Caucasus is impossible in force. The Russians, Turks and Iranians all
ground to a halt along the current line in the 19th century; the country is so
rugged that movement could be measured in yards rather than miles. Iran could
attack northeast into Turkmenistan, but the land there is flat and brutal
desert. The Iranians could move east into Afghanistan, but this would involve
more mountain fighting for land of equally questionable value. Attacking west,
into the Tigris and Euphrates river basin, and then moving to the
Mediterranean, would seem doable. This was the path the Persians took when they
created their empire and pushed all the way to Greece and Egypt.
In terms of expansion, the problem for
Iran is its mountains. They are as effective a container as they are a
defensive bulwark. Supporting an attacking force requires logistics, and
pushing supplies through the Zagros in any great numbers is impossible. Unless
the Persians can occupy and exploit Iraq, further expansion is impossible. In
order to exploit Iraq, Iran needs a high degree of active cooperation from
Iraqis. Otherwise, rather than converting Iraq’s wealth into political and
military power, the Iranians would succeed only in being bogged down in
pacifying the Iraqis.
In order to move west, Iran would require
the active cooperation of conquered nations. Any offensive will break down
because of the challenges posed by the mountains in moving supplies. This is
why the Persians created the type of empire they did. They allowed conquered
nations a great deal of autonomy, respected their culture and made certain that
these nations benefited from the Persian imperial system. Once they left the
Zagros, the Persians could not afford to pacify an empire. They needed the
wealth at minimal cost. And this has been the limit on Persian/Iranian power
ever since. Recreating a relationship with the inhabitants of the Tigris and
Euphrates basin - today’s Iraq - is enormously difficult. Indeed, throughout
most of history, the domination of the plains by Iran has been impossible.
Other imperial powers - Alexandrian Greece, Rome, the Byzantines, Ottomans,
British and Americans - have either seized the plains themselves or used them
as a neutral buffer against the Persians.
Underlying the external problems of Iran is a severe
internal problem. Mountains allow nations to protect themselves. Completely
eradicating a culture is difficult. Therefore, most mountain regions of the
world contain large numbers of national and ethnic groups that retain their own
characteristics. This is commonplace in all mountainous regions. These groups
resist absorption and annihilation. Although a Muslim state with a population
that is 55 to 60 percent ethnically Persian, Iran is divided into a large
number of ethnic groups. It is also divided between the vastly dominant Shia
and the minority Sunnis, who are clustered in three areas of the country - the
northeast, the northwest and the southeast. Any foreign power interested in
Iran will use these ethnoreligious groups to create allies in Iran to undermine
the power of the central government.
Thus, any Persian or Iranian government
has as its first and primary strategic interest maintaining the internal
integrity of the country against separatist groups. It is inevitable,
therefore, for Iran to have a highly centralized government with an extremely
strong security apparatus. For many countries, holding together its ethnic
groups is important. For Iran it is essential because it has no room to retreat
from its current lines and instability could undermine its entire security
structure. Therefore, the Iranian central government will always face the
problem of internal cohesion and will use its army and security forces for that
purpose before any other.
Geopolitical Imperatives
For most countries, the first
geographical imperative is to maintain internal cohesion. For Iran, it is to
maintain secure borders, then secure the country internally. Without secure
borders, Iran would be vulnerable to foreign powers that would continually try
to manipulate its internal dynamics, destabilize its ruling regime and then
exploit the resulting openings. Iran must first define the container and then
control what it contains. Therefore, Iran’s geopolitical imperatives:
1. Control the Zagros and Elburz
mountains. These constitute the Iranian heartland and the buffers against
attacks from the west and north.
2. Control the mountains to the east of
the Dasht-e Kavir and Dasht-e Lut, from Mashhad to
Zahedan to the Makran coast, protecting Iran’s
eastern frontiers with Pakistan and Afghanistan. Maintain a line as deep and as
far north and west as possible in the Caucasus to limit Turkish and Russian
threats. These are the secondary lines.
3. Secure a line on the Shatt al-Arab in
order to protect the western coast of Iran on the Persian Gulf.
4. Control the divergent ethnic and
religious elements in this box.
5. Protect the frontiers against
potential threats, particularly major powers from outside the region.
Iran has achieved four of the five basic
goals. It has created secure frontiers and is in control of the population
inside the country. The greatest threat against Iran is the one it has faced
since Alexander the Great — that posed by major powers outside the region.
Historically, before deep-water navigation, Iran was the direct path to India
for any Western power. In modern times, the Zagros remain the eastern anchor of
Turkish power. Northern Iran blocks Russian expansion. And, of course, Iranian
oil reserves make Iran attractive to contemporary great powers.
There are two traditional paths into
Iran. The northeastern region is vulnerable to Central Asian powers while the
western approach is the most-often used (or attempted). A direct assault
through the Zagros Mountains is not feasible, as Saddam Hussein discovered in
1980. However, manipulating the ethnic groups inside Iran is possible. The
British, for example, based in Iraq, were able to manipulate internal political
divisions in Iran, as did the Soviets, to the point that Iran virtually lost
its national sovereignty during World War II.
The greatest threat to Iran in recent
centuries has been a foreign power dominating Iraq – Ottoman or British – and
extending its power eastward not through main force but through subversion and
political manipulation. The view of the contemporary Iranian government toward
the United States is that, during the 1950s, it assumed Britain’s role of using
its position in Iraq to manipulate Iranian politics and elevate the shah to
power.
The 1980-1988 war between Iran and Iraq
was a terrific collision of two states, causing several million casualties on
both sides. It also demonstrated two realities. The first is that a determined,
well-funded, no-holds-barred assault from Mesopotamia against the Zagros
Mountains will fail (albeit at an atrocious cost to the defender). The second
is that, in the nation-state era, with fixed borders and standing armies, the
logistical challenges posed by the Zagros make a major attack from Iran into
Iraq equally impossible. There is a stalemate on that front. Nevertheless, from
the Iranian point of view, the primary danger of Iraq is not direct attack but
subversion. It is not only Iraq that worries them. Historically, Iranians also
have been concerned about Russian manipulation and manipulation by the British
and Russians through Afghanistan.
The Current Situation
For the Iranians, the current situation
has posed a dangerous scenario similar to what they faced from the British
early in the 20th century. The United States has occupied, or at least placed
substantial forces, to the east and the west of Iran, in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Iran is not concerned about these troops invading Iran. That is not a military
possibility. Iran’s concern is that the United States will use these positions
as platforms to foment ethnic dissent in Iran.
Indeed, the United States has tried to
do this in several regions. In the southeast, in Balochistan,
the Americans have supported separatist movements. It has also done this among
the Arabs of Khuzestan, at the northern end of the Persian Gulf. And it has
tried to manipulate the Kurds in northwestern Iran. (There is some evidence to
suggest that the United States has used Azerbaijan as a launchpad to foment
dissent among the Iranian Azeris in the northwestern part of the country.)
The Iranian counter to all this has several
dimensions:
1. Maintain an extremely powerful and
repressive security capability to counter these moves. In particular, focus on
deflecting any intrusions in the Khuzestan region, which is not only the most
physically vulnerable part of Iran but also where much of Iran’s oil reserves
are located. This explains clashes such as the seizure of British sailors and
constant reports of U.S. special operations teams in the region.
2. Manipulate ethnic and religious
tensions in Iraq and Afghanistan to undermine the American positions there and
divert American attention to defensive rather than offensive goals.
3. Maintain a military force capable of
protecting the surrounding mountains so that major American forces cannot
penetrate.
4. Move to create a nuclear force, very
publicly, in order to deter attack in the long run and to give Iran a
bargaining chip for negotiations in the short term.
The heart of Iranian strategy is as it
has always been, to use the mountains as a fortress. So long as it is anchored
in those mountains, it cannot be invaded. Alexander succeeded and the Ottomans
had limited success (little more than breaching the Zagros), but even the
Romans and British did not go so far as to try to use main force in the region.
Invading and occupying Iran is not an option.
For Iran, its ultimate problem is
internal tensions. But even these are under control, primarily because of
Iran’s security system. Ever since the founding of the Persian Empire, the one
thing that Iranians have been superb at is creating systems that both benefit
other ethnic groups and punish them if they stray. That same mindset functions
in Iran today in the powerful Ministry of Intelligence and Security and the
elite Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). (The Iranian military is
configured mainly as an infantry force, with the regular army and IRGC ground
forces together totaling about 450,000 troops, larger than all other service
branches combined.)
Iran is, therefore, a self-contained
entity. It is relatively poor, but it has superbly defensible borders and a
disciplined central government with an excellent intelligence and internal
security apparatus. Iran uses these same strengths to destabilize the American
position (or that of any extraregional power) around
it. Indeed, Iran is sufficiently secure that the positions of surrounding
countries are more precarious than that of Iran. Iran is superb at low-cost,
low-risk power projection using its covert capabilities. It is even better at
blocking those of others. So long as the mountains are in Iranian hands, and
the internal situation is controlled, Iran is a stable state, but one able to
pose only a limited external threat.
The creation of an Iranian nuclear
program serves two functions. First, if successful, it further deters external
threats. Second, simply having the program enhances Iranian power. Since the
consequences of a strike against these facilities are uncertain and raise the
possibility of Iranian attempts at interdiction of oil from the Persian Gulf,
the strategic risk to the attacker’s economy discourages attack. The diplomatic
route of trading the program for regional safety and power becomes more
attractive than an attack against a potential threat in a country with a potent
potential counter.
Iran is secure from conceivable
invasion. It enhances this security by using two tactics. First, it creates
uncertainty as to whether it has an offensive nuclear capability. Second, it
projects a carefully honed image of ideological extremism that makes it appear
unpredictable. It makes itself appear threatening and unstable. Paradoxically,
this increases the caution used in dealing with it because the main option, an
air attack, has historically been ineffective without a follow-on ground
attack. If just nuclear facilities are attacked and the attack fails, Iranian
reaction is unpredictable and potentially disproportionate. Iranian posturing
enhances the uncertainty. The threat of an air attack is deterred by Iran’s
threat of an attack against sea-lanes. Such attacks would not be effective, but
even a low-probability disruption of the world’s oil supply is a risk not worth
taking.
As always, the Persians face a major power prowling at
the edges of their mountains. The mountains will protect them from main force
but not from the threat of destabilization. Therefore, the Persians bind their
nation together through a combination of political accommodation and
repression. The major power will eventually leave. Persia will remain so long
as its mountains stand.
The history of what is now known as Iran is a
history of various ethnic groups, languages and cultures coexisting amongst
one another. Ever since the establishment of the first Elamite civilization
around 5000 BC. Iran has been a multiracial. multicultural and multilingual
society. The Iran Papers P.1 In Iran today, one minority regards its race culture
and language, as superior to all other cultures and languages. The Iran Papers P.3
Then, during the Iran-Contra affaire,
Iranians became convinced that for all the rhetoric, the United States was
the ultimate realist in international relations, for whom commercial and
geopolitical interests took priority. The Iran Papers P.5. |
The Iranian government sponsored conferences in which
Nazi lecturers were invited to deliver speeches on race, ethnicity, culture
and history. Right Wing Iran: The Iran
Papers P.2 Peoples of various ethnic origins, such as the
ancestors of contemporary Azeris, Kurds, Baluchs,
Turkomans, Arabs, Gilaks, and others have lived in
Iran for centuries.However, the continuation of
monolingual and monocultural agenda for Iran has brought the country to the
brink of ethnic discontent. The
Iran Papers P.4 Islamists are perfectly serious, and know what they
are doing. Their rhetoric has a millennial warrant. Conclusion
The Iran Papers. |
The most dangerous error we could make
in possible confrontation with Iran, is to convince ourselves that its leaders
will act rationally:
Iran doubtless counts on support from
Beijing, a relationship I also analyzed: Why An Iran-Chinese relationship.
Iran and its conspiracytheories
Selected Bibliography Comment
We Are Iran: The Persian Blogs. By
Nasrin Alavi. Brooklyn: Soft Skull Press, 2005 (also
London: Portobello Books). 365 pp.
The Soul of Iran: A Nation's Journey to
Freedom. By Afshin Molavi. New York: W.W. Norton,
2005. 352 pp.
Democracy in Iran: History and the Quest
for Liberty. By Ali Gheissari and Vali Nasr. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2006. 214 pp.
Iran Awakening: A Memoir of Revolution
and Hope. By Shirin Ebadi. New York: Random House,
2006. 233 pp.
Perhaps the two best ways to get past the
regime's controls are to look at the tens of thousands of Iranian blogs and to
take advantage of the Iranian-American and Iranian-European community's greater
access to ordinary people. Two recent, excellent books use these approaches to
present insight about how Iranians view the world. Nasrin Alavi
has edited a fascinating collection of translated Iranian blog entries in We
Are Iran: The Persian Blogs. The contextual explanation she provides is useful,
but she lets the blogs carry the weight of the story. Chapters cover women,
culture - which she misleadingly labels "media" - reporting news,
attitudes towards recent history such as the 1979 revolution and the 1980-88
war with Iraq, attitudes towards the regime's icons, and politics. The entries
illustrate daily life under the Islamic Republic, and the picture is not pretty
- social problems such as drugs and prostitution are rampant; people feel
alienated; petty repression is common. The hatred for the current regime comes
through strongly but so, too, does despair about the country's situation,
personal circumstances, and prospects for change. Alavi,
a strong supporter of the reform movement, interprets many messages to suggest
both the inevitability of long-term change but also resigned acceptance of the
immutability of circumstances in the near term. The bloggers describe
individual resistance to the regime's social and cultural restrictions, but
there are few entries calling for organization or action to bring about social
change. Indeed, most of the bloggers project outright cynicism toward
politicians and political action.
An excellent complement to We Are Iran
is Afshin Molavi's The Soul of Iran, an updated
version of his 2002 Persian Pilgrimages, which told the stories of the people
he met journeying across Iran. Molavi, an
Iranian-American who speaks Persian fluently, is a talented reporter who has
worked for Reuters and The Washington Post, among media. He is smart enough to
build on his journalistic skills by writing essays about the people he meets,
rather than trying to reinvent himself as an academic who offers grand social
theories or as a policymaker who proposes how to resolve U.S.-Iranian
differences. That makes The Soul of Iran a refreshing change from some books by
journalists who have covered Iran and then decided to write a "big
think" book about Iranian politics, U.S.-Iranian relations, or both.[4] Molavi has a good eye for the telling detail, be it the
clerk pulling out fading receipts to show how good times were under the shah
compared to now; the simple man in the slums of south Tehran who recounts how
his grand hopes for the 1979 revolution have been dashed; or the generosity and
kindness of the taxi driver he befriended in Mashhad who is utterly
uninterested in politics but instinctively supports those protesting against
the government. Molavi structures his account around
his travels but weaves in episodes from the country's long history, especially
from its rich literature, to illustrate the deep pride Iranians have in their
civilization. And it is indeed their civilization they venerate - their love is
in their culture more than in the power of the shahs. This is not nationalism
that exalts conquests of arms; it is the glorification of great ideas and
poetry. Against this background of pride in advanced thought, it is easier to
understand how reform-minded intellectuals and students touch a deep cord in
Iranian popular life.
Molavi's approach also brings to life how disappointed and
discouraged Iranians are. They are sure theirs is a great civilization, but
life is a bitter struggle for what Iranians assume should be theirs by right,
namely, a standard of living roughly on a par with those in other great
civilizations. The harshness of daily existence grinds people down - not that Iran
is particularly poor by the standards of developing countries; it is a
middle-income country roughly on par with Mexico or the Balkan states. This is
not the group with which Iranians seek comparison, though. The shah told his
countrymen that Iran would be the equal of Germany by now, and the revolution
promised to do even better. While Persians believe themselves to be richer in
culture and, frankly, intellect than Arabs across the Persian Gulf, the Arab
emirates and sheikhdoms have soared ahead of Iran over the last quarter
century, feeding the sense that had it not been for the Islamic Revolution,
Iran, too, would now be as rich as its people feel it deserves to be. Adding
insult to injury, the only social group whose income has risen dramatically under
the Islamic Republic is that of the families of the politically well-connected.
By bringing out the deep disappointment of ordinary Iranians, Molavi's account shows why the populist, anti-corruption
2005 presidential campaign of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad worked well. Not that this is
Molavi's aim; indeed, he makes clear that he expects
the economic discontent to add to the reformist camp and to work against the
Islamist hard-liners.
The insight into the views of ordinary
Iranians provided by Alavi and Molavi
is the key to understanding the weaknesses as well as the strengths of
democratic tendencies in Iran. Much less important is the high politics of
elections and maneuverings by establishment politicians. In their Democracy in
Iran: History and the Quest for Liberty, Ali Gheissari,
visiting assistant professor of religious studies at Brown University, and Vali
Nasr, professor of Middle East politics and associate chair of research at the
Naval Postgraduate School and adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign
Relations, rarely get beyond the stale and rarefied world of high politics.
Democracy means more than elections and human rights; it can only flourish
where there is a vibrant civil society, vigorous media and educational
institutions, and openness to debate in which all points of view are tolerated.
None of these issues are broached in Gheissari and
Nasr's account. In their slim volume, they rehash the familiar ground of the
shah's shortcomings before 1979, the revolution's turn towards Islamist absolutism
rather than political openness, and the failure of reformers to build on their
1997 victory in the presidential elections—all stories told elsewhere with as
much insight.
Disappointingly, Gheissari
and Nasr provide none of the context inside Iran or around the region that has
put democracy front and center on the Iranian agenda. In the end, they are much
less successful at making the case that democracy is inevitable for Iran than
is Iranian dissident Mohsen Sazegara, now at Harvard,
in his short monograph, The Point of No Return: Iran's Path to Democracy.[5] Sazegara points to the social changes, such as literacy and
urbanization, that are often associated with democratization in other countries
and that Iran has experienced. He also notes the changes in Iran's neighbors,
with the consolidation of democracy in Turkey and the adoption of the
democratic ideal nearly all around Iran - Iraq, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Pakistan,
Azerbaijan, and Armenia - as well as around the world.
Nothing would seem more different from
the Gheissari and Nasr abstract account of high
politics than Iran Awakening: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope by 2004 Nobel
Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi, which is a personal
account of her struggles to defend human rights under the Islamic Republic.
There is, however, a profound similarity in the two books in their common
defense of the 1979 revolution, which both narratives present as having lost
its way rather than having been from the start a great step backwards. To be
sure, Ebadi goes further on this path. Even with the
hindsight of twenty-seven years, she still writes, "The head-scarf
‘invitation' [the order days after the shah's fall for women to cover their
hair] was the first warning that this revolution might eat its sisters."[6]
Actually, the writings and speeches of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had for
decades been clear about his agenda.[7] Ebadi writes,
"When I think back to these times [of the revolution], my own naïveté
astounds me."[8] But she remains committed to the revolution that has
enslaved her; she cannot bring herself to acknowledge that she was wrong, that
the shah was a better ruler than Khomeini. The same refusal to learn lessons
from history and to reconsider the leftist ideology of her youth, which led her
first to oppose the shah, runs through her account. She manages to say not one
positive word about Western - much less U.S. - support for human rights and,
instead, devotes her final chapter to attacking the U.S. government for
limiting human rights in tones only slightly more balanced than her earlier
dark hints that "rumors swirled" of U.S. support for Khomeini's
Islamic Republic.[9]
Reconsidering the Islamic Revolution:
The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran. By
Charles Kurzman. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. 287 pp. $27.95.
Confronting Iran: The Failure of
American Foreign Policy and the Next Great Conflict in the Middle East. By Ali
Ansari. New York: Basic Books, 2006. 288 pp. $26.
Hidden Iran: Paradox and Power in the
Islamic Republic. By Ray Takeyh. New York: Times
Books/Henry Holt and Company, 2006. 260 pp. $25.
Ebadi's anecdotal approach makes for interesting reading, but
her memories and experiences were by no means typical of the revolution through
which she lived. By contrast, Charles Kurzman, a professor of sociology at
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has produced the definitive
account of the Islamic Revolution. No serious historian can write about these
events without consulting his 10-page essay on available source material in The
Unthinkable Revolution in Iran. His 41-page bibliography includes three pages
of document collections consulted, the majority in Persian. Some, such as the
twenty-nine volume Yaran-e Emam
beh Ravayat-e Asnad-e Savak (Friends of the
Imam According to the Documents of Savak)[10] and the
seven volumes of Enqelab-e Eslami
beh Ravayet-e Asnad-e Savak (The Islamic
Revolution According to the Documents of Savak),[11]
which includes the reports from the shah's secret police about the clerical
opposition, are amazing resources. As Kurzman explains, while it is clear that
not all the relevant documents from the shah's regime are included in these
collections, the amount released is significant, especially in juxtaposition to
the sluggishness with which the U.S. government declassifies documents. Much of
this material undermines the revolution's most cherished images. For instance,
the Islamic Republic releases the results of their strenuous efforts to
document casualties in demonstrations even though these confirm the imperial
government's estimates at the time rather than the claims of the revolutionary
movement.
The facts as established by Kurzman's
detailed research fit poorly with every theory of revolution in general and the
Islamic Revolution in particular, leading Kurzman to propose "an
anti-explanation that puts anomaly in the foreground." For instance, he
shows that the mosques and clerics were subject to severe repression under the
shah. This contradicts the claim that the shah repressed the liberal and secular
opposition, creating a climate in which those opposed to him had no choice but
to organize in mosques. Indeed, Kurzman shows that in 1977, most mosques were
controlled by apolitical clerics so that activists had to build a mosque
network from scratch in 1978. He also documents that as late as autumn 1978,
the revolutionaries did not expect to triumph, much less to do so quickly. In
other words, the revolutionary movement's intelligence failure was as complete
as that of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
The myths that Kurzman punctures
continue to reign in the semi-popular, semi-scholarly literature about Iran.
The latest example is Ali Ansari's Confronting Iran, whose subtitle - The
Failure of American Foreign Policy and the Next Great Conflict in the Middle
East - tells much about the theme. Ansari, who is on the faculty at St. Andrews
University in Scotland, writes that U.S. policymakers did not foresee the
Iranian revolution and that the shah's indecisiveness was key to the
revolution's triumph. Kurzman, however, demonstrates that no one in Iran
including the revolutionaries foresaw their victory and shows that the shah's
policies were sophisticated and decisive if unsuccessful. Ansari goes on to run
through the usual list of myths beloved of leftist Iranian intellectuals, such
as former prime minister Muhammad Musaddiq's
popularity, even though this had evaporated by the time of his 1953
overthrow.[12] By contrast, he mentions nothing in his historical narrative
about the June 1963 demonstrations against the shah led by Khomeini. For those
who rule Iran today, this marks the central moment in modern Iranian history;
however, many Iranian intellectuals saw and continue to see the demonstrations
as a minor event led by backward clerics.
Ansari, like so many Iranian-origin
academics who write with such confidence about U.S. ignorance regarding Iran,
does not know what matters to those who rule the country. Nor is he well
informed about U.S. policy towards Iran. He elevates into a major missed opportunity
the 1979 cable from Bruce Laingen, the U.S. chargé d'affaires in Tehran, recommending reconciliation with the
Islamic Republic. In fact Laingen's recommendation
was adopted: U.S. national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski met with
Iranian prime minister Mehdi Bazargan in Algiers on
November 1, 1979, to assure him that Washington looked forward to working with
the Islamic Republic. That meeting, however, provoked revolutionary students to
seize the U.S. embassy four days later. Undeterred, Brzezinski spent the
succeeding twenty-seven years urging Washington to follow the same policy. The
minor difficulty - which neither he nor Ansari wish to confront - is the
ideological hostility of Iranian power-holders, who have little use for
Western-oriented intellectuals like Ansari and his friends.
A better version of Ansari is Ray Takeyh's Hidden Iran. Takeyh, a
senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who once worked under this
reviewer's direction at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, is an
excellent writer, which makes his book a pleasure to read. On some issues, he
has done his homework and displays an excellent feel for how those who rule
Iran think: for instance, their utter disdain for democracy and pluralism
since, in his words, they view the "essential purpose of the state as the
realization of God's will on earth."[13] But on other issues, he slips
into simple assertions of the usual liberal shibboleths, for instance, blaming
the hard-liners' success on U.S. hostility. On the basic question for U.S.
policymakers of what motivates Iran's foreign policy, Takeyh
could not be more wrong. Time and again, he asserts that Iran is a near-normal
state: "its rhetoric is infused with revolutionary dogma, yet its actual
conduct is practical, if not realistic."[14] But, as his own chapter on
"Israel and the Politics of Terrorism" shows, those who hold power in
Tehran are committed to revolutionary goals though they may temper their
actions to preserve their regime. Takeyh concludes
with the recommendation that the United States and revolutionary Iran form a
partnership to deal with issues of common concern—an extraordinarily
impractical suggestion given the attitudes in both countries.
Culture and History:
Iran's Diverse Peoples: A Reference Sourcebook.
By Massoume Price. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2005. 376
pp.
The Persians. By Gene Garthwaite.
Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. 311 pp.
Iran-Persia: Ancient and Modern. By Helen Loveday, et al. Odyssey Books and
Guides, distributed by New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2005. 430 pp.
Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution. By Nikki Keddie. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2003. 379 pp.
Much as Kurzman's book is indispensable
to study the Iranian Revolution, so, too, is Massoume
Price's Iran's Diverse Peoples: A Reference Sourcebook must reading for anyone
who wants to understand ethnic and religious diversity in Iran. Price, a
University of London-trained anthropologist, shows that Iran very much remains
a Persian empire: a country in which Persians dominate a mosaic of ethnic and
religious groups. The historical record has some surprising twists, such as the
positive experience of many minorities under the rule of Mohammed Reza Shah (r.
1941-79) although that was less true of tribal groups who do better when the
central state is weak. Price begins her story in ancient times, showing Iran's
long experience knitting together groups by both rewarding loyalty and
tolerating diversity. The one weakness in her account is that she skips too quickly
over Islam's slow permeation of Iran. The nature of Islam's diffusion in Iran
marks Iranian society to this day. While religious minorities dominated trade
and urban life through much of Arab history, in Iran the bazaar class was at
the core of Islam.
Dartmouth professor Gene Garthwaite
elaborates upon the depth and strength of imperial tradition in The Persians.
He has written that rarity: a readable, historical introduction rooted deeply
in the scholarly literature. That he is a respected historian with decades of
research experience rather than a regurgitater of
others' work shows in the richness of his account of Persian history from the
earliest days, covering religion, the arts, governance, warfare - even
occasionally, economic life - as well as the comings and goings of rulers. He
brings to life the historical reality that modern Iran is the heir of ancient
Persia in at least as much the sense that modern European civilization has its
roots in the Greco-Roman past. Indeed, the continuity of Iranian civilization
over those millennia is well on a par with any claim of a common European past
during that interval. Garthwaite's command of the grand sweep comes out most
clearly in his chapter on the eight centuries from the Arab conquest to the Safavid
dynasty. Entitled "‘Non-Iran': Arabs, Turks, and Mongols in Iran,"
the chapter emphasizes the taming role of Persian culture over successive
hordes of invaders. Garthwaite's account of recent times is less interesting,
only as that story has been told far more often.
While Garthwaite paints the picture of
Iranian history, he does not tell the story of the land as it is now - its
natural and social geography, historical buildings, and grand sights. Here, the
best introduction is Iran - Persia: Ancient and Modern by Helen Loveday, Bruce Wannell, Christoph Baumer, and
Bijan Omrani, four Persian-speaking experts. Although
part of a series of travel guides, this book is skimpy on practical travel
suggestions; for instance, there is no information about where to eat and only
a 6-page list of hotels, which mostly gives telephone and fax numbers. Nor does
it bother with much information about modern Iranian society; this is not the
place to learn what to shop for or where to see Iranians enjoying themselves.
Instead, it has stunning photographs combined with quite sophisticated local
histories, excellent maps, and detailed explanations about the famous
historical buildings. The introductory chapters on geography, art, and
architecture are well done.
Perhaps the most influential book, at
least among the university student population, is emeritus University of
California- Los Angeles historian Nikki Keddie's Modern Iran, a revised edition
of her 1981 earlier version Roots of Revolution. Her knowledge of Iran is deep
and so are her liberal politics, which permeate the three new chapters she
added in the 2003 edition to cover Iran since 1979. Typical is her assertion,
"The term terrorism, now in vogue, fails to make distinctions," and
does not capture Iran's support for "using means available to a weak side
against a militarily overwhelming one - means similar to some use in past
anti-colonial fights in Israel, South Africa, Algeria, and elsewhere."[15]
She paints an upbeat picture of the Islamic Republic. She lavishes six pages on
the "advancement of women's causes," and her five pages on the arts
is more than 90 percent about arts films which, while popular at international
festivals, have little audience in Iran. By contrast, the rigid censorship of
state television, which is the main source of news and electronic entertainment
for the vast majority of Iranians, passes unmentioned.
An Axis of Evil?:
Iran's Strategic Weapons Programmes: A Net Assessment. By International Institute
for Strategic Studies. New York: Routledge, 2005. 128 pp. $69.95.
The "Great Satan" vs. the
"Mad Mullahs": How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other. By
William Beeman. Westport: Praeger, 2005. 299 pp. $49.95.
Turning to present foreign policy disputes,
the most pressing issue about Iran for the West is its nuclear program. The
best guide to this technical subject is Iran's Strategic Weapons Programmes: A Net Assessment from a team at London's
International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) led by Gary Samore, a National Security Council official under
President Bill Clinton. The political history of Iran's nuclear program serves
as a backdrop to a detailed examination of its current state and informed
speculation about its future. There follows a short discussion about Iran's
chemical and biological programs and its ballistic missile systems. Appendices
present resolutions of the International Atomic Energy Agency. The information
is well documented, and the tone is scholarly and sober.
Missing is much comment on the flawed
evaluation of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs. That is a curious
omission since, in 2002, the IISS produced under Samore's
leadership an influential evaluation, Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction: A Net
Assessment, which was on balance not much more accurate than other prewar
intelligence assessments. The IISS team would have been better advised to
integrate into Iran's Strategic Weapons Programmes a
full and cautious explanation of how the Iran case compares to the Iraq case.
That would have allowed them to pound home the difference in facts known and
those inferred. In Iran, the regime trumpets the existence of sensitive
facilities whereas Iraq tried to keep its programs murky. While Iraq had a
single centrifuge, Iran has more than a thousand and claims to be making more
than a hundred centrifuges each month.
Last and least is The "Great
Satan" vs. the "Mad Mullahs": How the United States and Iran
Demonize Each Other by William Beeman, the director of Middle East studies at
Brown University. It is disappointing to find a full professor at an Ivy League
school writing a book that claims to examine how Iran views the United States
while the author cites only four articles or books in the Persian language.
Beeman ignores or remains ignorant of both the rich literature produced by
Iranian analysts as well as the issue and opinion polling showing the
complexity of Iranian attitudes about the United States. Nor does his analysis
of how Iran views the United States refer to a single statement by an Iranian
leader, or a single article in the Iranian media, in the last twenty-five
years. Indeed, at critical points in his analysis, Beeman does not even refer
to secondary English-language sources; for instance, he gives not one single
footnote in his 3-page rant on how the U.S. accusation that Iran shipped arms
to the Palestinians on the Karine-A was
"absurd." The failure to cite primary sources is more troubling given
Beeman's intemperate language, more appropriate for talk radio than
scholarship. For instance, he refers to "a patchwork of untestable, murky
assertions from dubious sources [which have] asserted - or inferred - that
there were centrifuges for enriching uranium" at Natanz. In fact, Iranian
president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has shown the world's press the enriched uranium
Iran produced in the centrifuges. International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors
have issued dozens of detailed and public reports about the centrifuges.
What is more discouraging about Beeman's
book is the opportunity missed. As a linguistic anthropologist, he would be
well placed to analyze Iranian rhetoric and to elaborate upon the cultural
context for themes used in speeches, textbooks, and television images. Instead,
he ignores what Iranians themselves are saying, writing, and filming,
preferring instead to cite what Westerners writing in English say about
Iranians. That is typical of the critics of U.S. policy towards Iran: they
themselves make little effort to read or listen to the extensive material
available from Iran, and then they project onto the U.S. government their own
ignorance of what the Iranian regime projects.
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