Doomed to despotism

Khomeini’s Ghost, by Con Coughlin
The Life and Death of the Shah, by Gholam Reza Afkhami

The fall of the Shah of Iran at the beginning of 1979 took the world by surprise. A self-confident autocrat, supported by a large, American trained and equipped army and a ubiquitous and powerful security service, he was driven from power in less than six months by a motley alliance of middle-class liberals, clerical fanatics and student demonstrators, without a blow being struck in his defence. The impression of sudden cataclysm was accentuated by the character of the Shah’s successor: a bearded Islamic ideologue, who flew in from Paris after 15 years in exile. All the signs are that the diplomatic and intelligence services of the West were as unprepared as every one else.

Con Coughlin’s excellent book on Ayatollah Khomeini shows why they should not have been. Iran is a complex country, whose superficial westernisation during the 1950s and 1960s diverted attention from its unhappy history. Once the centre of a great empire extending from the Eastern Mediterranean to Afghanistan, Iran had been kicked about since the beginning of the 19th century by two ambitious foreign powers: Russia, Iran’s powerful neighbour to the north, and Britain, with its important strategic interests in India. The Shahs sold them influence for loans. They surrendered control over their customs service to foreign financiers and officials. They were bullied and bribed into granting huge commercial concessions. The Reuter concession of 1876, which briefly put almost all the country’s natural resources into the hands of a grasping commercial adventurer, shocked even that ambitious imperialist Lord Curzon. It was followed by the tobacco monopoly granted to Imperial Tobacco in 1891, and the oil concession which enabled the Anglo-Persian Oil Company to extract much of the country’s natural riches between 1908 and 1952.