A book published last year on the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1978 has relevancy to the current war with Iran.
King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution, a Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation, by Scott Anderson, 2025, Doubleday, New York, 481 pages.
Let’s pray that America has learned something in the intervening years and that delusion and hubris haven’t led us to once again make a catastrophic miscalculation. After all, it’s not as if the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq turned out as expected.
The book begins by recounting President Jimmy Carter’s state visit to Iran in 1977. On New Year’s Eve, Carter toasted Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, King of Kings, Light of the Aryans, Shadow of God on Earth. Carter said that Iran was “an island of stability,” due to the shah’s leadership and the “love and admiration” that the Iranian people had for him.
A little over a year later, the shah fled Iran, went into exile, and was replaced by the fundamentalist cleric Ayatollah Khomeini and his theocratic regime.
Neither the State Department nor the CIA saw it coming. One reason was that only a few staffers in Washington spoke Farsi, including those who manned the Iranian desk in the State Department. And Farsi was spoken by only a handful of staffers in the US Embassy in Tehran and in an outlying consulate.
One of the embassy personnel who spoke Farsi did see it coming, because he would get out of the embassy and mingle with Iranians, including, most importantly, poor Iranians in Tehran and in the countryside. They were the most disillusioned with the Shah’s extravagant lifestyle, the angriest over the pace of Westernization set by the Shah, the most bitter over America’s long history of interfering with domestic affairs in Iran, and, as doctrinaire Muslims, the most amenable to an Islamic state.
The diplomat who saw it coming tried to warn Washington, to no avail. His career suffered by going against the conventional wisdom.
At the time, Khomeini was living in Paris and communicating with his followers in Iran. An Iranian-American doctor, who was close to the cleric, convinced American officials that Khomeini was a moderate.
Of the many players interviewed by the author of King of Kings, one of the most interesting and insightful was the shah’s wife Farah. She had tried to warn her husband that he was becoming increasingly out of touch with the Iranian people, but he wouldn’t listen to her, just as he wouldn’t listen to anyone else.
Among the praise for the book was an endorsement by Steve Coll, author of The Achilles Trap, a National Book Award finalist, and author of Ghost Wars, which won the Pulitzer Prize. He wrote:
Scott Anderson’s King of Kings is a riveting, masterfully told account of how the shah’s downfall, became a tragic turning point in history, as America stumbled blindly into a long and costly conflict that shadows the Middle East to this day. Anderson’s clear analysis and vivid storytelling unravel one of the great miscalculations in America’s postwar foreign policy—a must read that is both urgent and unforgettable.
Will the current war with Iran be another turning point but in a positive direction, or will it prove to be another miscalculation?
That will depend on many unknowns—at least unknown to me but hopefully not unknown to the State Department, the National Security Council, the CIA, and the Israeli Intelligence Service, Mossad.
One unknown is who will prevail in Iran: the educated, secular upper class or the fervent and poor masses. A related unknown is whether the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his top echelon will turn them into martyrs in the eyes of fundamentalist Muslims in Iran and around the world. Still another is what this means for the longstanding rift between the Shia in Iran and the Sunni in Iraq and elsewhere. Will they come together to side with America or will they oppose America?
Or does any of this matter as long as the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran is removed?
I want to believe that such questions have been thought through, but it’s hard to be confident given the blunders of the last 48 years.
Mr. Cantoni can be reached at [email protected].
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