‘It was a harbinger’: How the 1979 Iranian Revolution still shapes the world

Video

Scott Anderson, author and veteran war correspondent, discusses his must-read book, King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation. He explains the origins of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and how a diverse coalition was united against the Shah of Iran, only to then be overtaken by Ayatollah Khomeini’s theocracy. He also examines how the Carter administration’s Cold War mindset contributed to catastrophic miscalculations. Finally, he discusses the Iranian Revolution’s lasting global impact and how it is a harbinger of similar movements in the present day.

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Program Transcript

This is an automated transcript. Please check against delivery.

SEAN SPEER: Scott, thanks for joining us at Hub Dialogues. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation ever since I read the book. As we were talking just before we started recording, I had a superficial understanding of immediate pre revolution Iran and the forces that have changed that society in the subsequent 40 years or so. But man, I learned a lot reading the book and I hope our listeners and viewers do from our conversation, if you’ll permit me. In that vein, I want to start with a picture of pre revolution Iran. How should we think about the country’s economy and culture? I mean, as I say, I’m no expert, but it doesn’t seem like the obvious conditions for a revolution. What would you say to that, Scott?

SCOTT ANDERSON: I would say you’re absolutely right. It was the most westernized of any country in the Middle east, excluding Israel, of course. It had hundreds of thousands of college graduates. It had the best university system in the region. Women had not worn the veil for over 50 years. It was extremely Westernized and developed, of course, under the Shah and with the oil explosion that happened under his regime. The money was, was pretty unequally distributed. There was, there was a, a small wealthy class and a lot of poor. And there’s also a huge gap between urban and rural. The, the, the countryside was very conservative and, and really little changed from, from, you know, even centuries before, while the, the cities were very modern and, and the center of all the economic development in the country.

SEAN SPEER: The book’s subtitle, as I mentioned in the introduction, is a story of hubris, delusion and catastrophic miscalculation. You describe the Shah’s rule as a story of hubris and delusion. What was it, Scott, about his mindset or the system he had built around himself that made it so hard for him to see. See what was coming?

SCOTT ANDERSON: The Shah was one of the most contradictory figures I’ve ever, certainly the most contradictory figure I’ve ever written about and maybe even read about he was brilliant, he was vain, horribly insecure, and progressively surrounded himself more and more with sycophants and became, existed in this kind of echo chamber. And the other thing that he seemed to really miss was that so many of his country people, and I think this is the key to the revolution, he was seen as an American lackey by his own people. He was referred to as the American Shah.

And this went back to 1953 when the CIA, in a power struggle inside Iran put the Shah back in power. So even, even his supporters would, you know, recognize that he, he was kind of in the pocket of the Americans. And so I really think that part of the revolution was that you had this religious reformation or counter revolution, but it was really joined to this kind of anti colonial spirit. And you know, when I talk about the delusions of the Shah, even while the revolution was going on, he was constantly asking the people were, were, you know, calling an American stooge.

But he was still lobbying the, the Carter administration for some sign that they still stood by him. And, and the Carter administration is as obtuse as they were about almost everything in Iran. They understood how self defeating this was and, and tried to resist. Famously in one case, there was a, there had been a massacre in, in a, in a square in, in Tehran. About 150, 200 people were killed by Iranian soldiers, demonstrators. And the Shah was desperate for Carter to come out publicly in support of him. And Carter knew that this was the worst possible thing that he could do. So he arranged to have a private telephone conversation with the Shah. Just a kind of condolence call, kind of buck up his spirit.

The Shah taped that conversation, transcribed it and had every paper in Iran run it on the front page of the paper the next day. So now it made America look complicit in a massacre. So the shot, I mean, for a brilliant man, and he really was in many ways, he was utterly blind in others. And the added problem was he wasn’t listening to anyone else. The one person who could kind of, he would listen to sometimes was his wife. She could sometimes correct his worst impulses, but by and large there was nobody.

SEAN SPEER: Well, let’s stay on this subject of paradox because it, in a way it runs through your story. The shock, as we’ve been discussing, invested heavily in modernization, things like industrialization, land reform, women’s rights, et cetera. And yet you argue that that very modernization helps sow the seeds of revolt. How do you explain that paradox, Scott? Why did progress in a way produce such backlash?

SCOTT ANDERSON: I think that he called what he was creating the great civilization and this. And he hearkened back to the days of Darius and Cyrus that this was, you know, the new Persian empire was coming. So when there was this kind of this oil boom that happened in the mid-70s, I think, you know, people’s aspirations, expectations became very exaggerated. And this was when you saw millions of young men coming in from the countryside to kind of cash in on the gold rush that was happening. You had tens of thousands of foreigners, mostly Americans, coming in to build the military, build industrialization. And then the bubble kind of burst.

The economy got superheated, overheated, and within about a year and a half it had gone into something of a recession. So I think a lot of it was having so raised expectations and then them not following through. And then secondly, again, this was a, this was a country of two worlds. There was the urban and there was the rural. And I can’t stress enough how much the dichotomy was between the two.

I’d actually traveled through Iran with my father a couple of years in 1974, 1975. And in Tehran you saw women, you did not see women in any kind of veil. Sometimes you’d see headscarves, miniskirts. It was a modern, traffic congested city. And literally 10 miles out of outside of Tehran, people were living in mud huts and using dried cow dung for, for fuel. Little had changed in 500 years. So, and again, that was the really conservative part of the country. And so when I think the economic kind of malaise set in, you had all these millions of especially young men in the cities who are now jobless or marginally employed. And religion was the one constant thing they could fall back on.

SEAN SPEER: One more contextual question, Scott, before we get into the revolution itself, talk a bit more about the religious environment leading up to 1979. What was happening and why was the ultimate revolution itself infused with this high degree of religiosity?

SCOTT ANDERSON: Right. You know, it’s so the Iranian revolution that what I placed so much importance on is the first religious counter revolution we’ve, we’ve ever had in that I can think of, but I don’t. And so I think you can see the carry on from the Iranian revolution and religious nationalism now around the world. But this was kind of bubbling up in the 1970s throughout the world. You know, there was, there was, in this country, there was a, in the United States, there was a resurgence of kind of born again Christianity. There was, there was this kind of. And in a lot of ways around the world, in different forms, it took the form of anti modernity and I think that was absolutely the case in Iran.

The other thing is the Shah, I mean, you know, he was, he was nominally a Muslim. He, you know, he claimed, he claimed lineage back to the Prophet Muhammad. Everybody knew that was, that was not true. He really was, you know, he would go to mosque, you know, every once in a while to sort of press the flesh and stuff. But everyone knew it was kind of a charade. And you know, again, you’re talking about also the, the branch of Islam in, in Iran, which is Shia Islam is very, it’s a very charismatic religion.

It’s, it’s about you, you follow different leaders within the church and so, and a lot of the, the, the Ayatollahs in Iran were very, very conservative. What the Shah had done over time was basically he’d created a great patronage system in the country. He bought off the ayatollah. So they were all, most of them were on sinecures. His fatal mistake with, with Khomeini, with Ayatollah Khomeini was having kicked Khomeini out of the country 15 years before the revolution. Khomeini was not going to be on, on a sinecure. He was, he was in exile so he could say whatever he wanted. So when the, the religious movement started up, people saw the other ayatollahs as corrupted. They, they’d been on the snake, whatever. And Khomeini was pure, you know, in their minds, he was unsullied by the Shah’s money.

SEAN SPEER: And as we were talking before we started recording, one of the most striking parts, and perhaps my favorite part of King of Kings, is how you develop the story around the different groups that comprise this change movement, from religious traditionalists to secular liberals to even Marxist students. What held that coalition together even briefly and perhaps pulling up a bit? Scott, what does that mix of motives tell us about how revolutions actually happen in practice?

SCOTT ANDERSON: That’s a great question. One of the great riddles I was trying to figure out in this book is, is the nature of Khomeini, Was he, was he an accident of history? Was he, was he a guy who happened to be at the right place at the right time? Or was he actually much more, you know, cunning and, and manipulative than people give him credit for? And I, I, I feel very much it was the latter. He was, he was the, the guy in the room that everyone discounted. He was ferociously ambitious. Did not seem it, he just seemed this old guy sitting under an Apple tree. And I think that the people right around Khomeini, these, these Westernized Islamists, they’d all, they’d all gone to school in, in Europe or America and they really sort of took the rough edges off, off of Khomeini and I think they thought they could control it.

And I think that collectively you mentioned it, you know, the Marxists and intellectuals in Tehran, I think that there was this collective feeling that well, let’s get the Shah off the stage and then we will figure out where this revolution goes. And in the meantime, the poor people, the people in the countryside are rallying around Khomeini so he’ll be our useful fool for now. But of course this old guy, you know, in his late 70s, he’s not going to take over. So I think just everybody kind of discounted him.

SEAN SPEER: I want to press on this point because for someone who was being exposed to the intricacies and nuance of the story for the first time, it is so striking that though as we’ve been discussing, there was this broad coalition against the Shah, that coalition quickly gives way to Khomeini’s theorecracy. Talk a bit more about this precise point, Scott. Was that outcome inevitable or could Iran’s revolution have taken a more pluralistic path?

SCOTT ANDERSON: I think early on it could have taken a much more pluralistic path. I think that the longer it went on, and it went on for 14 months, this kind of yes, stutter, stop. And I think the longer it went on, the more inevitable the Khomeini’s ascension became and the more marginalized the others, the other factions became. The revolution got bloodier and that, that tended to, it made people more militant. Interestingly, the other aspect to this of, of why I think Khomeini was, was really kind of positioned to take over was the Carter administration.

To a degree that really surprised me that the Carter administration was so very much in the Cold War mindset when they looked at Iran. It was in that zero sum game of Cold War that our losses, inevitably the Soviets gain and vice versa. So for a long time they’re clean to. And again Iran was the most important American ally economically, militarily, politically between Europe and Japan. There’s nothing in between those two that, that, that equal in importance. So initially they were worried, oh my God, if we lose Iran, if we lose the Shah, it’s going to, it’s going to become a Soviet satellite. The fundamentalists, the men around Khomeini played this very adroitly and once they figured out that was the primary concern of the, of the Carter administration.

They had Khomeini come out more and more against the left and said, well, of course the Communists are not going to be a part of the government. And it had the effect of, you know, allaying the worst fears of the Carter administration. And Carter in the late days kind of famously or infamously said, you know, if Khomeini takes over, it’s not the worst thing that can happen to us. Little did he know. So I think that that was really, that was a very key element to all this.

SEAN SPEER: Well, let’s stay on the subject because it is something that I took away from the book. It’s a theme that runs throughout it, in effect, the US Profound misunderstanding of Iran. How did you come to, to understand it? Is it a failure of intelligence, imagination, or of empathy?

SCOTT ANDERSON: I’d say absolutely. A failure of intelligence and a failure of understanding. You know, I, I grew. My father was with usaid, so I grew up overseas. And so I’ve seen, I’ve seen an American diplomatic missions firsthand. And wherever Americans go, they tend to create a little bubble of Americana. Most diplomats do not speak a local language. They live in American compounds. They shop at the px, their kids go to the American school. And that was absolutely true in Iran. But what was shocking about it. So the American diplomatic mission in Tehran was one of the largest in the world, some 300 at its peak.

When the peak was right, when the revolution started, probably five or six out of those 300 actually spoke the local language. Virtually nobody did. So they’re relying on their local staff. And again, Americans tend to hire huge local staff. And of course that local staff is going to be vetted by the resident government and approve of the resident government. So Americans really existed in this bubble. But what was shocking in Iran. So the CIA station in Tehran was one of the largest CIA stations in the world.

No domestic intelligence at all. They did not do, did no domestic intelligence gathering. They were just there to do spy on the Soviet Union. So they got all their domestic intelligence, such as it was, from the Shah’s secret police. And the Shah’s secret police said, you know, everybody loves the Shah, so they were doing absolutely nothing. No intelligence gathering added to the fact that there was this narrative in successive American administrations that the Shah is secure, he’s beloved by his people, and let’s not go looking for problems where they don’t exist.

So a handful of people, one I profile quite thoroughly in my book, he was a former Peace Corps volunteer and then came back to Iran. As a junior diplomat who did speak Farsi, time and time again, he was telling his superiors at the embassy, this place is coming apart. There’s this anti Americanism growing, anti Shah movement growing. And not only was he ignored, but he was reprimanded. And when he kept bringing these points up, they finally shipped him off to a provincial city where it was hoped he could do no damage. So there was very much a, a head in the sand, deliberate head in the sand approach for the Americans. They did not want to see problems.

SEAN SPEER: We’ve been talking so far about the economic, cultural and religious conditions that contributed to the Iranian revolution and the gradual consolidation of power under Khomeini’s theocracy. I want to understand better how to situate post revolution Iranian politics, this form of theocracy that’s fused by religion and revolution and in modern politics. Should we understand it, Scott, as distinctly Iranian, or is it part of a broader global mood of the era?

SCOTT ANDERSON: I think very much the latter. I think that the Iranian revolution was a harbinger of what we now see playing taking place all around the world. In the United States, you see the, the rise of Christian nationalists, you know, and align themselves with kind of the neo Nazi movement. But every, every major religion in the world now has this, this strain of religious nationalism. Jewish settlers on the West Bank, Hindu nationalists attacking Muslims in India, Buddhist nationalists attacking Hindus in Sri Lanka.

And it, it just seems to be something that we’re just seeing break out all over. And I do think that Iran, it kind of empowered it in a way. I, I don’t know. I can’t say that Iran was the, the fountainhead of all this, but certainly it was, it was the, it was for the first time we saw what would happen when that, that strain of militant religiosity won out. And I’ve spent most of my career as a, as a war correspondent and mostly from the Middle East. If you’re covering modern war, you spend a lot of time in the Middle East. Yes, and I see, you know, I see the traces of what happened in Iran throughout, throughout the region and again in this, in this kind of religious militancy that you see.

SEAN SPEER: Well, another through line for a lot of your work you might characterize as the moral illusions of empire. I think of that from Lawrence in Arabia to the Quine Americans. And I wondered as I was reading the book, Scott, if you think King of Kings marks another chapter in that story, in what sense, in other words, is Iran’s revolution also about the end of Western imperial confidence yeah, yeah.

SCOTT ANDERSON: I seem to be stuck in a sub genre of American foreign policy screw ups. I think that’s absolutely true. And I think that, you know, the kind of funny thing about American imperialism is that I think most Americans, whether they’re left or right, they fundamentally don’t see America as an imperial power. Yeah, we’re not like the British or the French, but so. But as we see ourselves in this kind of Pollyannish way, as liberators, right. I mean, how we go into Iraq and we expect people to throw roses at our soldiers and stuff.

So I, I think we get caught out again and again in this, in this fantasy, this fiction that we’re actually involving ourselves in these places in order to help people, in order to, you know, export democracy or nation build or whatever it is, and it’s just not true. And I think that that was really underscored in Iran. You know, Carter came to office two of the major planks. He was a reformist politician. Two of his planks were respect for human rights around the world and lessening American arms sales abroad. Both of those put a bullseye on the Shah. He was being criticized for his human rights record. And by the time Carter came in, he was responsible for over half of all American arms sales around the world.

And Carter let it be known quite quickly that none of those reformist proposals of his really attached to Iraq. But what he had also done is he’d raised expectations around the world that he was going to have this new respect for human rights. So I think in a roundabout way, he helped kind of light the fire in Iran because very shortly after Carter came to office, you started seeing that. I mean, you saw it around the world and many places to the benefit. You saw it in Eastern Europe, this rise of kind of reformist movements, human rights groups. And I think it really backfired in a very big way in Iran from the American perspective.

SEAN SPEER: Yeah, it’s impossible not to read the book through something of a presentist lens. And so one question I had as I was reading it is whether in hindsight there was something about the origins of the revolution, its anti imperial mood, as we’ve been discussing its religious character, its sense of betrayal vis a vis the Carter administration and the broader west that made a SEAN SPEERile relationship with the west almost inevitable. Could it have unfolded in a way, Scott, that might have preserved some measure of cooperation or trust?

SCOTT ANDERSON: I think that if the Shah had started doing reforms earlier in the, earlier in the 70s, it might have averted the revolution. The problem he got into once the movement of rebellion started was that he would alternately kind of take a hard line stand, send soldiers in the streets and then try to appease the demonstrators by declaring reforms and promised democratic elections for parliament, not of him for the following year. And the demonstrators just saw that as a sign of weakness.

They didn’t see it as a sign of compromise and that the Shah had turned. After all, the Shah had been in office for 37 years. So he was seen as just kind of throwing chum on the water and kind of trying to save himself. So by the time the revolution started, there was really nothing he could do, I think, to, to kind of save his situation. Unless he had just done a, a massive, you know, just machine gunning people in the streets.

If he had been a. But as he said, and he said this on a number of occasions, that to the American ambassador, to the British ambassador, if, if my, if saving my throne means, you know, killing the, the youth of my nation, I won’t do it. It’s not worth it to me. So maybe admirable as a human being, but not the right approach to take if you want to hold on to power in that.

SEAN SPEER: More than 40 years later. Talk a bit, Scott, about the extent to which. Let me say that differently. More than 40 years later, Scott. Talk about the extent to which the revolution itself is part of the Iranian political identity and the, the society’s understanding of itself.

SCOTT ANDERSON: It’s a. That’s a great question. And I think that there’s. I think I would answer this differently now than I would have say three or four months ago before the Israeli and American bombing of Iran in, in June. My sense, I’m still in discrete touch with a number of people in Iran. It has to be discreet because they actually have a very sophisticated kind of surveillance system. It felt like that there was a huge amount of dissatisfaction with the regime. I’m. I always hear numbers that the numbers that support the regime are 15 to 20%. I don’t know where those numbers come from, but I did feel that the anti regime movement was growing.

Whether it would have. This has happened several times though. This happened in 2009 when Ahmadine Judd stole the election Reformist had actually won. And the, the regime has always been quite good at knowing when to really, you know, release stress a little bit or tension, you know, when to go soft, when to go hard. But what I think really changed in June and I’ve been hearing this from people I’ve talked to, most of whom would consider themselves opposition, that there just has been this Tremendous rallying around the flag effect since the American and Israeli bombing of Iran.

You know, it turns out that people really don’t like being bombed, their country being bombed by foreign countries. So there’s been this huge rally around the flag effect and it’s had the effect for your opposition. If people go out and protest, then they’re seen as lackeys of the Israelis and the Americans. So it’s made it very, very difficult for the opposition. And so you’re at this weird juncture right now with Iran, you know, over the last years, year and a half, Israel especially has kind of knocked out one of its kind of proxy allies one after the other. So as a regional force, which everyone was talking about Iran, you know, a year ago. Yes, I think that’s much, much weaker now, but perversely might be stronger internally than it’s been in a long, long time. I don’t see, I don’t see a reformist movement happening anytime soon inside Iran.

SEAN SPEER: Yeah, that’s fascinating. The inattention to nationalism on the part of the Trump administration, which purports to be a political movement motivated by nationalism, is something, of course, that we’ve talked and thought a lot about here in Canada. Beneath the surface, though, are there traces of Iran’s pre revolutionary political culture. It’s cosmopolitanism, for instance, that still shapes how ordinary Iranians, particularly those in cities, might think of themselves and their society.

SCOTT ANDERSON: Absolutely. There is a top layer Iranian society that is wealthy, that comes and goes from Iran. It’s a, it’s a clever regime in that it, you know, as I mentioned earlier, it kind of knows when to let up a bit.

So, and I think that gives people hope that, you know, they can say, oh, things are better now than they were 10 years ago. So maybe five years from now they’ll be that much more liberal. Also for that class, that, that upper middle class to wealthy class, it’s a different set of rules as, as long as you’re not flagrant about things. You know, it’s, it’s a cliche, but you know, your upper class Iranians drink, they have wild parties, but it’s all kind of behind closed doors.

You know the woman who was killed three years ago, that’s kind of set off the Women in Freedom movement. She was, she was a Kurd, which is a, you know, a minority within Iran. That would not have happened if that, that Kurdish girl had been dressed in Versace or whatever. If she’d clearly been of the upper class, they would not have messed with her. So Again, it’s almost like in the Shah’s time. This is a tale of two different cultures coexisting, but one being now quite invisible.

SEAN SPEER: As we wrap up, just a couple of big picture questions because, well, the book tells the extraordinary story of the revolution, including through the lens of some of the figures involved. You also do a really tremendous job at these big kind of meta. Through lines. We’ve been talking about imperialism. We’ve also talked a bit about the nature of revolutions, and that’s where I want to go, if that’s okay. When you look across history, this particular history, do you see larger lessons about how revolutions evolve? Is there something almost about the logic of revolutionary politics that itself tends to produce repression and isolation, even when they begin in the name of liberation?

SCOTT ANDERSON: It does seem that way, with the exception of the American Revolution. And that might just be because we don’t know what really went on. It does seem that what revolutions tend to do is they sweep away all constraints. So it’s really left up to the, the people or the small group of people in power to, you know, they have kind of complete control over what happens. What was very curious about the Iranian revolution, I mentioned this in the book, is that it didn’t follow the normal path of most revolutions. Most revolutions, they have a steady build to them, and it builds to a climax where either the regime is overthrown or the, the rebels are wiped out or crushed.

And Iran, it had all these ebbs and flows and there was long periods of relative quiet. And then, then other times when it looked like the country was just going to come apart at the scene. So I think that that also lulled people into thinking until very late in the game, well, the Shah isn’t really in such great danger after all. He has the fifth most powerful army in the world. So, you know, worse comes to worst, he can always unleash his army. But what they didn’t, you know, I don’t say they.

I mean, like the Americans and Western allies, what they didn’t count on was that the Shaw was kind of a deer in headlights. He was, he did just didn’t know what to do. And he froze. And he didn’t just freeze for, you know, a few days. He froze for months and just didn’t move. So that, I think that, I think was, was really what made the revolution come about. But, and one other thing I was going to say is the optics of the revolution. You know, I’m, I’m older. I remember when the Iranian revolution was underway and you’d see this, it did not look like a religious revolution. The people in the streets, you know, firebombing or, you know, throwing rocks at the, at the soldiers were, had long hair, blue jeans, leather jackets. They look like, they look like the, the parisian demonstrators from 1968.

SEAN SPEER: Of course.

SCOTT ANDERSON: Yeah. So I think that that was another way that it kind of people didn’t really figure this was going to be this, this religious counter revolution until very late.

SEAN SPEER: Final question. Having gone deep on the conditions that led to the revolution and then, of course, it’s evolution. What conclusions, if any, have you reached about the, about the regime’s durability and the extent to which it continues to manifest some of the impulses that animated its, its launch?

SCOTT ANDERSON: Yeah, you know, I think, I don’t know if this is directly answering your question. What I’ve, what I’ve thought a lot about in different revolutions around the world. The way the Americans usually approach what they see as a foe is this, I think this idea of isolating regimes, of putting sanctions on it really just fortifies the strength of the regime. Sanctions look like you’re doing something right. You’re not putting troops on the ground and it doesn’t cost anything. So it looks like you’re going to cripple the regime. But, but, you know, secret police never go hungry, armies never go hungry.

So really by doing this, all you’re doing is strengthening the hand of the regime.

And I think the, the Iranian regime has been, again, very adept at playing the anti American card. I think that the sanctions have been put on it over and not just by the Trump administration, but by previous ones. Just strengthen the hand of the, of the ayatollahs and it makes it look like they are being targeted.

And, you know, it’s one of the great paradoxes because every American I know, every journalist who’s gone to Iran, when people see a foreigner on the street and they say they’re American, Iranians light up. They like Americans, but they don’t like American governments. And so I think that they feel, I mean, I’ve talked with a number of people in the Iranian diaspora about this, of, of, yes. This idea that, that, you know, almost everything that’s being done is, is counterproductive from that, from the standpoint of change.

SEAN SPEER: Yeah. A humbling message about what is not a humble book. It is an ambitious and enormously insightful one. The title is King of Kings, the Iranian Revolution, A story of hubris, delusion and catastrophic miscalculation. Scott Anderson, thank you so much for joining us at Hub dialogues.

SCOTT ANDERSON: It was my pleasure. Thank you.

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Scott Anderson, author and veteran war correspondent, discusses his must-read book, King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation. He explains the origins of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and how a diverse coalition was united against the Shah of Iran, only to then be overtaken by Ayatollah Khomeini’s theocracy. He also examines how the Carter administration’s Cold War mindset contributed to catastrophic miscalculations. Finally, he discusses the Iranian Revolution’s lasting global impact and how it is a harbinger of similar movements in the present day. You can listen to this episode on Amazon, Apple, and Spotify. Program Transcript This is an automated transcript. Please check against delivery. SEAN SPEER: Scott, thanks for joining us at Hub Dialogues. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation ever since I read the book. As we were talking just before we started recording, I had a superficial understanding of immediate pre revolution Iran and the forces that have changed that society in the subsequent 40 years or so. But man, I learned a lot reading the book and I hope our listeners and viewers do from our conversation, if you’ll permit me. In that vein, I want to start with a picture of pre revolution Iran. How should we think about the country’s economy and culture? I mean, as I say, I’m no expert, but it doesn’t seem like the obvious conditions for a revolution. What would you say to that, Scott? SCOTT ANDERSON: I would say you’re absolutely right. It was the most westernized of any country in the Middle east, excluding Israel, of course. It had hundreds of thousands of college graduates. It had the best university system in the region. Women had not worn the veil for over 50 years. It was extremely Westernized and developed, of course, under the Shah and with the oil explosion that happened under his regime. The money was, was pretty unequally distributed. There was, there was a, a small wealthy class and a lot of poor. And there’s also a huge gap between urban and rural. The, the, the countryside was very conservative and, and really little changed from, from, you know, even centuries before, while the, the cities were very modern and, and the center of all the economic development in the country. SEAN SPEER: The book’s subtitle, as I mentioned in the introduction, is a story of hubris, delusion and catastrophic miscalculation. You describe the Shah’s rule as a story of hubris and delusion. What was it, Scott, about his mindset or the system he had built around himself that made it so hard for him to see. See what was coming? SCOTT ANDERSON: The Shah was one of the most contradictory figures I’ve ever, certainly the most contradictory figure I’ve ever written about and maybe even read about he was brilliant, he was vain, horribly insecure, and progressively surrounded himself more and more with sycophants and became, existed in this kind of echo chamber. And the other thing that he seemed to really miss was that so many of his country people, and I think this is the key to the revolution, he was seen as an American lackey by his own people. He was referred to as the American Shah. And this went back to 1953 when the CIA, in a power struggle inside Iran put the Shah back in power. So even, even his supporters would, you know, recognize that he, he was kind of in the pocket of the Americans. And so I really think that part of the revolution was that you had this religious reformation or counter revolution, but it was really joined to this kind of anti colonial spirit. And you know, when I talk about the delusions of the Shah, even while the revolution was going on, he was constantly asking the people were, were, you know, calling an American stooge. But he was still lobbying the, the Carter administration for some sign that they still stood by him. And, and the Carter administration is as obtuse as they were about almost everything in Iran. They understood how self defeating this was and, and tried to resist. Famously in one case, there was a, there had been a massacre in, in a, in a square in, in Tehran. About 150, 200 people were killed by Iranian soldiers, demonstrators. And the Shah was desperate for Carter to come out publicly in support of him. And Carter knew that this was the worst possible thing that he could do. So he arranged to have a private telephone conversation with the Shah. Just a kind of condolence call, kind of buck up his spirit. The Shah taped that conversation, transcribed it and had every paper in Iran run it on the front page of the paper the next day. So now it made America look complicit in a massacre. So the shot, I mean, for a brilliant man, and he really was in many ways, he was utterly blind in others. And the added problem was he wasn’t listening to anyone else. The one person who could kind of, he would listen to sometimes was his wife. She could sometimes correct his worst impulses, but by and large there was nobody. SEAN SPEER: Well, let’s stay on this subject of paradox because it, in a way it runs through your story. The shock, as we’ve been discussing, invested heavily in modernization, things like industrialization, land reform, women’s rights, et cetera. And yet you argue that that very modernization helps sow the seeds of revolt. How do you explain that paradox, Scott? Why did progress in a way produce such backlash? SCOTT ANDERSON: I think that he called what he was creating the great civilization and this. And he hearkened back to the days of Darius and Cyrus that this was, you know, the new Persian empire was coming. So when there was this kind of this oil boom that happened in the mid-70s, I think, you know, people’s aspirations, expectations became very exaggerated. And this was when you saw millions of young men coming in from the countryside to kind of cash in on the gold rush that was happening. You had tens of thousands of foreigners, mostly Americans, coming in to build the military, build industrialization. And then the bubble kind of burst. The economy got superheated, overheated, and within about a year and a half it had gone into something of a recession. So I think a lot of it was having so raised expectations and then them not following through. And then secondly, again, this was a, this was a country of two worlds. There was the urban and there was the rural. And I can’t stress enough how much the dichotomy was between the two. I’d actually traveled through Iran with my father a couple of years in 1974, 1975. And in Tehran you saw women, you did not see women in any kind of veil. Sometimes you’d see headscarves, miniskirts. It was a modern, traffic congested city. And literally 10 miles out of outside of Tehran, people were living in mud huts and using dried cow dung for, for fuel. Little had changed in 500 years. So, and again, that was the really conservative part of the country. And so when I think the economic kind of malaise set in, you had all these millions of especially young men in the cities who are now jobless or marginally employed. And religion was the one constant thing they could fall back on. SEAN SPEER: One more contextual question, Scott, before we get into the revolution itself, talk a bit more about the religious environment leading up to 1979. What was happening and why was the ultimate revolution itself infused with this high degree of religiosity? SCOTT ANDERSON: Right. You know, it’s so the Iranian revolution that what I placed so much importance on is the first religious counter revolution we’ve, we’ve ever had in that I can think of, but I don’t. And so I think you can see the carry on from the Iranian revolution and religious nationalism now around the world. But this was kind of bubbling up in the 1970s throughout the world. You know, there was, there was, in this country, there was a, in the United States, there was a resurgence of kind of born again Christianity. There was, there was this kind of. And in a lot of ways around the world, in different forms, it took the form of anti modernity and I think that was absolutely the case in Iran. The other thing is the Shah, I mean, you know, he was, he was nominally a Muslim. He, you know, he claimed, he claimed lineage back to the Prophet Muhammad. Everybody knew that was, that was not true. He really was, you know, he would go to mosque, you know, every once in a while to sort of press the flesh and stuff. But everyone knew it was kind of a charade. And you know, again, you’re talking about also the, the branch of Islam in, in Iran, which is Shia Islam is very, it’s a very charismatic religion. It’s, it’s about you, you follow different leaders within the church and so, and a lot of the, the, the Ayatollahs in Iran were very, very conservative. What the Shah had done over time was basically he’d created a great patronage system in the country. He bought off the ayatollah. So they were all, most of them were on sinecures. His fatal mistake with, with Khomeini, with Ayatollah Khomeini was having kicked Khomeini out of the country 15 years before the revolution. Khomeini was not going to be on, on a sinecure. He was, he was in exile so he could say whatever he wanted. So when the, the religious movement started up, people saw the other ayatollahs as corrupted. They, they’d been on the snake, whatever. And Khomeini was pure, you know, in their minds, he was unsullied by the Shah’s money. SEAN SPEER: And as we were talking before we started recording, one of the most striking parts, and perhaps my favorite part of King of Kings, is how you develop the story around the different groups that comprise this change movement, from religious traditionalists to secular liberals to even Marxist students. What held that coalition together even briefly and perhaps pulling up a bit? Scott, what does that mix of motives tell us about how revolutions actually happen in practice? SCOTT ANDERSON: That’s a great question. One of the great riddles I was trying to figure out in this book is, is the nature of Khomeini, Was he, was he an accident of history? Was he, was he a guy who happened to be at the right place at the right time? Or was he actually much more, you know, cunning and, and manipulative than people give him credit for? And I, I, I feel very much it was the latter. He was, he was the, the guy in the room that everyone discounted. He was ferociously ambitious. Did not seem it, he just seemed this old guy sitting under an Apple tree. And I think that the people right around Khomeini, these, these Westernized Islamists, they’d all, they’d all gone to school in, in Europe or America and they really sort of took the rough edges off, off of Khomeini and I think they thought they could control it. And I think that collectively you mentioned it, you know, the Marxists and intellectuals in Tehran, I think that there was this collective feeling that well, let’s get the Shah off the stage and then we will figure out where this revolution goes. And in the meantime, the poor people, the people in the countryside are rallying around Khomeini so he’ll be our useful fool for now. But of course this old guy, you know, in his late 70s, he’s not going to take over. So I think just everybody kind of discounted him. SEAN SPEER: I want to press on this point because for someone who was being exposed to the intricacies and nuance of the story for the first time, it is so striking that though as we’ve been discussing, there was this broad coalition against the Shah, that coalition quickly gives way to Khomeini’s theorecracy. Talk a bit more about this precise point, Scott. Was that outcome inevitable or could Iran’s revolution have taken a more pluralistic path? SCOTT ANDERSON: I think early on it could have taken a much more pluralistic path. I think that the longer it went on, and it went on for 14 months, this kind of yes, stutter, stop. And I think the longer it went on, the more inevitable the Khomeini’s ascension became and the more marginalized the others, the other factions became. The revolution got bloodier and that, that tended to, it made people more militant. Interestingly, the other aspect to this of, of why I think Khomeini was, was really kind of positioned to take over was the Carter administration. To a degree that really surprised me that the Carter administration was so very much in the Cold War mindset when they looked at Iran. It was in that zero sum game of Cold War that our losses, inevitably the Soviets gain and vice versa. So for a long time they’re clean to. And again Iran was the most important American ally economically, militarily, politically between Europe and Japan. There’s nothing in between those two that, that, that equal in importance. So initially they were worried, oh my God, if we lose Iran, if we lose the Shah, it’s going to, it’s going to become a Soviet satellite. The fundamentalists, the men around Khomeini played this very adroitly and once they figured out that was the primary concern of the, of the Carter administration. They had Khomeini come out more and more against the left and said, well, of course the Communists are not going to be a part of the government. And it had the effect of, you know, allaying the worst fears of the Carter administration. And Carter in the late days kind of famously or infamously said, you know, if Khomeini takes over, it’s not the worst thing that can happen to us. Little did he know. So I think that that was really, that was a very key element to all this. SEAN SPEER: Well, let’s stay on the subject because it is something that I took away from the book. It’s a theme that runs throughout it, in effect, the US Profound misunderstanding of Iran. How did you come to, to understand it? Is it a failure of intelligence, imagination, or of empathy? SCOTT ANDERSON: I’d say absolutely. A failure of intelligence and a failure of understanding. You know, I, I grew. My father was with usaid, so I grew up overseas. And so I’ve seen, I’ve seen an American diplomatic missions firsthand. And wherever Americans go, they tend to create a little bubble of Americana. Most diplomats do not speak a local language. They live in American compounds. They shop at the px, their kids go to the American school. And that was absolutely true in Iran. But what was shocking about it. So the American diplomatic mission in Tehran was one of the largest in the world, some 300 at its peak. When the peak was right, when the revolution started, probably five or six out of those 300 actually spoke the local language. Virtually nobody did. So they’re relying on their local staff. And again, Americans tend to hire huge local staff. And of course that local staff is going to be vetted by the resident government and approve of the resident government. So Americans really existed in this bubble. But what was shocking in Iran. So the CIA station in Tehran was one of the largest CIA stations in the world. No domestic intelligence at all. They did not do, did no domestic intelligence gathering. They were just there to do spy on the Soviet Union. So they got all their domestic intelligence, such as it was, from the Shah’s secret police. And the Shah’s secret police said, you know, everybody loves the Shah, so they were doing absolutely nothing. No intelligence gathering added to the fact that there was this narrative in successive American administrations that the Shah is secure, he’s beloved by his people, and let’s not go looking for problems where they don’t exist. So a handful of people, one I profile quite thoroughly in my book, he was a former Peace Corps volunteer and then came back to Iran. As a junior diplomat who did speak Farsi, time and time again, he was telling his superiors at the embassy, this place is coming apart. There’s this anti Americanism growing, anti Shah movement growing. And not only was he ignored, but he was reprimanded. And when he kept bringing these points up, they finally shipped him off to a provincial city where it was hoped he could do no damage. So there was very much a, a head in the sand, deliberate head in the sand approach for the Americans. They did not want to see problems. SEAN SPEER: We’ve been talking so far about the economic, cultural and religious conditions that contributed to the Iranian revolution and the gradual consolidation of power under Khomeini’s theocracy. I want to understand better how to situate post revolution Iranian politics, this form of theocracy that’s fused by religion and revolution and in modern politics. Should we understand it, Scott, as distinctly Iranian, or is it part of a broader global mood of the era? SCOTT ANDERSON: I think very much the latter. I think that the Iranian revolution was a harbinger of what we now see playing taking place all around the world. In the United States, you see the, the rise of Christian nationalists, you know, and align themselves with kind of the neo Nazi movement. But every, every major religion in the world now has this, this strain of religious nationalism. Jewish settlers on the West Bank, Hindu nationalists attacking Muslims in India, Buddhist nationalists attacking Hindus in Sri Lanka. And it, it just seems to be something that we’re just seeing break out all over. And I do think that Iran, it kind of empowered it in a way. I, I don’t know. I can’t say that Iran was the, the fountainhead of all this, but certainly it was, it was the, it was for the first time we saw what would happen when that, that strain of militant religiosity won out. And I’ve spent most of my career as a, as a war correspondent and mostly from the Middle East. If you’re covering modern war, you spend a lot of time in the Middle East. Yes, and I see, you know, I see the traces of what happened in Iran throughout, throughout the region and again in this, in this kind of religious militancy that you see. SEAN SPEER: Well, another through line for a lot of your work you might characterize as the moral illusions of empire. I think of that from Lawrence in Arabia to the Quine Americans. And I wondered as I was reading the book, Scott, if you think King of Kings marks another chapter in that story, in what sense, in other words, is Iran’s revolution also about the end of Western imperial confidence yeah, yeah. SCOTT ANDERSON: I seem to be stuck in a sub genre of American foreign policy screw ups. I think that’s absolutely true. And I think that, you know, the kind of funny thing about American imperialism is that I think most Americans, whether they’re left or right, they fundamentally don’t see America as an imperial power. Yeah, we’re not like the British or the French, but so. But as we see ourselves in this kind of Pollyannish way, as liberators, right. I mean, how we go into Iraq and we expect people to throw roses at our soldiers and stuff. So I, I think we get caught out again and again in this, in this fantasy, this fiction that we’re actually involving ourselves in these places in order to help people, in order to, you know, export democracy or nation build or whatever it is, and it’s just not true. And I think that that was really underscored in Iran. You know, Carter came to office two of the major planks. He was a reformist politician. Two of his planks were respect for human rights around the world and lessening American arms sales abroad. Both of those put a bullseye on the Shah. He was being criticized for his human rights record. And by the time Carter came in, he was responsible for over half of all American arms sales around the world. And Carter let it be known quite quickly that none of those reformist proposals of his really attached to Iraq. But what he had also done is he’d raised expectations around the world that he was going to have this new respect for human rights. So I think in a roundabout way, he helped kind of light the fire in Iran because very shortly after Carter came to office, you started seeing that. I mean, you saw it around the world and many places to the benefit. You saw it in Eastern Europe, this rise of kind of reformist movements, human rights groups. And I think it really backfired in a very big way in Iran from the American perspective. SEAN SPEER: Yeah, it’s impossible not to read the book through something of a presentist lens. And so one question I had as I was reading it is whether in hindsight there was something about the origins of the revolution, its anti imperial mood, as we’ve been discussing its religious character, its sense of betrayal vis a vis the Carter administration and the broader west that made a SEAN SPEERile relationship with the west almost inevitable. Could it have unfolded in a way, Scott, that might have preserved some measure of cooperation or trust? SCOTT ANDERSON: I think that if the Shah had started doing reforms earlier in the, earlier in the 70s, it might have averted the revolution. The problem he got into once the movement of rebellion started was that he would alternately kind of take a hard line stand, send soldiers in the streets and then try to appease the demonstrators by declaring reforms and promised democratic elections for parliament, not of him for the following year. And the demonstrators just saw that as a sign of weakness. They didn’t see it as a sign of compromise and that the Shah had turned. After all, the Shah had been in office for 37 years. So he was seen as just kind of throwing chum on the water and kind of trying to save himself. So by the time the revolution started, there was really nothing he could do, I think, to, to kind of save his situation. Unless he had just done a, a massive, you know, just machine gunning people in the streets. If he had been a. But as he said, and he said this on a number of occasions, that to the American ambassador, to the British ambassador, if, if my, if saving my throne means, you know, killing the, the youth of my nation, I won’t do it. It’s not worth it to me. So maybe admirable as a human being, but not the right approach to take if you want to hold on to power in that. SEAN SPEER: More than 40 years later. Talk a bit, Scott, about the extent to which. Let me say that differently. More than 40 years later, Scott. Talk about the extent to which the revolution itself is part of the Iranian political identity and the, the society’s understanding of itself. SCOTT ANDERSON: It’s a. That’s a great question. And I think that there’s. I think I would answer this differently now than I would have say three or four months ago before the Israeli and American bombing of Iran in, in June. My sense, I’m still in discrete touch with a number of people in Iran. It has to be discreet because they actually have a very sophisticated kind of surveillance system. It felt like that there was a huge amount of dissatisfaction with the regime. I’m. I always hear numbers that the numbers that support the regime are 15 to 20%. I don’t know where those numbers come from, but I did feel that the anti regime movement was growing. Whether it would have. This has happened several times though. This happened in 2009 when Ahmadine Judd stole the election Reformist had actually won. And the, the regime has always been quite good at knowing when to really, you know, release stress a little bit or tension, you know, when to go soft, when to go hard. But what I think really changed in June and I’ve been hearing this from people I’ve talked to, most of whom would consider themselves opposition, that there just has been this Tremendous rallying around the flag effect since the American and Israeli bombing of Iran. You know, it turns out that people really don’t like being bombed, their country being bombed by foreign countries. So there’s been this huge rally around the flag effect and it’s had the effect for your opposition. If people go out and protest, then they’re seen as lackeys of the Israelis and the Americans. So it’s made it very, very difficult for the opposition. And so you’re at this weird juncture right now with Iran, you know, over the last years, year and a half, Israel especially has kind of knocked out one of its kind of proxy allies one after the other. So as a regional force, which everyone was talking about Iran, you know, a year ago. Yes, I think that’s much, much weaker now, but perversely might be stronger internally than it’s been in a long, long time. I don’t see, I don’t see a reformist movement happening anytime soon inside Iran. SEAN SPEER: Yeah, that’s fascinating. The inattention to nationalism on the part of the Trump administration, which purports to be a political movement motivated by nationalism, is something, of course, that we’ve talked and thought a lot about here in Canada. Beneath the surface, though, are there traces of Iran’s pre revolutionary political culture. It’s cosmopolitanism, for instance, that still shapes how ordinary Iranians, particularly those in cities, might think of themselves and their society. SCOTT ANDERSON: Absolutely. There is a top layer Iranian society that is wealthy, that comes and goes from Iran. It’s a, it’s a clever regime in that it, you know, as I mentioned earlier, it kind of knows when to let up a bit. So, and I think that gives people hope that, you know, they can say, oh, things are better now than they were 10 years ago. So maybe five years from now they’ll be that much more liberal. Also for that class, that, that upper middle class to wealthy class, it’s a different set of rules as, as long as you’re not flagrant about things. You know, it’s, it’s a cliche, but you know, your upper class Iranians drink, they have wild parties, but it’s all kind of behind closed doors. You know the woman who was killed three years ago, that’s kind of set off the Women in Freedom movement. She was, she was a Kurd, which is a, you know, a minority within Iran. That would not have happened if that, that Kurdish girl had been dressed in Versace or whatever. If she’d clearly been of the upper class, they would not have messed with her. So Again, it’s almost like in the Shah’s time. This is a tale of two different cultures coexisting, but one being now quite invisible. SEAN SPEER: As we wrap up, just a couple of big picture questions because, well, the book tells the extraordinary story of the revolution, including through the lens of some of the figures involved. You also do a really tremendous job at these big kind of meta. Through lines. We’ve been talking about imperialism. We’ve also talked a bit about the nature of revolutions, and that’s where I want to go, if that’s okay. When you look across history, this particular history, do you see larger lessons about how revolutions evolve? Is there something almost about the logic of revolutionary politics that itself tends to produce repression and isolation, even when they begin in the name of liberation? SCOTT ANDERSON: It does seem that way, with the exception of the American Revolution. And that might just be because we don’t know what really went on. It does seem that what revolutions tend to do is they sweep away all constraints. So it’s really left up to the, the people or the small group of people in power to, you know, they have kind of complete control over what happens. What was very curious about the Iranian revolution, I mentioned this in the book, is that it didn’t follow the normal path of most revolutions. Most revolutions, they have a steady build to them, and it builds to a climax where either the regime is overthrown or the, the rebels are wiped out or crushed. And Iran, it had all these ebbs and flows and there was long periods of relative quiet. And then, then other times when it looked like the country was just going to come apart at the scene. So I think that that also lulled people into thinking until very late in the game, well, the Shah isn’t really in such great danger after all. He has the fifth most powerful army in the world. So, you know, worse comes to worst, he can always unleash his army. But what they didn’t, you know, I don’t say they. I mean, like the Americans and Western allies, what they didn’t count on was that the Shaw was kind of a deer in headlights. He was, he did just didn’t know what to do. And he froze. And he didn’t just freeze for, you know, a few days. He froze for months and just didn’t move. So that, I think that, I think was, was really what made the revolution come about. But, and one other thing I was going to say is the optics of the revolution. You know, I’m, I’m older. I remember when the Iranian revolution was underway and you’d see this, it did not look like a religious revolution. The people in the streets, you know, firebombing or, you know, throwing rocks at the, at the soldiers were, had long hair, blue jeans, leather jackets. They look like, they look like the, the parisian demonstrators from 1968. SEAN SPEER: Of course. SCOTT ANDERSON: Yeah. So I think that that was another way that it kind of people didn’t really figure this was going to be this, this religious counter revolution until very late. SEAN SPEER: Final question. Having gone deep on the conditions that led to the revolution and then, of course, it’s evolution. What conclusions, if any, have you reached about the, about the regime’s durability and the extent to which it continues to manifest some of the impulses that animated its, its launch? SCOTT ANDERSON: Yeah, you know, I think, I don’t know if this is directly answering your question. What I’ve, what I’ve thought a lot about in different revolutions around the world. The way the Americans usually approach what they see as a foe is this, I think this idea of isolating regimes, of putting sanctions on it really just fortifies the strength of the regime. Sanctions look like you’re doing something right. You’re not putting troops on the ground and it doesn’t cost anything. So it looks like you’re going to cripple the regime. But, but, you know, secret police never go hungry, armies never go hungry. So really by doing this, all you’re doing is strengthening the hand of the regime. And I think the, the Iranian regime has been, again, very adept at playing the anti American card. I think that the sanctions have been put on it over and not just by the Trump administration, but by previous ones. Just strengthen the hand of the, of the ayatollahs and it makes it look like they are being targeted. And, you know, it’s one of the great paradoxes because every American I know, every journalist who’s gone to Iran, when people see a foreigner on the street and they say they’re American, Iranians light up. They like Americans, but they don’t like American governments. And so I think that they feel, I mean, I’ve talked with a number of people in the Iranian diaspora about this, of, of, yes. This idea that, that, you know, almost everything that’s being done is, is counterproductive from that, from the standpoint of change. SEAN SPEER: Yeah. A humbling message about what is not a humble book. It is an ambitious and enormously insightful one. The title is King of Kings, the Iranian Revolution, A story of hubris, delusion and catastrophic miscalculation. Scott Anderson, thank you so much for joining us at Hub dialogues. SCOTT ANDERSON: It was my pleasure. Thank you.

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