Die Islamische Republik war nie unvermeidlich

Arash Azizi: “The Islamic Republic of Iran is a constant source of anguish for its own people, its neighbors, and the broader world. The government likely executes more people than any state except China. It imposes bizarre restrictions on its citizens, especially women (who are barred from singing solo, cycling, or smoking hookah in public). Its transnational revolutionary Islamist identity is extremely rare for a modern state. Similarly ideological states of the communist variation were mostly either abolished long ago or preserved only in name. Yet the Tehran regime is still here.

“How was it that, of all countries, Iran became this Islamic Republic? It boggles the mind, especially if you get to hang out with Iranians. On average, we are less religious than many peoples of the Muslim world, and patriotic to the point of narcissism. How did we become the building block of globally messianic Islamism? In other words, how did the Islamic Revolution of 1979 come to be, and why did its leaders endure?

“The revolution was preceded by years of organized opposition to the shah, waged not just by Islamists but by Marxists, nationalists, and liberals. Each group had entered the movement with its own aspirations. Very few advocated for the kind of theocracy that eventually emerged and went on to repress all non-Islamists. The losers of the revolution have spent the years since trying to figure out what went wrong.

“The field of Iranian studies sometimes resembles a whodunit, fixated on finding a grand, overarching reason for the revolution. Was it the Marxist left and secular nationalists, fatally allying themselves with devout Muslims in 1979? Was it the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, reforming too rapidly in the 1970s? Was it the U.S., which in 1953 helped overthrow Iran’s democratic government? Or does blame go much further back, to the way Iranians began adopting Islam in the 600s? Or to an authoritarian culture forged in the Persian kingdoms of antiquity? The obsessive nature of such inquiries reveals more about their authors than the question at hand.

“Academics often scoff at histories written by journalists, as some surely will at Scott Anderson’s new book, *King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion, and Catastrophic Miscalculation.* But Anderson succeeds precisely because he eschews structural, quasi-philosophical queries for an energetic account that concerns itself with, as he puts it, ‘a few core questions’: Why was the shah unable to stop the revolution? Why was the U.S. so oblivious to the dangers facing one of its most crucial allies? And how could Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a mysterious septuagenarian Muslim cleric then little known to most of the world, ‘establish a theocratic dictatorship with himself as supreme leader?’ As a result of this inquiry, Anderson finds an answer at once simpler, more instructive, and truer than those of many scholars.”

Read more: [https://theatln.tc/Ob231gmq](https://theatln.tc/Ob231gmq)

“Was it the US, which in 1953 helped overthrow Iran’s democratic government”.

People commonly make this claim but this is such an absurd way to describe the US role in the power struggle in Iran in 1953.

At the time, the Shah was already the leader of Iran, with parliament and the PM being lesser branches of government.

The National Front assasinated the Prime Minister, installed their own candidate (Mossadegh), and released the assassin.

Mossadegh then held a national “referendum” to essentially give himself dicatorial powers. It passed… 99.9% in favor.

The US sided with the Shah in the power struggle. We didn’t support a coup, we sided against one – and there was nothing democratic about Mossadegh.

There’s obviously legitimate criticisms to be made of US foreign policy but it’s insane to me how someone makes a claim like this (with the original intent to portray the US as being responsible for the Ayatollahs rule), and then it just gets accepted into public record as fact.

The only ones as ruthless as the islamists are the marxists and the nationalists. If either of them had become top dog instead of the Islamists I doubt there would have been less murderous repression; it would just be a different flavor.