The National Interest

Ray Takeyh, Guardians of the Revolution: Iran and the World in the Age of the Ayatollahs (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 328 pp., $27.95.

Steven R. Ward, Immortal: A Military History of Iran and Its Armed Forces (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2009), 380 pp., $29.95.

IN AN episode in Ray Takeyh’s newest book, a government contemplates invading Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Saddam cannot be trusted, argue several of the decision makers. “Given the slightest opportunity Saddam will continue his aggression,” says one of them. The most senior decision maker declares that the oppressed Iraqi people would, if freed from tyrannical rule, opt for a political system in line with his own values. Moreover, people throughout the Middle East would choose such a system if given the chance. The government decides to launch the invasion—with little planning for what would follow a defeat of Saddam’s army, no expectation of a prolonged and costly occupation, and a belief that Iraqis would welcome the invaders as liberators.

This story is not about the George W. Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 but instead the Islamic Republic of Iran’s attempt at an invasion in 1982. This followed the Iranians’ reversal of Saddam’s gains in the war he had started by invading the Republic two years earlier. The episode underscored some of the common interests of the United States and Iran—in this case shared opposition to the late Iraqi dictator and others who might emulate him. The story also shows the depth of Iranian concern about threats in their immediate neighborhood and a confidence in their ability to counter those threats. The enormous miscalculation the leaders of the Islamic Republic made in 1982 by trying to carry the war into Iraq led to six more years of one of the costliest conflicts in the modern Middle East, and it placed a deep imprint on Iranian perspectives and thinking that continues today.

U.S. policy makers could have applied some useful lessons from the Iranian experience to their own encounter with Iraq, of course. Yet, there are even-more lessons from Iranian history to apply to the U.S. encounter with Iran itself. Americans, characteristically ahistorical, have trouble looking back even as far as the beginnings of the Islamic Republic, which is now a generation ago, let alone to earlier Iranian history. In contrast, that history flows through the veins of Iranians; it shapes their fears and ambitions, and even their strategies, in readily recognizable ways. And, boy, what a history: today’s Iran is the linear descendant of a millennia-old nation and culture that has experienced periods of expansive empire, subjugation to foreign rule and most everything in between.

With Washington and Tehran taking tentative first steps toward a new relationship, the former needs all the insights it can get about the historically based hang-ups of the latter. The two books under review are welcome aids to that understanding. Steven Ward’s Immortal is a narrative of Iran’s wars from the time of Cyrus the Great to the present. It is an exceptionally well-informed military history that conveys a sense of the sweat and sacrifice, and of the grandeur and the blunders (not to mention the essentials about major campaigns and battles).

The book’s title derives from a name first applied to an army corps in the time of Xerxes: the Immortals, who replaced all casualties immediately and thus conveyed the impression of never suffering any losses. The term also evokes the perseverance that repeatedly has characterized Iran’s confrontations with its adversaries, as well as the seeming indestructibility of its armed forces.

Ray Takeyh’s Guardians of the Revolution addresses a narrower slice of Iranian history: the three decades of the Islamic Republic, with particular emphasis on foreign policy and how domestic-political struggles have shaped that policy. It provides a narrative background to the insights in his earlier Hidden Iran. Takeyh’s two books together offer as instructive a portrait as one can find of politics in Tehran and why it generates sometimes maddening Iranian postures toward the outside world.

THE GLORY of the ancient empires, from the first great dynasty of the Achaemenids to the reign of the nomadic Parthians to the subsequent rise of the Sassanians, is a source of pride to Iranians today, as it has been throughout Iran’s history. It is a story that runs from the sixth to fourth centuries BC, through six hundred years of unsettled rule and a power change, ending in the seventh century AD. It carries legacies deeply felt in the modern Republic. Iranian leaders, to bolster their legitimacy and to stir nationalist sentiment, have repeatedly invoked that history—most ostentatiously when Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi hosted a lavish two-thousand-five-hundredth birthday bash for the Persian Empire at the ruins of Persepolis in 1971. That the Persians of old often outfought the best that anyone in the West could throw at them—including the Roman Empire—makes lingering chauvinism understandable. But those same Persians, and their successors in subsequent centuries, have had many downs to go along with the glorious ups. Some of the downs have been catastrophic. Ward estimates that the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, for example, killed as much as three-fourths of Iran’s population, which may not have recovered to preinvasion levels until the mid-twentieth century. The resulting outlook for today’s Iranians is a keenly felt but curiously heterogeneous mixture of insecurity and distrust along with pride and perseverance.

The policies we associate with the mullahs and hard-liners of the current regime were forged and fostered not only in the present moment but more importantly in the historical experiences of this rich and durable culture.

The first of these is the belief that Iran rightfully is, or ought to be, a regional hegemon. It is hard for an Iranian to reconcile thoughts of ancient empires stretching from the Aegean to the Indus with the idea that modern Iran is just one more resident of the Persian Gulf, whose influence should be no greater than that of any other resident. For Iranians, modern conflicts have specific similarities to previous wars. The Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s was fought on much the same geographic and ethnic lines as war between Persians and Arabs during the initial Muslim conquests roughly one thousand three hundred years ago in the century after the Prophet. The geographic lines were similar as well to contests Iranians have waged with Assyrians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines and Ottomans, from as early as the sixth century BC all the way to the 1700s.

When Tehran today utters anything that sounds like a bid for regional domination, we tend to attribute it to the revolutionary expansionism of the Islamic Republic. A member of Iran’s Expediency Council recently caused a stir when he reportedly remarked that Bahrain used to be Iran’s fourteenth province—a comment that elicited thoughts not only of the Islamic Republic’s attempts in the late 1970s to foment revolutionary sentiment in Shia-majority Bahrain but also of Saddam Hussein describing Kuwait as the nineteenth province of Iraq in 1990. But the more historically minded Iranians are instead likely to think first of Iran having captured Bahrain from the Portuguese in the early seventeenth century, part of a larger conflict over Portuguese colonial activity in the Persian Gulf.

Old battles with Portugal are related to another major pattern in the modern Iranian mindset: a concern with overcoming victimization and domination at the hands of foreigners. The victimization usually did not lead to the level of devastation wrought by the Mongols, but domination by foreigners remained a recurrent theme in Iranian history. Domination would bring to mind the Qajar dynasty, which ruled Iran throughout the nineteenth century and first quarter of the twentieth. Though it did not allow Iran to come under direct European control, the Qajar dynasty did succumb to a softer form of European imperialism. That experience, notes Ward, “had a tremendous impact on Iran and made the restoration of Iranian power, measured in territory, freedom of action, and influence, the central theme of Iranian foreign and defense policies ever since.”

Iranian rulers have repeatedly used religion as one way to articulate a national identity distinct from that of foreigners, especially foreign foes—something else that seems peculiar to the modern Republic but is instead a familiar theme. Sassanian rulers established Zoroastrianism as the state religion as part of a larger effort to bolster the power and legitimacy of the empire’s central government. Islam would later serve the same role for other monarchs. The Safavid Shah Ismail I, a military leader who claimed to be the Hidden Imam, effectively used the official religion of Twelver Shiism as a tool in rebuilding an independent and powerful Iranian state in the early sixteenth century after hundreds of years of subjugation by Arabs and Turks.

Finding salvation in strong leaders is another recurring pattern. A major theme of Ward’s book is that Iran’s successes and defeats through the centuries are in large part attributable to good and bad leadership. Often demonstrably good and bad attributes have been found in the same leaders. Some really vile men have periodically rescued Iran from national weakness. There was, for example, Nadir Shah, the so-called Persian Napoleon whom Ward credits with having saved the then-declining Safavid state from Polish-style partition in the eighteenth century. But Nadir was in fact a cruel tyrant, killing many of his subjects (and blinding his own son) over suspicion of their plotting against him.

The foreign influence that Iranians have been so anxious to overcome has been both the doing and undoing of some of their leaders. Reza Khan, founder of the Pahlavi dynasty and father of the shah whom Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s revolution would overthrow, rose through the ranks of the Cossacks, a military unit the Qajar government had asked Russia to create and train. The Cossacks were a visible symbol of foreign influence; they looked just like their Russian namesakes, right down to the fur hats and long wool coats. The events of the early 1920s that transformed Reza Khan from a Cossack commander to—after a coup overthrowing the Qajars—the new shah, owed much to British support. Two decades later, the same two outside powers, Russia (as the Soviet Union) and Britain, would invade Iran as a sideshow of World War II, leading to Reza Shah Pahlavi’s humiliation, abdication and exile. The rise and fall of his son and successor also were entwined with an outside power, only this time it was the United States.

TAKEYH WOULD argue that twenty years after his death, Khomeinei remains the latest dominating, transforming Iranian leader to wield the energizing themes of religion, escape from foreign subjugation and restoration of Iran’s regionwide influence. Takeyh ranks Khomeini as perhaps the most successful twentieth-century revolutionary, because by molding not only institutions but also a generation of the Iranian elite, he has had profound and lasting influence going well beyond his own tenure as supreme leader.

That influence has endured despite enormous turmoil during the three decades of the Islamic Republic. Beyond the core legacy of Khomeini, much else has changed, including major elements of Iranian policy and strategy. Against the backdrop of two-and-a-half millennia of Persian history, the history of these last thirty years has unfolded with dizzying speed and complexity.

If that fast pace leaves us confused, Takeyh sympathizes with us. In the opening pages of Guardians of the Revolution, he poses the central question of whether Iran is a revolutionary state scheming to upset the existing order or a pliant partner ready to accommodate the demands of the international community. The truth, he says, is “somewhere in between.” He hastens to add that Iran “defies easy characterization” and that Iran’s approach to the world is filled with “complexities and contradictions.”

Takeyh’s tracing of the Islamic Republic’s policies shows that not only are there grounds for us to be confused but that Iranians are confused as well. Our tendency to attempt the easy characterization and to expound about what “Iran wants” is inconsistent with a reality in which many Iranians do not know what their nation should want. Or, individual members of the Iranian elite may have ideas, but the ideas have not congealed into a consensus. During the Rafsanjani era of the 1990s, Takeyh writes, “Iran was a nation in the midst of a prolonged and unresolved identity crisis.” The crisis still is not altogether resolved.

Americans tend to erroneously equate today’s Iranian regime with its most ubiquitous and familiar face, that of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. They are quick to link his over-the-top and sometimes-execrable rhetoric with Iranian policy. Part of Ahmadinejad’s political skill is his ability to make himself the face of a larger regime of which he is only a part, and to exploit for his personal benefit issues (particularly involving security policy) on which he otherwise has little influence. He has needed all that skill to offset the failed economic policies that have placed him in danger, in an election in June, of becoming the first president under the Islamic Republic not to win a second term.

Takeyh’s account is a useful aid to understanding what makes this obnoxious Iranian president tick and what advantage Ahmadinejad sees in the themes he spouts. Even more useful is Takeyh’s guide to the varied and vibrant politics found within the Iranian political class and within the regime. The convoluted constitutional structure that assures a dominant role for the supreme leader—currently Ali Khamenei—is the core of Khomeini’s legacy. It makes Iranian politics a lot different from Western democracies, but it is politics nonetheless. Factions contend for power, and policies and strategies get debated.

Ever since the Iran-contra affair of the 1980s, “Iranian moderate” has been something of a dirty word in Washington. But the political spectrum in Tehran extends well beyond the conservatives who have had the upper hand in recent years. Moreover, even the conservatives disagree among themselves on issues of importance to the United States. All the conservatives believe that Iran should assert regional leadership. But while members of what Takeyh calls the “New Right,” such as Ahmadinejad, see little advantage in cultivating a new relationship with Washington, other influential conservatives believe a more rational U.S.-Iranian relationship is a prerequisite to such leadership.

The usual political lexicon of conservative and moderate, or left and right, breaks down in trying to make sense of Iranian politics. Positions on different issues that we might expect to go together do not necessarily go together in Iran. Think of the first few years after the fall of the shah, when the wing of the revolutionary movement labeled as “radicals” seemed alien and dangerous, emphasizing anti-Americanism, export of the revolution abroad and the creation of a command economy at home. Yet even then the radicals were also the most prodemocratic of the revolutionaries, questioning the powers of the supreme leader and the ability of the Guardian Council to nullify legislation and the popular will. And by the late 1990s, the radicals—having shed much of their anti-Americanism and statist economics—had reemerged as the reformers, giving U.S. policy makers hope that a better relationship with Tehran might just be possible. As Takeyh’s narrative reveals, the evolution of ideologies throughout the life of the Islamic Republic has made the mixing and matching of policy preferences even more complicated. What may seem alien and dangerous to us today can morph into something more approachable tomorrow.

As we listen to the inflammatory rhetoric of Ahmadinejad, we might remember the context within which this hard-line right-wing firebrand was reared: the Iran-Iraq War. As with all else in Iran, history is everything. It would be hard to overestimate the impact of this extremely destructive conflict on the policies of the Islamic Republic and the perspectives of its leaders. Both books give an excellent sense of this—and from different perspectives. Ward tells the story from the standpoint of the armed forces, including both the regular army and the Revolutionary Guard. The human sacrifice was incredible. Revolutionary fervor was relied upon as a substitute for tactics and matériel. Young men in the Basij—the barely trained volunteer auxiliary of the Revolutionary Guard—perished by the thousands in human-wave assaults. Takeyh focuses on the perspectives of the leaders in Tehran, including their ruinous decision not to agree with Saddam Hussein after two years of war to call it a draw.

The war accentuated the bifurcated Iranian outlook forged in previous centuries of conflict. There is pride, with the Iranians’ performance in the face of Iraqi advantages in weaponry and foreign support giving them plenty to be proud about. Along with the pride, there is also a renewed appreciation for self-sufficiency. But there is still the same old fear and insecurity. In the end, Iran lost the war. When Khomeini finally announced his agreement to a cease-fire—a decision, he told his countrymen, “more deadly than drinking hemlock”—he was suing for peace in the face of an advancing Iraqi army.

One major consequence of the war was that it moved Iran away from trying to foment revolutionary change in neighboring states. Iran threw everything it had into trying to topple the existing order in Iraq, and it failed. Khomeini, in the remaining year of his life, tried to keep revolutionary fervor alive with such moves as his condemnation of Salman Rushdie. But his successors knew they would have to find other ways to sustain the regime’s legitimacy and to expand Iran’s influence in the region.

A delayed consequence is the more recent coming to power of a generation, including Ahmadinejad, who fought in the war as young men, were steeled by the experience and now constitute much of the New Right. They, too, are part of Khomeini’s legacy. Contrary to the belief of some, they are not trying to foment Islamist insurrections all around the Persian Gulf. But they believe that a nation whose greatness was demonstrated by its willingness and ability to sustain the enormous effort that the Iran-Iraq War became should also spare no effort to claim what they regard as Iran’s rightful place as the preeminent power of the Middle East.

ONE LESSON for the makers of U.S. policy toward Iran is simply to identify the potholes that have wrecked past tentative efforts to improve the relationship and to try to avoid any similar hazards in the road ahead. Takeyh’s account is useful in this regard. For the most part, domestic politics in both Tehran and Washington are the greatest obstacles. Avoiding hazards is largely a matter of tolerating how politics in the other side’s capital tends to work, and appreciating how politics in one’s own capital tends to be perceived.

Another lesson is that any improved relationship will have to accept and recognize a major Iranian role in the region. This need not entail infringement of U.S. interests, given the significant extent to which U.S. and Iranian interests in the region run parallel. This certainly is true of the effort to quell the Taliban and to stabilize Afghanistan. It also is true to a larger degree in Iraq than much discourse in Washington would lead one to believe. Not surprisingly, this is one of the subjects on which the Iran-Iraq War affected Iranian perspectives most profoundly. Takeyh argues that Iranian hard-liners, however resistant they are to greater democracy in Iran, support it in Iraq. The underlying Iranian belief is that the Iran-Iraq War stemmed from the autocratic rule of a Sunni minority.

History can also enhance understanding of the sticky issue of the Iranian nuclear program. It is another example of something important to Iran and not unique to the age of the Islamic Republic. The program and its main objectives date back to the time of the shah; the Islamic Revolution merely slowed the effort. The emphasis on self-sufficiency borne of their experiences in the Iran-Iraq War is of course also at play in the push for a nuclear program.

As U.S. policy makers try to chart a new course in relations with Iran, they should find both sober realism and encouragement in Iranian history. With so much historical baggage, setbacks are inevitable. But understanding the basis for the setbacks should make them less surprising and daunting. The Iranians will demonstrate perseverance, as they have so often in the past, and so must we.

We also need to keep in mind a quality that is frustratingly difficult to operationalize but that seems so important to Iranians: respect. Such an incredible history, with so much glory and such impressive rebounding from disaster, so strong a thrill of victory and agony of defeat—how could one not respect this country? President Obama’s message for the Iranian new year, which looked forward to a new relationship grounded in “mutual respect,” hit exactly the right note.

Paul R. Pillar is a visiting professor and director of studies of the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University.