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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.
The theory that “they began funding the only Shia they could find near Israel” because of “antisemitism” is falsified by the fact that they only began funding proto-Hezbollah mere days after Israel invaded Lebanon. The antisemitism theory would make sense if they funded the Shia from 1969 to pre-war, but that isn’t so. Their funding was in direct response to an Israeli invasion which was supported by America.
The theory that Iranians chose to antagonize America, rather than vice versa, ignores that America orchestrated the Shah, which is a pretty big deal, and then that America supported Iraq’s mass use of chemical weapon against Iran (200k casualties iirc), despite Iran’s protest to the international community. Again a pretty big deal. It also ignores the 2003 "Grand Bargain" proposal where Iran sought better relations with America and were willing to offer —
Bush declined this offer, probably because the Neo-Cons, most of whom at the time Jewish Zionists, wanted America to eventually invade Iran.
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The Sunnis are useless though, they don't know how to fight or do anything correctly. Only Pakistan and Turkey are decent, the Arab world doesn't have a clue. They're either rich and get Koreans, Europeans or Americans to run their oilfields and just about all demanding aspects of their economies, or they're poor and even weaker. They don't actually make weapons, oil infrastructure or manufactured goods like Iran does, they're not real military-industrial powers.
The US shot their load. Those JASSMs and interceptors were supposed to be for China and cannot be quickly replaced. The Arabs can't do shit to Iran. If the US Navy doesn't dare to enter the straits of Hormuz, if the US ground forces don't feel like they can do anything significant against Iran, then the Saudis and assorted riff-raff are just going to have to do as Iran says.
Iranian regional and global power is greater than its ever been. Iran used to be opposed by Iraq (who needed the support of both Cold War superpowers just to contend with Iran). Now Iran practically runs Iraq thanks to an incredibly dumb US invasion. This current incredibly dumb war might now give them effective control over the bulk of the Oily Lands.
The regional balance of power is not proportionate to population at all. There is a reason why both Cold War superpowers were helping Saddam's Iraq, they feared Iranian hegemony in the Oily Lands for good reason.
Exactly how does not being able to defend your own territory give you control over someone else's?
The Arabs can't fight, Iran can. Saudi Arabia and UAE are much more vulnerable targets than Iran. They are much more reliant on food imports, desalination and oil exports, so they're already structurally weaker. But they're much less capable at improvising and showing resilience. The UAE version of warfighting is buying insanely expensive American weapons and making slick propaganda videos, not actually achieving strategic goals. Nobody has even see the UAE navy, they're totally useless and know it.
'Not being able to defend your territory from US bombing' does not preclude countries clearly defeating the US. South Vietnam and Afghanistan come to mind.
Bombing is not achieving US strategic goals. If bombing was effective, why has the US stopped bombing Iran before their main goals (regime change and reopening the straits of Hormuz) were met? Why is Trump now going on about Iranian oilfields scarring, why is blockade the new strategy? Because bombing has failed. It's a Star Wars brained, Top Gun strategy 'let's blow this thing and go home'. That's not how the real world works. The Iranians prepared for bombing, they expected bombing and planned around it.
I think the recent historical record shows the Iranians can't fight any better than the Arabs. See the Iran/Iraq war. They too are a patrimonial clan-based society that can't coordinate at a national level. They also have a divided military, which has advantages for dispersion but disadvantages for coordination. They do have certain advantages in a separate ethnic identity similar to Turkey and Egypt. Iran is a more cohesive society than most arab nations, but this doesn't really translate to military capability. They've done well with unconventional guerrilla warfare using Sunni catspaws, but in a straight up shooting war they've not won shit in several hundred years.
The Iran-Iraq war was a surprise attack against a purged and unprepared Iranian military, with Iraq needing enormous amounts of weapons and borrowed funds from overseas. Iraq made great use of chemical weapons because Iran was close to overrunning them for much of the war. Saddam wanted to sue for peace in 1982 but the Iranians were pursuing regime change from then on, only to fail eventually, mostly due to Iraq eventually fielding greater materiel (because they could import more weapons).
The Iranians were much better at fighting the whole time, only they were cut off from buying weapons. There's only so much that being better at fighting gives you when you're up against chemical weapons and superior firepower. The Iraqis had 3:1 or more in aircraft, artillery and armour because they had more access to world markets and superpower assistance, they could buy spare parts and Iran could not.
Iran has since developed a domestic military-industrial base, something Arab countries don't/can't do.
If Iranian military capabilities are so feeble, why isn't the US winning the war? Why are US strategic goals not achieved? It was supposed to be over in a few weeks. Trump has claimed victory about 50 times by now, yet the war hasn't been won. Iran's already achieved their strategic goal, securing control of the straits of Hormuz.
Either the Iranians are capable or the US is incapable.
The US is winning, and it's barely a war. The idea that the people missing half their government and their entire military are in some sense winning is bonkers.
Neither of us knows what the actual strategic goals are, we're guessing. And sometimes wars take longer than a month or two?
Wat. Laying a few mines and boarding a couple merchant ships isn't "securing control", they don't "control" a single square inch of the Strait. Their navy has no ships left, nothing but speedboats. Their interdiction operations are basically the same as Somali pirates. They haven't done anything yet except spook the maritime insurance companies. This whole game is still in the first half, if not the first quarter.
Remember when Venezuela was going to chew up the Marine expeditionary units and we'd be in WW3 in the mountains of South America? And then that didn't happen?
Destroyed the Iranian military, yet the US is too pussy to enter the straits and make safe the seas from these speedboats and drones and antiship missiles... The USN must be real cowards and losers, quivering in fear from an enemy they've already destroyed, in your model of the world.
In the real world, if the Americans could escort tankers safely, they would. That would deny Iran their strongest card of economic warfare against the West. But the US cannot do this and doesn't even try. America cannot even protect the fleet HQ in Bahrain, they cannot protect hundreds of tankers.
Iran can find new generals and ministers, assassination simply is not a military strategy. Not once in history has a war been won by assassination.
The strategic goals are clear, regime change was the initial goal. They wanted the Iranian people to rise up, that was the point of the decapitation strike. Then to attack military capabilities such that Iran couldn't threaten the straits or Gulf energy production. This didn't work either, since Iran retains its capabilities. Then a blockade, which Iran can counter with their own blockade.
Iran controls who can enter and who can leave the straits of Hormuz, they've been charging fees. The US is losing this war.
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In a word, yes. The Iranian revolutionary program is a descendant of the Muslim Brotherhood ideology of Sayyid Qutb (though this is embarassing for them to admit, as he was a Sunni and spawned other groups that have been or are enemies of Iran), which was itself a repackaging of early 20th century leftist ideas in an anticolonial context where poor Muslims are the oppressed class and Western powers are the oppressors. Israel, being for most intents and purposes a Western settler-colonialist state founded by Europeans, is a natural enemy for people with such beliefs. As you pointed out, the timing of the revolution in Iran allowed the new regime to step in as the champions of the Palestinian cause at the precise moment the Arab governments were giving up the struggle and signing peace accords, and the ability to channel the free-floating anger of millions of young Muslim men was a handy thing for them until Hamas finally broke their leash and set off the geopolitical chain reaction we are still living through.
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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?
Your last sentence:
“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 one of those thoughts that sound true but is more often than not false. Just because they fought the US doesn’t mean the following generation will hate the US. It seems like high IQ countries can just flop their relationships. Japan doesn’t seem to have any lingering anti-Americanism. Vietnam which obviously remained control of their government is a friend today. It seems as though something else controls radicalism/military impulse in the next generation.
That's a fair point, and it caused me to do some thinking. I think in the case of Japan, we very deliberately went out of our way to embed the US occupation in the existing structure of the Japanese state, leaving the Emperor on the throne etc. In the Tokyo War Crimes trial, we went out of our way to only prosecute a relatively small handful of top-ranked leaders and a whole bunch of lower-ranking folks were allowed to return to political and government life after a short time. We also kept boots on the ground for a long time, both to contain any resurgent militarist tendencies, but also to shield Japan against enemies like Russia and Communist China. Nothing makes people over look old enmity like a new common enemy. So there was a carrot-and-stick arrangement in place which encouraged post-war reconciliation.
In the case of Vietnam, you again have a case of common adversary in the form of China, which fought a war with Vietnam within a few years of US departure. I will note that even so, it took twenty years for the US and Vietnam to normalize diplomatic relations. And crucially, the North Vietnamese won; its a lot easier to be generous in victory than defeat.
So I won't say its impossible for us to be friends with the Iranians in a decade or two. If an ISIS-like entity were to re-emerge, say, I could see us making common cause. But I do think that kind of reconciliation would require a major fat-tail event that is hard to see from here.
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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.
I guess it is basically a steel man if your argument. To be fair, they're not the only nation whose leadership committed them to decades of misadventure in the region based off of conspiracy theories
Not in the least! I would say that Iran can only hope the outcomes for their country are as mild as the US got away with.
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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 theory of mind 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?
Saudi Arabia is a monarchy, and monarchies in todays world are very, very good at avoiding moronic foreign policy positions. The one thing every monarchy in the world has in common is being a firm US ally, because that is the intelligent move in today's world.
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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.
Thank you, that was a fascinating listen, and I ended up doing some more reading.
It's always interesting to me to hear how regimes that fell to revolution just blatantly fucked up. Of course, you rarely hear much about failed revolutions; it seems it's very much the incumbent's game to lose. If the Shah were a tenth the tyrant the revolutionaries believed he was -- a hundredth the tyrants they would prove to be -- he'd have shut it down easily. Khomeini? He was arrested for sedition twice... And, both times, they just let him go. He set up in Iraq and fomented revolution from exile. Saddam Hussein reportedly offered to kill the guy as a favor, and the Shah refused!
Lenin was known to the Tsar's security forces for years and years before the Russian Revolution, and several other major figures (including Trotsky) had previously been arrested one or more times. It's odd to think of these oppressive regimes -- and they were that, to at least some extent -- as being far too merciful, but you have to wonder how different the world would look if they just executed these would-be revolutionaries, people who would go on to cause unbelievable amounts of suffering and death. Of course, it's not obvious before the revolution which would-be revolutionaries are worth worrying about. Still, at least in the Russian case, they couldn't possibly have done more damage by cracking down on the communists than the communists would go on to do. The Bolsheviks certainly didn't make that mistake: they ended the Tsar's bloodline and executed his doctor too for some reason. The Shah managed to flee before capture, but not for lack of trying on the revolutionaries' part. (The hostage crisis was instigated in response to his brief visit to America for cancer treatment.)
It's darkly hilarious to hear about the revolutionaries' wailing and gnashing of teeth over the protestors the Shah's regime killed... totaling maybe a few hundred. The entire death toll on the revolutionary side was less than 3k; that is, less than a tenth the number of protestors the Islamic Republic gunned down in the street just this year. (Er, probably? There's a very large range in reported numbers here -- no clue how all these organizations could reach such different conclusions; aren't they all working from the same evidence? But even by their own admission it was more than 3k.)
Also interesting to note a couple other absurdities: Yes, the Iranians were already utterly obsessed with Israel, to the point that they invented a story that the Shah was using Israeli troops against them -- total fiction. Another striking story: there was an Islamist terror attack on a movie theater, a symbol of Westernization. They barred the doors and burned the place down, killing hundreds. The revolutionaries didn't blink: they immediately declared it a false flag and used it to further spur the revolution. Iran still pretends that's what happened. Who is it again "who cries out in pain even as he strikes you?"
For fairness's sake, I recall a couple people blaming the recent US bombing of the Iranian girl's school on Iran. (Then again, I recall more people blaming it on Israel.) But so far as I know not even the Trump admin, famously uninterested in the truth, ever actually pushed that claim. It is a uniquely infuriating sort of lie; mere blood libel merely hurts you, it doesn't also exonerate your enemies of their crimes.
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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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