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I'm studying Iranian history this year and am looking for any pointers on texts. Currently still on ancient history, but will work up to modern. If anyone has book suggestions, I'd appreciate it!
That said, I read a few general histories early to get a sort of overview, including the Amanat one. I'd guess at this point my grasp of the general lines of Iranian history exceed pretty much everyone who hasn't studied the place seriously. And I'm mystified as to exactly why the Iranian government became the primary opponent of Israel and the US in the region.
Iran doesn't border Israel. In fact, they don't border any countries that border Israel. Persian people ethnically are not particularly in conflict with jews. Historically, Judaism is rather positive on Persia relative to Rome or Assyria, or any of the other mideast empires that owned the place successively. Neither is there much in the way of religious conflict, because the Iranians are Shia, and the countries that surround Israel are mostly Sunni. Shiism, as a minority faith for most of its history, is less militaristic and more tolerant generally than Sunnism (on the scale of tolerance that is muslim society).
Early in the conflict, it was the Sunnis, both Arab and Egyptian, who funded and manipulated the Palestinian cause. Iran had decent relations with Israel, which grew closer during the time of the Shah.
As best I can make out, this positive international relationship shifted the other way prior to the revolution. In very broad terms, the elites of Iranian society were pretty jew-friendly and largely remain so. The middle class and lower classes are wildly anti-semitic as most middle-eastern nations are, in the Iranian case because they blame much of the abuses of the Shah's regime on Israel and the jews. There was a fair bit of intelligence sharing and cross-training between the Israelis and the Shah's Iran, but of course this was conspiracized into the entire regime being a puppet of Zionists.
When the Iranian revolution succeeded, this view became the dominant one. Immediately as part of their efforts to export their revolution to the world, they began funding the only Shia they could find near Israel, what became Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Over time, the long arc of US/Israeli diplomacy and pressure was slowly bringing the Sunni arab nations around. They didn't like it, but the fact is none of them want the Palestinians and they've been cynically using the issue to keep their people riled up at the joos for a century. The non-arabs, Egypt made a deal with Israel in the seventies. Jordan and Syria made de-facto but not fully de jure deals. Israel and Saudi Arabia, the home of Mecca and Medina, were in talks to regularize relations when the Oct. 7 attack was launched. Those talks were scotched for a few years, but have since been concluded.
The Americans were able to choke off most of the funding for Palestinian terrorism coming from the oil-rich Sunni states. Iran (and the UN) stepped in to fill the void, and began funding Sunni groups like Hamas. Iran was able to install a friendly government in Iraq after the US did them the favor of clearing out the Sunnis, and controlled the most effective fighting forces in the Iraqi Army. Ten years ago the Iranians had their fingers everywhere, propping up Assad in Syria with Hezbollah, running ISIS out of Iraq (yeah, that wasn't us), keeping Hamas relevant and armed.
The US under Trump and Biden have been willing to legitimize Sunni terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and the Taliban, who now run Syria and Afghanistan (again). In my view, we've essentially delegated to the Turks, Saudis and Egyptians, on the condition that everyone play nice with Israel and keep the oil running. There is no more "Iranian Crescent" of influence. Iran just bombed every country in the middle east with a Shia population in their response to the US and Israel playing trampoline on their government and infrastructure. Hezbollah is in rough shape after losing in Syria and the Israelis doing Mossad shit. Hamas is in bad shape after the last war.
So how did it come to this? Why did the Iranian government choose to so directly antagonize the US and Israel, both previous allies (with a lot of dirty politics)? Is it really so simple that the conspiracy theories of a revolutionary pack of morons in 1979 drove them to fight their only geopolitical friends in the region? Are they really going to be the last holdouts for Sunni muslim supremacy in the Levant?
I have to be missing something, because this is one of those things that makes me wonder if countries really are controlled by a cabal of their enemies.
To the extent I can give you a neat answer, I think it comes down to the principal-agent problem, a ruling class which legitimizes itself on the basis of a particular revolutionary ideology, and of course, blind luck and historical contingency.
As you indicate, prior to the Revolution, Iran was basically an Israeli ally. Then you have the revolution, in which counter-elites overthrew the Shah's regime in the name of an ideology which fused left-wing anti-colonialism with religion. As is usually the case, there was a range of opinion amongst the revolutionaries about what shape the post-revolutionary world would take, but the more hardline elements won out. The Iranian Hostage Crisis was a kind of bleeding ulcer that would have prevented normalization of relations between the US and Iran even if the US had been inclined to recognize the new regime - which we weren't. The Shah had been perceived as a key ally against Communism and the whole US security complex had been humiliated by their failure to anticipate or prevent the revolution, so negotiation was always gonna be a heavy lift.
Then comes the Iran-Iraq war, an absolutely brutal conflict in which all sorts of atrocities are committed and in which the US (who mostly still sees Iran as their main problem in the Middle East) backs Iraq. During the war, Iran doubles down on its revolutionary hard-line attitudes. Remember, a lot of the military was considered unreliable because they were associated with the Shah, so Iran lacks a corp of professional, capable officers. They compensate by invoking sheer fanaticism. When the war ends, you have a generation of leaders whose formative experiences have been fighting the US and it's proxies in the name of Revolutionary Shiism, burying their friends and family along the way. Additionally, various things happen which contribute to Iran being an international pariah and make normal relations difficult to impossible with the rest of the world.
Combine this history with geopolitical opportunism. There's lots of Shia throughout the middle-east, mostly in a politically subordinate position. As you pointed out, Iranians are not Arabs, and are the wrong kind of Muslim as far as most of the middle eastern regimes are concerned. So there's already a lot of tension there, not helped by the fact that Iranians aren't shy about considering themselves the successor of the Persian empire. Iran doesn't have the conventional military power to be a regional hegemon, but of course just as the revolution happens we're entering a golden age of unconventional warfare. So, lets assume you're at odds with all your neighbors, and you don't have the guns, tanks and airplanes to threaten them, but you do have a whole bunch of dedicated Shia operatives with paramilitary experience. And you have a bunch of not-particularly-happy Shia looking to put pressure on their own governments. What do you do?.
Thats more or less how we got to where we are. You have a generation of leaders invested in a particular view of the world, who have embedded themselves in the government and security apparatus of the state. You have a hostile but stable equilibrium in which Iran doesn't get along with the US or its Arab neighbors but nobody wants to risk a full-on military conflict (until recently). Personally, everything I took from own study of Iran in grad school was that I'm glad it wasn't my problem to deal with. Cuz it really is a thorny problem. If you're a based conservative, you can point out that Iran is constantly starting shit at every opportunity, and you're absolutely right. If you're a bleeding-heart liberal, you can point out that all the stick-shaking and sanctions and tough-talk haven't actually effected a change in regime attitudes, and you're also absolutely right. Personally, I'm not optimistic about the latest developments. Sure, we can smash their conventional forces, and their economy, and kill all their leaders. But in another twenty years there will be a fresh crop of military age males. And what will their formative experiences have been?
This is as good a take as I've seen, but it's a more detailed version of (slightly uncharitably) "the conspiracy theories of a revolutionary pack of morons in 1979 drove them to fight their only geopolitical friends in the region".
The answer to the questions in your final paragraph, as I see the current state of US policy is that Iran is going to be systematically excluded from middle-eastern affairs. This wouldn't have been my personal policy preference, but I see why they're doing what they're doing. The Sunni are the vast majority, they control most of the countries, they have most of the oil, etc. The combination of Israel, Egypt and Iran as balancing various parts of teh arab world is over for now.
I think what Trump is doing is trying to crush the "Shia Crescent", partly because the two ends of that crescent got themselves into fights they couldn't win. Whatever the outcome of the current air campaign/Hormuz crisis, I doubt Iran is going to be in any shape to be secretly funding and arming other people for a decade or so. In the meantime, what happens to their clients? If Hezbollah and Hamas can both be neutralized as military forces while their sponsor is down, the PA can be strengthened as the leadership of the Palestinians and some sort of deal becomes at least more possible than it currently is. Oct. 7th was Iran's last dice throw to stop this process, and it didn't work.
Meanwhile, various ethnic and religious minorities which have been broadly Shia-aligned/sympathetic (Yazidi, Kurds, Druze, etc.) have been systematically mass murdered, driven out or politically marginalized across the middle east. ISIS did a lot of this, AQ a fair bit etc. The result has been to drastically weaken the various groups that Iran could hypothetically use as agents against Sunni powers. The middle east is being arabized and sunnized.
In the current conflict the Sunni countries (excluding the UAE) pretty much just sat there and took it as Iran obliterated their air defenses, military bases and essential infrastructure with missiles and drones. Whether this is because they fear Iran itself or because they fear their own people rising up if they get too cozy with Israel, either way their oil output has cratered and Trump's blockade currently aims to drive Iran to the state that Iran has already driven every other Gulf nation to (except Oman).
If anything it looks like it's the US that's going to be systematically excluded from Middle Eastern affairs as Gulf countries discover that cutting a deal with Iran is the only way to get oil to market without getting struck by Shaheds. In the long run the Aya-toll-ah could generate more revenue for Iran than oil exports ever did.
None of those groups were "Shia-aligned"; those are American-aligned groups, and their slaughter is a demonstration of the impotence and short-sightedness of American imperial policy. Yet more proof of Kissinger's old adage that to be America's enemy is dangerous but to be America's friend is fatal.
If Iran were to make a comeback in Syria it would be through funding pissed off (mostly) Sunni Syrians in the territory that Israel occupied after the fall of Assad to create a kind of Hamas-Hezbollah hybrid. If anything, fighting the US directly creates more opportunities for this sort of cross sect collaboration; the Houthis started working with Al-Shabaab and AQAP after they achieved "street cred" fighting the US Navy during Prosperity Guardian and Rough Rider.
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And the Taliban never would have spent 20 years in the wilderness (or Pakistan, anyway) if they hadn't chosen to antagonize the United States (when it was at its least tolerant) in the first place. The terrorist-to-statesman pipeline is an old and honorable one, achieved mostly through winning, as Paul Revere, Samuel Chase, and John Hancock could tell you.
If Iran had settled down into being an ordinary dictatorship after the revolution, they'd probably have relations with the US no worse than e.g. Vietnam does today. I don't know why they chose to stick with the whole "Death to America, Death to Israel" thing -- my guess would be their religious fanaticism is absolutely genuine -- but that's what led to today's situation.
I agree with this take. In general I find that Westerners usually fail to model the thinking of dictators because they assume that all dictators are motivated by personal enrichment or ego, rather than by genuine belief in a totalizing ideology. While naked self-interest is a useful framing for the tin-pot dictators of, say, Latin America or Africa, it’s often a poor fit for the motivations of the rulers of civilization-states like Russia, China, and Iran.
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I agree, which is why it is strange
No doubt mostly true, but so is the Saudis, the Jordanians, the Lebanese etc. And they have more national interest at stake. The Shia are not more religiously extreme than the Sunni, much the opposite. It is Sunnis who invented and funded 99% of what we think of as "muslim terrorism". It is the Sunnis who funded and produced the anti-semitic propaganda taught to schoolchildren all over the middle east. Iran got on this "terrorism" thing late and most of the terrorists they fund are Sunnis.
So why is it easier for them to climb down than it is the Iranians? Weird, right?
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I would've thought that voluntary members of The Motte would understand the concept of deeply held convictions better than the average Joe. They are doing this because they sincerely believe that Jews in Jerusalem are bad for Islam, and when the Muslims of the world see which country is doing God's work while their own governments are decadent and faithless, they will finally accept Ali as the true heir of Mohammed.
There are a lot of ways that Iran could have sought to enhance their prestige and standing in the Muslim world. For example, Iran could have sought to turn itself into a shining vision of a bright Islamic future, kind of like Dubai (or at least what Dubai aspires to be). Or it could have tried to establish itself as the champion of Muslim minority groups who were facing religious persecution/assimilation, e.g. Muslims in China or Russia. Or it could have set itself up in opposition to the Sunni leadership in Saudi Arabia. And probably a lot of other things.
And yet, by some strange coincidence, they chose essentially the same villains for their script as is chosen by Leftists.
The Uighur thing wasn’t really a big topic in the late 1970s, and for Iran antagonizing Russia is always a bad idea if it can be avoided. They certainly did set themselves up in opposition to the Gulf Monarchies, including Saudi Arabia (although they are most hostile to Bahrain, which has a Shia majority ruled by a Sunni monarch). Nevertheless, a combination of the Hormuz, access to Hajj, shared OPEC membership and the Iraq Iran war, plus economic difficulty means that waging war on Saudi directly is infeasible. That said, they fund the Houthis who fought a proxy war against Saudi Arabia for many years and bombed Saudi oil facilities.
The difference is that most Muslims around the world either like Saudi Arabia (because they provide immense foreign investment into Iraq, Malaysia, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan etc etc) or don’t care about it. Many people have family or friends with fond memories of Hajj. The main group who dislike Saudi Arabian monarchy are hardline Sunni Islamists who consider it decadent and Western - but those same theological hardliners also consider Shia Islam in its entirety an aberration and a heresy. The only major group of Sunni Islamists who throw their lot in with Iran are Hamas, and that is very much an alliance of convenience (and both sides know it).
Antagonizing the US is also a bad idea, as you seem to concede. Anyway, I don't see why it matters that the Uighur thing wasn't a big topic. Iran could have made it a big topic, or at least tried to. There is also plenty of discrimination against Muslims in India, parts of Europe, and probably in the Philippines as well.
They certainly could have chosen to go after Saudi leadership with the ferocity they normally reserve for Israel, agreed? I mean, they could have had "Death to King al Saud" chants or whatever.
Sure, by contrast, the Iranians were surely well aware that there was a lot of anti-Jewish sentiment as well as anti-US sentiment. Which (in my view) surely informed their choice of a scapegoat. When I said "Ideally you want one who is successful and who therefore excites peoples' envy and greed," I probably should have added "and it also helps if that success has already made the person unpopular."
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It's not that surprising if you consider that the Iranian Revolution followed on the heels of the 60s and 70s waves of protest and all of that period's political change, and was in part driven by students in the same vein as Kent State and friends. The Islamic hardliners were but one faction initially, but happened to displace the others after the Shah was forced out and Khomeini returned, although some of the trappings of leftist anti-colonial revolution were still useful.
Sure, and here's what I said earlier in response to the OP:
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Then what process lead them to that belief? They didn't have it fifty years ago.
They did, they just weren't the ones in charge.
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Fifty years ago they were led by a pragmatic dictatorship. One possibility is the bulk of the people are the fanatics -- this would fit with what happens in Sunni states, where the rulers are always having to deal with challenges from the populist Islamic fanatics -- and the revolution was a truly popular one. This is what I suspect. Another is they are now led by a minority Islamist fanatic dictatorship (which does have those beliefs and always did) and it doesn't matter what the bulk of the people think.
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Propaganda, radicalization, education, history revisionism, etc. "Deeply held convictions" are often proselytized.
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Tom Holland's Persian Fire is nominally about the Greek-Persian war, but about half the page count is the history of Achaemenid Persia up to that point. His In the Shadow of the Sword is mostly a debunking of the "official" story of Muhammed and the origins of Islam, but it includes a good, long chapter on Sassanid Persia.
Holland is an extremely talented writer (he was a successful mass-market novelist before he took up history) and his status as a freelance historian with no academic affiliation allows him to be considerably more based than academic historians writing for a mass audience. His books are considered not-bullshit by serious academic historians, although they attract criticism for writing narrative descriptions of events which we imply we are more certain about what happened than we really are.
Read both, the second some time ago in an islamic reading list. Not bad as pop history.
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It's not a "book suggestion", but The Rest Is History (of which Tom Holland is a co-host) has done a few series of episodes on the history of the area, including a recent one about the Iranian Revolution. I was surprised at how un-kind it was to Jimmy Carter and his handling of the whole situation.
However unkind it was to Carter, it was less than he deserved. The man ruined the middle east for a generation.
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Listen to that podcast all the time, just put together that Tom Holland is one of the hosts. No idea he used to write fiction, I'll have to check him out.
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For the revolution and what led up to it, I recommend The Pride and the Fall by Anthony Parsons (probably have to go to a decent university library for this one), Shah of Shahs by Ryszard Kapuscinski, and King of Kings by Scott Anderson. For the subsequent period there's Revolutionary Iran by Michael Axworthy and Children of Paradise by Laura Secor. Also you might like Soul of Iran by Afshin Molavi.
Thanks, I'll check them out!
Seconding Axeworthy's book. Additionally I'd recommend "The Eagle and The Lion" by James A Bill, which is about US-Iranian relations specifically.
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I'm 99% sure it's already on your list, but I highly recommend the Anabasis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anabasis_(Xenophon)
Edit: Also for a sort of modern version of the Anabasis, you should read up on the Revolt of the Czechoslovak Legion in WWI/the Russian Revolution. Also if you're a gamer there's a fun squad based strategy/tactics game based on it called Last Train Home.
Re-read it already, but ty!
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The obvious explanation is one that is as old as time: It's useful -- socially, emotionally, and ultimately politically -- to have a scapegoat. Ideally you want one who is successful and who therefore excites peoples' envy and greed.
Actual "cries out in pain even as he strikes you", Israel has been belligerent against everyone in the region, stole nuclear technology and illegally acquired nukes, manipulated US into instituting regime in several countries in the region, has clearly been targeting the Iranian regime with war for decades, has now started two wars with surprise attacks. And we STILL have to suffer the "the Joos are just scapegoats" scthick.
They weren't belligerent to Iran under a different government for thirty odd years. Makes me think there's another variable.
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This is completely false, but before I respond I have a couple of questions:
First, generally speaking do you dislike Jewish people?
Second, do you assign blame/responsibility to Jewish people for much of the ills of the West, for example the Social Justice movement?
In my post, I was disputing the claim that Israel has been belligerent against everyone in the region. That's what I quoted.
For what it may be worth, I don't dispute that Israel has nuclear weapons. As to whether they were illegally acquired, I do know that Israel is not a signatory to the non-proliferation treaty, although I wouldn't be shocked if Israel broke some specific country's law along the way.
I'm not sure what you mean by "12 days' war" Iran has been aggressively and incessantly waging war against Israel for decades. So I'm not sure I would say that Israel "started" that war. But if you want to ignore context and look at in isolation (and I know that Israel haters LOVE to examine Israel's behavior out of context) then yeah, I don't dispute that Israel started a bombing campaign against Iran in June 2025 as a surprise attack.
Anyway, before we go on, let me ask you the same questions I asked SS:
Generally speaking do you dislike Jewish people?
Do you assign blame/responsibility to Jewish people for any of the public policies in the West to which you object? For example, if you object to Social Justice, do you assign any blame/responsibility for Social Justice to the Jews?
Sorry, deleted my comment because I realised you were only responding to the belligerent claim, which is fair, my bad.
I think theres a distinction between the relations Israel and Iran had before and after both sessions of surprise aerial bombing. I guess my motte would be that both surprise attacks severely increased direct kinetic conflict, civilian suffering, and heightened tensions in and between both states, in a way that wasn't there on the days before both attacks.
wrt your two questions:
In general, I agree. But I would also note that when countries decide to go to war, it inevitably increases "direct kinetic conflict, civilian suffering, and heightened tensions" War sucks, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's unreasonable or unjust. And in fact, this situation is a good example. Iran has been making war against Israel for decades through proxies. At any time, Iran could have stopped and enjoyed the same sort of uneasy peace Israel has with places like Egypt and Jordan. But instead, Iran decided to pursue a FAFO strategy. It was totally reasonable for Israel to strike directly at the country which has been attacking Israel indirectly.
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It is not useful, however, to chase your scapegoat into the backyard of the biggest dude on the block. What you suggest is that the class war of the Iranian people lead them to hamstring their national position on the world?
Well, I would point out that
(1) these decisions are made by individuals and the interests of those individuals are not necessarily aligned with the interests of the people as a whole;
(2) In Iran's case, the decision was made -- to a large extent -- in 1979. At that time, given the standing of the Soviet Union, going against the US would have seemed more defensible.
(3) I am tempted to ask whether, even today, life is really so bad for Iran's leadership. It does seem like they are pretty well entrenched in power. To be sure, Israel and the United States are in a position to carry out decapitation attacks against them, but it would have been difficult to anticipate in 1979 the development of the kinds of weapons which make this possible.
From the point of view of the Revolutionary leadership in 1979, suppose you had to choose a "Satan" to use as a scapegoat. The US and Israel seem like reasonable choices in hindsight. Even now, there are lots of Jew-haters, third-worldists, etc. throughout the world who hate Israel and the United States, giving Iran significant tailwind.
In California? Not too bad. In Iran? Less so.
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