TY - JOUR
AU - Citino, Nathan, J
AB -  Matthew K. Shannon opens his important reinterpretation of United States-Iranian relations with the tears of Mohammad Reza Shah. Invited in November 1977 for his twelfth (and final) state visit to the United States, the Shah joined President Jimmy Carter on the south lawn of the White House. Nearby, hundreds of the Shah’s opponents clashed with supporters before police dispersed the demonstrators with tear gas. When the cloud drifted over the south lawn, the Shah and President Carter were forced to “reach for their handkerchiefs” (1). Shannon’s original contribution is to focus attention on the demonstrators rather than on the Shah and the eight U.S. presidents who made Pahlavi Iran into one of America’s principal cold-war allies. He examines the unintended consequences of employing international education as a form of “soft power.” As part of Washington’s strategy of building up the Shah’s military and state bureaucracy, hundreds of thousands of Iranian students studied at universities in the United States and Europe, where they not only acquired technical training but also organized against the Shah’s authoritarianism. They criticized the anti-democratic nature of Iran’s modernization and, through their interactions with other activists, laid the foundations of a human-rights campaign that ultimately weakened the Shah prior to the Islamic Revolution. Shannon convincingly shows that international education “created a transnational space in which the political opponents of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi organized during the mid-twentieth century” to produce a “rights discourse … that ran counter to the strategic objectives of the U.S. and Iranian leaders” (11, 12). In an introduction, five chapters, conclusion, and epilogue that addresses recent conflicts over the Iran nuclear deal, Shannon describes a clash not of civilizations but between the Shah’s authoritarianism and students’ transnational organizing for democratic principles. In Shannon’s story, Americans and Iranians appear on both sides of the conflict over whether to compel the Shah to respect human rights. This account parallels and complements existing historiography centered on the 1953 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) coup against prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq, the Shah’s role anchoring U.S. power in the Persian Gulf under President Richard Nixon’s Doctrine, and Carter’s ordeal with the Islamic Revolution. Just weeks following the coup, the CIA front organization American Friends of the Middle East established the Iranian Student Association in the United States (ISAUS). From its inception, however, some members of ISAUS criticized the Shah and subsequently “created a political culture of dissent” through networks of allies in the U.S. and Europe (39). With a membership that included both supporters of Mosaddeq and those training to serve in the Shah’s development bureaucracy, known as the Plan Organization, ISAUS embodied the contradiction between modernization and rights. Shannon incorporates an impressive array of other individuals and non-state actors into his transnational history. These range from the United States-educated technocrat Khodadad Farmanfarmaian and the Ford Foundation, to Iranian dissident Sadeq Qotbzadeh and the Confederation of Iranian Students National Union (CISNU), an umbrella group for Iranians studying in the United States and Europe. The author argues that the contributions of these previously neglected actors are vital to understanding the fundamental problems that eventually consumed the United States-Iranian alliance. At the heart of the book are three waves of rights-oriented criticism during the 1960s and 1970s directed against the Shah’s authoritarian approach to modernization. The first resulted from a campaign in the United States by Iranian dissidents whom Shannon describes as “free-speech modernists” (47). These included Fariborz and Ali Fatemi, both relatives of Mossadeq’s foreign minister who was executed by the Shah’s government. During the John F. Kennedy administration, these activists appealed to Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas and the president’s brother, Robert, to pressure the Shah into making political reforms and permitting dissent. Bobby Kennedy cancelled a trip to Tehran following the violent suppression of demonstrations there and arranged for Douglas and Ali Fatemi to meet separately with National Security Council staff member Robert W. Komer. But as Komer wrote, the Shah was “our boy,” and JFK’s administration backed him despite the brutality with which the Shah imposed his White Revolution (64). Shannon describes the second wave of rights-based criticism as part of student radicalism during the “Global 1960s.” In 1964, CISNU’s secretariat moved to West Germany and joined the “Other Alliance” of transnational student activism, a phrase borrowed from historian Martin Klimke. As part of a global student Left, CISNU supported Palestinian rights, while Students for a Democratic Society criticized America’s official alliance with the Shah. During the Vietnam era, Iranian students also drew inspiration from antiwar and Black Power activists. This phase of the Iranian student movement became divided between the “Maoist-influenced Revolutionary Organization of the Tudeh Party and the religiously oriented Liberation Movement” (71). Although demonstrations followed the Shah’s visits to cities across the United States and Europe, even resulting in the death of a student in Berlin, President Lyndon Johnson recommitted the United States to the Shah, who supported America’s war in Vietnam. Shannon nevertheless credits this second wave with challenging the prevailing definition of “free world” by protesting the lack of democracy in Iran. The third wave corresponded to the height of the United States-Iranian alliance, when Nixon granted the Shah access to all non-nuclear weapons and the oil embargo and price hike flooded Iran’s treasury with petrodollars. Among the thousands of Iranians studying at U.S. institutions were students training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to administer Iran’s nuclear program. This wave also coincided with “the most severe period of domestic repression” in Iran, when SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police, became synonymous with torture and the secretary general of Amnesty International declared that “no country in the world has a worse record in human rights than Iran” (118). High oil prices and revelations about SAVAK’s activities in the United States and Europe created a receptive audience for criticisms of the Shah’s abuses. Well before Carter championed human rights, Shannon argues, Iranian students rallied to defend political prisoners in Iran and organized a “global anti-shah movement” in cooperation with Amnesty, the International Council of Jurists, and sympathetic members of Congress (137). Their efforts not only resulted in legal reforms in Iran but also “contributed to the overthrow of the shah” (140). Despite “the maturation of the human rights network,” Shannon notes, “the Nixon Doctrine held in the Persian Gulf until the Iranian Revolution of 1979” (131). Student activism was therefore more successful in mobilizing protests against the Shah than in changing U.S. policies. In 1977, the momentary effects of tear gas on the Shah amounted to a visible achievement that ISAUS hastened to publicize with a photo. Shannon’s English-language research vividly reconstructs United States-centered student activism, but the movement’s implications inside Iran are less clear. United States-educated dissidents such as Qotbzadeh, who advised Ayatollah Khomeini during his exile in Paris, were purged following the revolution. The amalgam of Marxism and Shi‘a Islam reflected in the writings of Ali Shariati, whom Shannon mentions in his conclusion, arguably had more significance for the Islamic Republic than rights-based liberalism. Also important for revolutionary Iranian foreign policy from Lebanon to the Gulf were the long-standing transnational networks of Shi‘a religious scholars and politicians studied by Laurence Louër and others. Nevertheless, Shannon has written one of the finest available monographs on students as transnational actors. His book is also required reading for anyone wishing to comprehend the full story of U.S. relations with Pahlavi Iran. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - The Shah’s Tears
JF - Diplomatic History
DO - 10.1093/dh/dhz017
DA - 2020-01-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-shah-s-tears-rIQ0YoNNLB
SP - 160
VL - 44
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -