False Dawns and Long Shadows in Iranian History

Events in Iran have rarely had predictable consequences

Women protest restrictive new laws in 1979 (Public domain)

As I write this, the long struggle between the United States and Iran seems to have taken an important turn. After several days of Israeli assassination of Iranian officials and bombardment of the country’s nuclear sites, the United States has joined the conflict.

On Saturday night, Donald Trump went on Truth Social and, eventually, TV to tell the nation that American warplanes had dropped bombs on Iranian nuclear facilities that Israeli munitions could not penetrate. The operation, we were told, was a stunning success.

Trump posted that “Tonight, I can report to the world that the strikes were a spectacular military success. Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.” News anchors talked to experts about the mission’s success over B-roll of Trump looking grimly decisive and animations showing how the “bunker buster” bombs work.

This feels like an important turning point. Israel and the United States appear to have a definitive upper hand over Iran, which has been systematically weakened over the last few years. The administration and many of the pundits on TV believe that this is the end of the Iranian nuclear program — and maybe even the country’s theocratic regime.

Maybe. But moments like these often feel far more decisive than they are. You may recall, for example, the triumphant TV coverage of the “shock and awe” bombings (and George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech), when it seemed like the Iraq war would be a quick and successful operation rather than a brutal, costly slog.

Iranian history is especially littered with misleading moments, moments whose true consequences would not become obvious for a long time. The long tail of history in Iran should make Americans wary of jumping to conclusions about where things are headed.

Iran’s modern history began with a popular revolution against its royal family. The Persian monarchy (the country officially changed its name to Iran in 1935) had been in decline for some time; European militaries had repeatedly humiliated it in the 19th century while Western traders forced it into unfair deals. The once-great Persian empire was in clear decline.

In 1906, after royal agents tortured several merchants, the frustrated population took to the streets. They demanded a constitution, inspired by European values that were filtering into the country. The ruler, Mozaffar ad-Din Shah, who worried he would lose all of his power and maybe his life, capitulated. It must have seemed at the signing of the constitution on December 31, 1906, that Persia was on the verge of transformation into a freer and more functional country.

But the revolution’s effects took years to fully manifest. Mozaffar ad-Din died three days after approving the constitution, which was based on Belgium’s. His son, Mohammad Ali, was much less interested in sharing power. He began to ignore the document before the ink had even dried.

European powers, seeing an opportunity, took advantage of the chaos in Iran; the British, who had initially supported the constitutional movement, switched their support to the new Shah. England and Russia signed a 1907 treaty that carved Iran into spheres of influence while the new parliament watched impotently from the sidelines. There was a brief civil war between parliamentary forces and the royal family; the royals prevailed, backed by 12,000 Russian soldiers.

The revolution was finished by 1911, and Persia would find itself at the mercy of foreign powers for several decades more. The 1908 sale of oil rights to British interests (the firm would eventually become British Petroleum) left the country impoverished, even though it sat on top of some of the world’s richest oil reserves.

The revolution, which had seemed in 1906 to be a promising beginning to a new era of rights and freedoms, actually had the opposite effect. Historian Ali Ansari argues that

The experience of the Constitutional Revolution and the depredations of the Great War convinced Iranian intellectuals that they needed the means to implement change and that this could only be achieved through the services of an autocrat. Interrogating the European experience they concluded that what Persia needed to kick start the process of modernisation was an ‘Enlightened Despot’.

Constitutionalism came to be linked with foreign imperialism; Iran would never establish a lasting form of democracy. The revolution that had given Iranians so much hope would end up reinforcing authoritarianism.

These patterns repeated themselves a half-century later, when another moment proved definitive in Iranian history — although not as it first seemed it would.

By the early 1950s, Iranians understood that their country possessed great quantities of oil, by then one of the most valuable resources in the world. But they weren’t benefiting from it. The lopsided oil deal that the country had signed with British interests dictated that the lion’s share of the profits went to London, not Tehran. Winston Churchill wrote of the deal that “Fortune brought us a prize from fairyland beyond our wildest dreams.” The British Empire powered itself with cheap Iranian oil while Iran remained poor.

As Iranians watched other nations like Saudi Arabia strike much fairer deals with Western oil companies, they became angry — should Iran be impoverished because of the foolish decision of a long-dead shah?

The nationalist prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, decided in 1951 to solve this problem. He combined fiery anti-British oratory with an attempt to negotiate a better deal. The British stonewalled him, so he decided to nationalize the oil industry. This was a common strategy in the developing world at the time, especially in places where imperialism had taken key resources out of the hands of the locals.

After Mossadegh took control of his country’s oil, it seemed like he had struck a decisive blow in Iran’s favor. Finally, an Iranian government had stood up to the imperialists. His domestic popularity soared. Time made him its Man of the Year, noting that “his people loved all that he did, and cheered him to the echo whenever he appeared in the streets.”

The initial perceptions of this event turned out to be illusory. It soon became clear that Mossadegh, who had seemed to be on top of the world, had a problem: there was no one to sell the oil to. The British and Americans organized a boycott of Iranian oil, and Iran was only able to sell a few hundred barrels in the first year after nationalization. Mossadegh’s triumphant, popular action soon became an albatross around his neck.

Then another long-tail event occurred. The Americans and British, worried that other nations might follow Iran’s lead and convinced that Mossadegh was a communist, decided that he had to go. The CIA and MI6 orchestrated a coup that ended with Mossadegh in handcuffs and the shah, Mohammad Reza, an absolute monarch.

In the moments after the coup, it, like Mossadegh’s nationalization, seemed like a stunning victory. The United States had eliminated a pesky leader and crushed a potential communist movement. But, over time, the coup turned out to be disastrous for American interests.

Iranians understood that the shah was a puppet of the Americans and never saw him as legitimate. The opposition empowered radical religious figures like Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and leftist militias far more Marxist than Mossadegh had been. Iranians became more likely to believe conspiracy theories about the country’s enemies — after all, they really had been the victims of a secret CIA coup. The Soviets stepped up their own activities in the region, polarizing the Middle East along Cold War lines.

Even in the middle of the 1970s, as the shah’s popularity tumbled, he and his backers in the United States could not see what was coming. Obsessed with Cold War politics, they focused on the threat from Marxists while a powerful religious opposition organized. American officials went from thinking that the shah was their sturdy “man in Tehran” to dealing with a hostile government very quickly.

The shah was finally overthrown after months of protests in 1978 and 1979. It seemed like everyone in Iran was a part of the revolution against him; by this point, he had managed to alienate everyone from devout Muslims to merchants to students to oil workers. There was a great sense of relief in Iran, but, again, initial impressions were misleading.

The aims of the revolution had seemed quite progressive; demonstrators demanded, in the words of Ali Fathollah-Nejad, “social justice, freedom and democracy, and independence from great power tutelage.” For a brief moment, that’s what they thought they would get.

Soon after the shah’s abdication, the nation held a referendum asking a very simple question: Do you want an Islamic republic? Almost everybody voted in the affirmative — after all, most Iranians were Muslim and they wanted a republic.

It quickly became clear that Khomeini and his allies wanted something quite radical; his rhetoric shifted away from vague paeans to nationalism and toward theocracy. Revolutionaries were shocked when the government decreed that women in this rather Westernized country would have to wear the hijab. On International Women’s Day in 1979, massive protests resisted Khomeini’s restrictions on women’s rights. Though the new regime backed down for a bit, it continued its assault on women’s rights. By the middle of the 1980s, women could be punished for failure to cover their hair, and could be married off as young as age 9.

The regime’s radicalism hardened after Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, seeing an opportunity to further weaken a rival, invaded Iran. Khomeini encouraged young boys to fight in the war as “martyrs for Allah” and refused to accept a peace deal with Iraq for eight long years. The war inflicted immense suffering on Iran. By the end of hostilities, radical theocrats were in full control of the country and Iran was an international pariah. Things were quite different than they had seemed in those heady days after the shah’s abdication.

So now we sit at what may be another pivotal moment in Iran’s history. The Iran hawks are preening, sure that their airstrikes constitute a great victory for the United States and its interests. But I wouldn’t be so sure. History tends to have a very long tail — especially, it seems, in Iran.

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