King of Kings by Scott Anderson

It is all right here, why Iran should never ever be underestimate. Even the subtitle--A Story of Hubris, Delusion, and Catastrophic Miscalculation--could be used to describe when the US decided to declare war on Iran and it blew up in their faces. The other book this reminds me of is Stanley Karnow's book on what led us into the war in Vietnam. There and in the case of the Iran Revolution, we had opportunity after opportunity to figure it out and not make a collosal mistake, and each and every time we made the clearly wrong choice. The last Shahahshah (King of Kings) was a narcisisst--outwardly haughty and magnificent, inwardly insecure and indecisive. Not many of the people close to him really loved the shah. He let his friends down, he dithered, he habitually took the advice of the last person he spoke to. The dominos that fell at the end, which in a lot of ways are the least interesting part of the story, are told in great detail, but the lead up to the fall are what interested me most. The US undervalued things about Iran that made it different from the rest of the Middle East. It was the most progressive Muslim nation in the region, and if there had been less support for a weak dictator and more focus on what was worth savin, maybe it would have gone another way. As it turned out, the Shah became bloated with himself--again--after Carter visited (the last American president to set foot on Iranian soil) in 1973, and he made the wrong choice each and every time. While demonstrations were a regular and growing occurrence, the Ayatollah Khomeini, the absentee leader of the demonstrations, had long been a virtual prisoner in the Shia religious centre of Najaf, in neighbouring Iraq, then ruled by Saddam Hussein. It was impossible for outsiders to get to Najaf and speak to Khomeini; but the shah put immense pressure on Hussein to get rid of him. Khomeini’s more worldly-wise advisers persuaded him to take shelter near Paris, in the village of Neauphle-le-Château, where the world’s press could visit him and interview him whenever they wanted, and every word was beamed back to Iran. By November 1978 the shah’s downfall was inescapable. End of story.