29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Concise, Profound History of Iran, June 19, 2001
This review is from: The History of Iran (The Greenwood Histories of the Modern Nations) (Hardcover)
Elton Daniel's brief history of Iran may be the most sober, realistic analysis of contemporary Iranian history in print. His sober assessment of the Islamic Republic's present and near future bears close scrutiny, and is far less optimistic than Robin Wright's. Yet it is also a fine introduction to Iranian history from prehistory to the present. Among its finest chapters are those devoted to the ancient Persian Empire of Cyrus and Darius I, the Parthians, medieval Persian history, and the early modern history of Iran through the rise of the Qajar Dynasty. Yet, as I pointed out earlier, it is most noteworthy for its coverage of recent Iranian history. Students of Iranian history and of the Middle East may find this essential reading.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent, May 16, 2006
This review is from: The History of Iran (The Greenwood Histories of the Modern Nations) (Hardcover)
This books excels in its intention: to provide a useful history of Iran. It guides without browbeating, informs the reader without opining the reader with extra epithets, and just generally equips the reader to understand the context of modern developments in Iran. Now I understand what it means when I read that Aminejad is an unknown but conservative backer of the Islamic Revolution, and that is something that I would not have without this book. If you want to understand Iran, this is an excellent tool.
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18 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A very valuable resource, December 5, 2004
This review is from: The History of Iran (The Greenwood Histories of the Modern Nations) (Hardcover)
Ayatollah Rouhallah Khomeini and Vladimir I. Lenin were on opposite ends of the spectrum regarding religion. Khomeini demanded that the masses live by it and Lenin considered it an opiate for the masses. And yet, these two men had much in common. Both were revolutionaries, dedicated to the overthrow of a monarchy they despised and were successful in doing so. After they rose to power, each tried to export their revolution, causing their country to be diplomatically and economically isolated. Khomeini and Lenin both possessed a single-minded devotion to their cause, and they were ruthless in maneuvering to have anyone who could oppose their leadership eliminated.
The last third of the book is devoted to the revolution in Iran that brought Khomeini to power and the aftermath and I was riveted as I read through the pages. I watched the revolution on television as it unfolded so most of the names and events were familiar to me. Like so many political figures who are reviled outside their nation, Khomeini was a political genius, very much under appreciated for his ability to garner and maintain support, even in the wake of disasters.
The incompetence of almost every other force in the Iranian revolution is also described in great detail. The Carter administration was positively schizophrenic in dealing with the Shah, one section strongly trying to prop him up and others criticizing him for the massive human rights violations under his rule. However, I cannot put all of the blame on Carter. The American intelligence community was a pathetic failure. It appears that no one anywhere in the American government considered the revolution any threat to the Shah until the very end. This same community stated without qualification that Saddam Hussein possessed massive amounts of weapons of mass destruction before the second gulf war and failed to anticipate the collapse of the Soviet Union. At least in those cases they could make a plausible argument that those were closed societies so that it was hard to obtain any information one the ground. However, given the enormous American involvement in Iran under the Shah, their lack of real knowledge about the country is inexcusable. I consider this to be the greatest American intelligence failure of the last half-century.
The Shah himself proved to be very weak, quite likely due to his illness. At the time, he was suffering from the cancer that took his life a few years later. Therefore, as Daniel emphasizes, this illness may have been the root cause of his vacillation when only strong actions could prevent chaos. In the end, he simply could not bring himself to order his army and secret police to kill the tens of thousands of people that would have had to die to put down the revolution.
While Iran/Persia has a history going back thousands of years and the early events are important in learning why Iran is the way it is, the really interesting events occurred in the last one hundred years. Slightly less than half of the book is devoted to the history of Iran before the twentieth century and Daniel does a good job in setting the historical, ethnic, religious and geographical background of Iran and the neighboring countries. The rise of Shah Mohammad Pahlavi from the ashes of his father's being forced by the Soviet Union and Britain to abdicate when they occupied the country in the Second World War are the beginnings of one of the most amazing historical events of the twentieth century.
When he regained the throne after the war, the Shah was faced with enormous problems, the worst of which was a country severely fragmented. There are many different ethnic groups in Iran and at the time, the primary loyalty that most had was to their tribe rather than to the central government. The Soviet Union had occupied the northern regions and as they were active in promoting the Tudeh or Iranian communist party. Therefore, the Shah not only had to assert the authority of the central government, but he also had to deal with the Soviet Union and Britain, convincing them to withdraw their troops and adopt a policy of minimal interference. I was impressed with Daniel's descriptions of these events. In navigating around all of these potential problems, the Shah showed a level of geopolitical acumen that few people give him credit for. At a time when Joseph Stalin was ruthlessly taking control of the Eastern half of Europe, China had fallen under communist control, and North Korea was preparing to invade South Korea it is amazing that the Soviet Union largely left Iran alone. Unlike so many other Islamic areas, the Tudeh was strong in Iran, probably strong enough to have taken power with a small amount of Soviet assistance. Given that access to a warm water port had been a strategic goal of the Russians from the days when they first entered the Caucasus region, and control of Iran would have given them that goal, I will never understand why Stalin didn't orchestrate a communist coup in Iran.
However, the price that the Shah had to pay in order to maintain independence was very high. The British oil concession was one of the most one-sided in the history of the planet; it is unbelievable to read the numbers on how little was actually paid to the Iranians for their oil in 1950. Since the Shah also could not unilaterally keep the Soviets out, he relied heavily on Western help, which allowed the opposition to paint him as a puppet. All this led to the assumption of power by Mohammad Mosaddeq, who reduced the power of the Shah and embarked on a policy of nationalizing the Iranian oil fields. This is another area where Daniel is excellent in his descriptions of the events and their causes. A counter-coup, supported by the American CIA and British agents, overthrew Mosaddeq and restored the Shah to power. In the intervening years, Mosaddeq has been rehabilitated into a man who led a popular coup and was cynically deposed by the CIA. That is false, Mosaddeq did a lot of stupid things while in power, showing none of the Shah's innate understanding of political realities. In the end, the coup that removed him from power was a popular one and the CIA had to do very little to aid the forces that restored the Shah. It was gratifying to read the truth about Mosaddeq.
In closing, this is a book that should be read by anyone who wants to learn about Iran. It has been stated that it is a rogue state and one of the three members of the "Axis of Evil." While that is a debatable point, Iran is one of the most complex countries in the world, and there are no easy answers to any approach to interacting with their leadership. This book does not have all the answers, but it has enough of them to make it a very valuable resource.
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