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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.
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