The Fall of the Shah and the Future of Iran
The Supreme Leader of Iran is 82 years old and in poor health. With his eventual death, the Islamic Republic will lose one of the final scions of the revolutionary generation and could enter a time of greater political uncertainty than any since Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, sick with cancer, piloted his own plane out of the capital city and the last Shah fled toward exile in the west. But with the average Iranian’s age now at just under 32 years old, the majority of the population has no living memory of the revolution of 1979 or life before the mullahs.
For 2,500 years before assaults on embassies, American hostages, proxy wars, and nuclear deals, there was monarchy in Iran. That history ended in the nearly 40-year struggle for the survival of the crown, expertly chronicled by the Council on Foreign Relations’ Ray Takeyh in his new book, “The Last Shah: America, Iran, and the Fall of the Pahlavi Dynasty”.
Takeyh’s great value is his combination of a comprehensive knowledge of the minutiae of Iranian history with clear analyses of the great debates regarding a nation that has bedeviled foreign-policy experts for decades. That combination comes through in the opening pages of the book, which starts with a detailed catalogue of the cast of characters, followed by a first-order question: “Why did Iran have a Revolution in 1979?”
Without any familiarity with the lengthy list of players, a quick skim gives even lay readers a preview of how Takeyh will answer that question. Outside actors have always played key roles in Iran, but the regime changed because of decisions made in Iran by Iranians. It wasn’t discontent over a purportedly-CIA-run coup against the last genuinely democratically elected leader of Iran in 1953 that captured Iranian public opinion for 26 years and drove the population to revolt in 1979. In order to understand why the Revolution happened, Takeyh looks to the Iranian people themselves, a population that, well before and well after Mosaddegh, sought “to emancipate itself from tyranny – first monarchial, now Islamist.”
Iran was occupied by the Allied powers in 1941, when the twenty-one-year-old Mohammed Reza Pahlavi became the last Shah of Iran. Once liberated from Stalin’s occupation of the north of his country – with President Truman’s diplomatic assistance – the Shah was then dominated by domestic players and an older establishment of “landlords, merchants, urban notables, and clerics who made up the Iranian elite.” The Shah never sat comfortably on his throne. He had “a taste for absolutism without the character to sustain it.”
The character of a dictator unable to dictate came through during the oft-misunderstood coup of 1953. In Takeyh’s masterful account of these events, America did play a role in the upheavals of that year, but it was far from the main driver of events.
After years of inequitable treatment of Iran by the British-run Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, nationalization champion Mohammed Mossadegh was elected as prime minister in 1951. Nationalization of AIOC went badly, and Mossadegh took a “prerogative that the Shah had reserved for himself,” dismissing the Majlis, the Iranian parliament. As Mossadegh continued to accumulate power – including by denying the Shah access to foreign diplomats and by cutting off relations with Britain – the CIA and MI6 finalized a plan called TPAJAX to take on the ambitious premier.
That plan accomplished little. TPAJAX was led by Kermit Roosevelt Jr., the grandson Theodore Roosevelt, a man who “spoke no Persian, his agency lacked a reliable network of agents, and the lynchpin of his operation was a monarch famed for his indecision.” Roosevelt spent a great deal of his time in Tehran playing tennis, drinking whiskey, and sunbathing. TPAJAX’s most consequential success appears to be recruiting emissaries like the Shah’s sister to persuade the monarch to use his lawful authority – an authority he would use dozens of times throughout his reign – to dismiss his prime minister.
But when the Shah sent the commander of his imperial guards to deliver the message, Mossadegh was waiting. He was ready, and he arrested the messenger, revealing that the coup was “the worst-kept secret in Iran.” The Iranian people might have interpreted the Shah’s subsequent flight to the luxurious Hotel Excelsior in Rome as a loss of conviction in his ability to rule. But landowners, the Left, the clerics, and more took to the streets themselves in support of the Shah. The CIA widely publicized Mossadegh’s unlawful actions through Iranian media. And the royalist army refused to go along with the prime minister in his attempt to subvert the royal family.
Mossadegh’s government collapsed, and the Shah returned to power because the Shah remained relatively popular. The CIA’s role was greatly inflated by Roosevelt, whose sensationalist account in his memoir “is debunked by the declassified record.” It was the Iranian people, not an international conspiracy, that kept the Shah in power in 1953, for good or ill.
And it would be Iranians that toppled the Shah in 1979. By then, Takeyh writes, the Shah was increasingly isolated from his people. Though he restored some economic justice with his land reforms and enfranchised the women of Iran, the economy suffered greatly during the recessions of the 1970s – and the Shah was hardly the people’s prince or an ardent feminist.
Outside sources reinforce Takeyh’s analysis on these points. In a 1973 interview for The New Republic with famed journalist Oriana Fallici, the Shah dismissed the contributions of women and insulted female leaders like Golda Meir and Indira Gandhi, saying they were “much more bloodthirsty” than men. After recounting the likes of Caterina de’Medici, Catherine of Russia, and Lucrezia Borgia, he said of women, “You’re schemers, you’re evil.”
The Shah, meanwhile, lacked the guile necessary to hold onto his father’s crown. He often confided more to foreign journalists than to his advisers. He asked foreign governments to explain his own people to him. He kept his leukemia a secret from his closest advisers for years. His repressive secret police, the SAVAK, built more resentment than security. He was out of step with an increasingly religious population that listened with rapt attention to Khomeini’s sermons on smuggled cassette tapes. And the army that he built and that sustained him in 1953 was a hollow shell of its former self by 1979.
In the crucial moment when Khomeini’s revolutionaries took the capital, the Shah’s generals issued a declaration of neutrality. Their Shah had fled the country a month earlier and they would not fight for his regime again.
Since 1979, many outside observers have come to perceive Iran as something of a monolith. The Supreme Leader exerts total control over the government. Even the name “Islamic Republic of Iran” connotes popular support of the theocratic regime.
That proposition may be tested sooner than most casual students of Iran expect. As Takeyh notes, the Shah’s reign was plagued by unrest. Unrest has continued under the Islamic Republic. The leftists engaged in vicious street battles in the 1980s, the students rioted in the 1990s, the Green Movement of the 2000s rocked the country after a fraudulent presidential election, and the rural population rose up in the 2010s only to be put down after massive state-sponsored violence. But, as the Pahlavi Dynasty showed, “If a government has nothing left but its enforcers, it has little true strength.”
The last Shah reigned for four almost decades. The Islamic Republic has now eclipsed that tenure. As the sun sets on the revolutionary generation, Iran’s future is in the same place it has always been: in the hands of the Iranian people. Ray Takeyh’s book is a service to their cause.
Wilson Shirley served in the Office of Policy Planning at the U.S. Department of State as a speechwriter to the U.S. Secretary of State. He is also a former U.S. Senate staffer.
