What we can learn from the fall of the Shah of Iran

During his troubled final days, the Shah of Iran was interrupted during a state dinner for China’s leader by an urgent phone call. Guests were stunned when he left the banquet table, later returning to summon two of his officials.  

Saddam Hussein was on the phone, the Shah quietly told them, and he wanted the Shah’s consent for liquidating Ayatollah Khomeini, then exiled in Iraq and a nuisance to both their secular regimes. The Shah plaintively asked them both how he should respond. But they demurred, prompting the sometimes passive monarch to remark that it seemed wrong.

{mosads}So instead, the Ayatollah was forced to leave Iraq for Paris, where he could more effectively orchestrate the Shah’s downfall and the creation of Iran’s Islamic Republic.

There are many such exasperating moments in Andrew Scott Cooper’s “The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran,” an amazing new account of how a modernizing monarch of 37 years led his country from impoverished obscurity into prosperity and power, only to be toppled by reactionary and murderous Islamists, whose theocracy still torments the Iranian people and the world.

Cooper is a New Zealander who became fascinated as a boy by the Shah’s stunning collapse and later devoted years to interviewing the Shah’s surviving family and staff, including the Empress, who quietly lives outside Washington, D.C.  

A critical New York Times review accusing Cooper of “reflexive hostility toward Islamism” prompted a global social media campaign against Cooper and his sympathetic account of the Shah as a benevolent autocrat.

But if Cooper is hostile, he is also justified, not just by the mass murder and torture of Iran’s ruling Islamists—whose crimes exponentially surpass the Shah’s—but by their regime’s ongoing war against America, Israel, and its Mideast neighbors.

Cooper is fair and factual, portraying the Shah as smart but often indecisive, a micromanager who didn’t fully trust subordinates, an ardent devotee of Persia’s glorious history that he hoped to revive, and a reluctant authoritarian who tried to democratize Iran when too much of his nation preferred an Islamist totalitarian.

The Shah’s Islamist and leftist critics have always portrayed him as a corrupt and grandiose tyrant who brutalized his nation at the behest of the CIA, which helped restore him to power in 1953. He was actually a reluctant but fastidious ruler, obsessed with monitoring the rainfall of his arid nation. Incapable of small talk, Queen Elizabeth privately complained he was dull. He lacked humor, spoke quietly, rarely showed anger, and was unfailingly polite to fellow monarchs as well as servants and hotel staff.

He’s recalled now for losing his throne, but the Shah was also his nation’s fifth longest serving monarch across millennia who took Iran to unprecedented greatness. Thanks partly to the oil price shock he engineered against the Western powers whose puppet he allegedly was, he molded Iran into a regional economic and military power on track towards Western living standards. His modernization included mass education, the near elimination of extreme poverty, the celebration of art and culture, and equal rights for women and religious minorities.

The latter displeased theocratic clerics like Ayatollah Khomeini who had initially supported the Shah against secular nationalists like the overthrown Premier Muhammad Mossadegh and his Marxist allies. Unlike Khomeini, most of Iran’s Shiite clerics were quietist and opposed politicized clergy. They also feared Khomeini, a lower-ranked ayatollah, whom they knew was bloodthirsty and luciferian. Iran’s senior ayatollah privately urged SAVAK, the Shah’s notorious police agency, to assassinate Khomeini, even offering a fatwah for Islamic absolution. SAVAK declined.

SAVAK and the Shah were slow to see Islamism as a threat, instead obsessing over leftists. So too the Shah’s American allies, who until the very end imagined the Ayatollah would at least be an anti-Soviet partner. Although video cassettes of Khomeini’s anti-American and anti-Semitic harangues were sold in Teheran’s street’s outside the American embassy, diplomats and policy makers remained clueless.

President Carter lavishly praised the Shah as an “island of stability” during his notorious 1977 New Year’s Eve visit to Iran. While the CIA was assuring Carter that Iran was not even in a pre-revolutionary stage, Israel was more presciently evacuating the last of its citizens from Iran.

Pro-Khomeini mobs and saboteurs during the revolution of 1978-1979 attacked Baha’i and Jewish businesses, threw acid at women in Western dress, and burned theaters, in one calamity incinerating over 400 cinema goers. Paranoid Shah critics claimed it was SAVAK provocations. Many such critics would later end up in Khomeini’s jails or before his executioners.

The Carter administration pushed the Shah to liberalize, which he willingly did, freeing prisoners, opening jails to international inspection and plotting free elections, while jailing some of his own officials. Islamist opponents, armed and funded by Yasir Arafat’s PLO and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, were encouraged by this perceived weakness. The Shah’s generals and SAVAK urged a crackdown to defeat the revolution. Jordan’s King Hussein offered personally to lead Iran’s large army against the mobs.

A visiting Ronald Reagan, whom the Shah enjoyed, said shooting the head of a riot would disperse the rest.

Concerned about his international image, and averse to confrontation, the Shah restrained his forces from decisive action—not wanting a blood-soaked crown that would discredit the monarchy for his heir. Many of his supporters among the military, middle class, moderate clergy and non-Islamist laborers either surrendered or fled the country when the Shah failed to rally them.

The formidable Empress and other intimates implored the Shah himself not to flee, but the Shah and his family left their country in early 1979, to become geopolitically unwanted nomads. Khomeini returned from exile to erect his reign of terror, which included taking captive U.S. embassy staff.

Cooper’s mesmerizing story of the Shah’s defeat doesn’t specifically offer counsel for addressing Islamist political threats today. But any appearance of retreat or appeasement in the face of revolutionary terror only stimulates and encourages further terror. Promises of liberal democracy will be treated contemptuously. Mideast republics generally aren’t prone to moderation, and the region’s monarchies are always replaced by far worse, from Afghanistan to Iran, from Iraq to Libya.

Near the Shah’s end, Saddam Hussein told the Empress to tell the Shah that killing one thousand was bad, but better than the deaths of one million. Unlike the well intentioned but often feckless Shah, the brutal and clear-eyed Iraqi dictator saw what was to come.

Mark Tooley, author of “The Peace That Almost Was: The Forgotten Story of the 1861 Washington Peace Conference and the Final Attempt to Avert the Civil War,” is president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy and editor of Providence: A Journal of Christianity & American Foreign Policy.

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