KING OF KINGS

A thoroughgoing history of the last years of the Pahlavi dynasty and the rise of the Islamist theocracy in Iraq.

Shah Reza Pahlavi, notes journalist and historian Anderson, met with seven American presidents over his long reign. When the last, Jimmy Carter, took office, the Shah had reason to worry, since Carter had run on a clean-government, pro–human rights platform. “Both these promises,” Anderson writes, “cast an uncomfortable spotlight on Iran.” At the time, Islamist protest was rising in the Shah’s realm, and with it demonstrations by outlawed leftist groups; when the Shah arrived in Washington, D.C., more than 4,000 Iranians, mostly in the latter camp, greeted him in protest. The Shah proved ineffectual in suppressing the growing rebellion and tried to mollify some critics, even though he was warned to do something: As Anderson documents, “the more dovish State Department felt it was vital that his program of political reforms continue while he sought to restore order”—but Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, “felt that order should be reestablished first” and urged a crackdown. Although there were some high-profile victims of political intrigue, including a middle-aged son of the then-exiled cleric Ayatollah Khomeini, the Shah’s regime was comparatively light-handed: Whereas the government of the Islamic Republic that overthrew the Shah recorded that the regime had killed 60,000 Iranians, an investigative committee “arrived at the remarkably precise figure of 2,781.” Not bad, measured against the Islamists, who killed 5,000 leftists in a single week during a purge of 1988, as well as thousands more Iranians executed in the first years of Khomeini’s government. It’s ironic that the U.S., in Cold War mode, bet on the wrong horse, subverting the leftists while “a Red Iran probably would have been far preferable to the Iran they got.”

An eye-opening history of how Iran became a point on the “axis of evil” and is considered such a dangerous enemy today.