Contra Greenwald on Iran
Against ahistorical narratives that perpetuate the status quo
Watch this clip from a debate between Alan Dershowitz and Glenn Greenwald. The main topic is whether the US should bomb Iran's nuclear facilities. But in this post, I only want to focus on the 2-minute clip in this tweet to demonstrate the problem we face when talking about Iran (and I suspect many other countries) and interpreting the history of their relations with the west.
The first question posed by Dershowitz is: "Was the world and the middle east a better or worse place under the Shah with all the horrors that the Shah and the Pahlavi family perpetrated?"
The question has already begun the editorializing of Iranian history. I challenge anyone to name a single government anywhere for whom one could not find and highlight "horrors". By posting the question in this fashion, Dershowitz is undermining his own point and ceding ground that must not be ceded.
Greenwald: "The only reason this question would be relevant would if... professor Dershowitz supports regime change in Iran.... It depended on who you are. If you're Israel and the CIA, outstanding! He did their bidding. If you were a dissident in Iran, if you were religious in Iran, if you were critical of the government in Iran, things were extremely grim for you because dissidents were savaged and brutalized in prison."
This short response betray's Greenwald's cartoonish understanding of the history of 20th century Iran. And that's fine. We don't all need to have a complete understanding of every nation's history. But this cartoonish understanding has become the dominant narrative that misinforms policy choices today.
Let's break down the explicit and implicit claims in Greenwald's response:
"The Shah was a puppet of the US and Israel"
It's fascinating to me that Greenwald is throwing Israel in the mix here. This is undoubtedly a Current Thing effect. Israel came to existence in 1948. The Shah reigned since 1941. Even at the time of the supposed CIA-backed coup, Israel was 5 years old. Israel and Iran did indeed have friendly relations, but saying the Shah did Israel's bidding is a propagandist tactic to fool audiences in May of 2024.
Was the Shah a US puppet?
I previously dissected the claim that the Shah was installed via a CIA-backed coup here. But let's step back and understand the historical context at the time Mohammad Reza Pahlavi ascended to the throne.
Prior to the Pahlavi dynasty, Iran had failed to industrialize and fell at the mercy of European powers. It was never formally colonized because Russia and Britain kept each other in check, but they did agree to carve Iran into two "spheres of influence" with the British in the south and the Russians in the north. Playing off these two colonial powers against each other was the monarch's primary job for much of the 19th century.
Then came Reza Shah - an army man who rose through the ranks purely on the basis of his merit and established the Pahlavi dynasty. Reza Shah began an aggressive program of modernization but he was still beholden to foreign powers. First, in order to catch up after nearly 200 years of stagnation, he needed foreign expertise. Second, past concessions to foreign powers meant that vast swaths of the Iranian economy were controlled by Britain and Russia. Reza Shah is often vilified for having befriended Nazi Germany, but a big motivation for this was finding a new ally to help break the Russian and British grip on the nation. Lastly, Iran was heavily subject to foreign sponsored propaganda. BBC Radio Persian, for example, was established by Britain to promote ani-Shah narratives when his policy decisions did not fit their agenda. Many of the narratives peddled by them survive to this day.
During WWII, the allies invaded Iran, forced Reza Shah to abdicate, and allowed his son to ascend the throne. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was 21 years old at the time. A history of the Shah's rule in the early days is basically a log of trips he would make to the Russian, British and sometimes American embassies. These three powers had to vet any decision of significance in Iran.
In the ensuing 37 years, the picture changed dramatically. The Shah and the Iranian nation went from a plaything of global powers to being a power broker, both revered and feared.
People like Greenwald, who promote the Shah-as-a-foreign-puppet narrative, ignore the power he wielded in the latter part of his reign. And they set an impossible standard for a leader of a poor and stagnant nation who is set on modernization and progress. What should the Shah have done? What was his alternative? Was it democracy? Arguably, Greenwald would readily admit the corrupting influence of money in the electoral systems of the most successful democracies of the world today. What does he imagine would happen with democracy in a poorer nation when the money is controlled by foreign interest?
What else could the Shah have done to not be accused of being a puppet? Rebel against the nations far more powerful than his? It turns out that's what the overpraised prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh did. In order to nationalize Iranian oil, he went to economic war with Britain, and, predictably, lost.
What else could the Shah have done? Perhaps he should have continued to reign and allowed the elected parliament to choose Prime Ministers. We can try to trace what could've happened under this scenario. In the best case, Iran would have elected one or more prime ministers who had been competent, powerful, and pragmatic enough to bring about the progress that the country lacked – in other words, a prime minister that would have more or less enacted the same reforms that the Shah did enact. Since doing so in a purely independent fashion would not have been possible, this nation-builder prime minister would need foreign alliances to get things done, which would immediately open him to the same accusations of being a puppet that the Shah faced.
That, however, is a highly idealistic scenario. It's important to note that it has not panned out in any comparable country. More likely scenarios would be perpetual political instability as various factions fail to cooperate, the rise of a president-for-life figure that views the nation as a personal resource to extract the most out of, the installation of an actual puppet regime, or a combination of the above.
"The Shah's regime was brutal to..."
I previously covered this claim in this post. Some degree of brutality was probably exercised by the intelligence agency that the Shah established, as it is with any intelligence/police force (SAVAK). However, it is also true that the degree of this brutality has been grossly exaggerated first by the Shah's domestic enemies and then picked up and amplified by western leftists and organizations like Amnesty International.
In the 60s and 70s, it was commonly claimed that there were up to 100,000 political prisoners in Iran. This in a nation of ~30 million. In public interviews, the Shah and officials from SAVAK, regularly gave figures of about 3000. They also claimed that the use of torture had been something that was phased out after the early years of the agency. In 1977, the Shah invited the International Committee of the Red Cross to inspect Iranian prisons and prisoners. They found 3,087 prisoners, and while about a third had suffered abuse, they found no recent evidence of torture.
And who were the subjects of these brutality? The primary targets were communists and islamists. In fact, many people who turned out to play key roles in the Islamofascist regime post-1979 had been veterans of SAVAK's prisons. From the 50s to the 70s, Iran was rife with various ideological groups that wanted to overthrow the government to establish whatever type of utopian government their ideology promised. These groups regularly carried out terrorist attacks including multiple attempts on the Shah's life. On one end of this spectrum were the communists. Their Tudeh party, which was established and supported by the USSR, was outlawed. On the other end of the spectrum were the islamists. And in the middle, there were several groups with hybrid ideologies of islamism and communism - a cocktail of shit and crap. These were the political targets of SAVAK. This is why many in my and younger generations believe the main problem with SAVAK was not its brutality but its insufficient vigilance.
Greenwald tried to portray the Shah's rule as a period where anyone could be at risk. This is not true. While political freedom was lacking (a mistake that the Shah himself later admitted), life for the vast majority of Iranians was improving throughout the Shah's reign. Iran's GDP per capita peaked in 1978 and has not recovered since. We don't even need to talk about political and social freedoms.
The popular narrative in the west with regards to Iran is that the CIA installed the Shah as a puppet and his brutality is what led to the revolution. This is an ahistorical narrative. The forces that opposed the Shah, opposed him precisely because they held values that would presumably make the likes of Greenwald gasp with horror. The most iconic policy that the Shah instituted (which, by the way, was first put to a referendum) was dubbed the "white revolution", and it was a programme of modernization. Among other things, part of this entailed expanded rights for women and another part was land reforms that made peasants into landlords. When Khomeini, the later leader of the revolution, began making noise in opposition to the Shah, it was precisely this program of modernization and liberalization that he opposed. Contrary to the popular narrative, the backlash against the Shah did not stem from the brutality but from the liberalism. The brutality, insofar as it existed, targeted those who opposed modernization and liberalism. Would Glenn Greenwald like to tell us how this should have been handled instead? Should these elements have been allowed into government where they would have forestalled modernization and ensured the continued oppression of women (as they did as soon as they took power) and maintained a feudal social hierarchy?
Glenn Greenwald's arguments in this short clip are symptomatic of the confusion of western anti-establishment figures when it comes to other nations. On the one hand, they try to portray themselves as supporters of the struggles of the little people in poor countries. On the other, they will attack anyone who lifts a finger to actually make life better for them.
Throughout the 20th century, no developing nation with strategic importance for great powers has managed to improve its lot without giving up either its independence or democracy. South Korea and Japan became what they are thanks to protection from the US. Turkey was modernized under a "republic" that was in reality a one-party system under Ataturk. Once political plurality was introduced, it experienced multiple coups and has since reverted into some flavour of islamic authoritarianism. Perhaps the greatest success story is Singapore, but even here, Singapore's democracy is at best described as illiberal. The founding prime minister ruled continuously for over 30 years and has been described as a benevolent dictator. And Singapore did not even hold the strategic importance for great powers that countries in the middle east do.
Those who attack the legacy of the Shah of Iran like Greenwald did are setting an impossible standard for any leader who wants to bring about progress in such nations. It is said of communists that they're not friends of the poor but of poverty, and the same applies to Greenwald. So long as a developing nation is "downtrodden", they will express support for its people. But by holding leaders to a standard that can only be met in an idealistic lalaland, they ensure that no leader can lift those people out of poverty and into prosperity without losing legitimacy. In this way, the likes of Greenwald are actually the biggest useful idiots for western imperialism, since they help keep non-westerners poor.
The Shah's reign started with him begging the United Nations to help protect Iran's sovereignty. When it ended, Iran and its people were respected and admired throughout the world. Whatever his mistakes, he was a patriot who thought about the long term wellbeing of his nation and his people. Thankfully, in the digital age, his speeches and those of his officials are available for young Iranians to rediscover this fact, and that's exactly what's happening.
Most importantly, he was a democrat! He respected his people. He put his crowning achievement to a popular referendum, in which he extended the vote to women, several years before Swiss women got this right. He built the 5th largest military in the world, but in contrast to many authoritarian puppet rulers that Greenwald would lump him in with, his military was never trained or equipped to be deployed domestically, nor was he willing to give the order to do so. This was one of the key reasons why the revolution of '79 could succeed, while larger scale protests against the current islamofascist regime have repeatedly failed.
In the final comment, Greenwald says he wants to see Iranians be able to choose a democratic leadership and the only reason why Dershowitz' question would be relevant would be because he wants the US to install another puppet government in Iran. This is yet another impossible and idealistic standard that will ensure nothing but preservation of the status quo.
For a revolution to succeed, particularly against a regime such as the Islamic Republic, it needs leadership and a cohesive vision for how a transition would work. No leadership can arise within Iran, since it will immediately be put down or killed. Any leadership outside of Iran will be delegitimized as a tool of western imperialism by the likes of Greenwald.
In fact, the only reliable and trustworthy leader figure we have today is the son of the late Shah, the crown prince Reza Pahlavi. But western anti-establishment figures have already got to work delegitimizing him, often by implying that any western support would be equivalent of getting boots on the ground like another Iraq war or that any support for the crown prince is a sign of another ploy by the CIA to install another puppet regime. These are narratives that play into the hands of the islamofascists in Iran.
The vast majority of Iranians today want regime change. A large number (though precisely how much is harder to tell) trust the crown prince at least with leadership throughout a transition period while a constitutional assembly can be formed. We will make this happen, but foreign influence will determine the cost. On average, the islamofascist regime executes one person every 8 hours. That's to say nothing of the extrajudicial killings. The longer the status quo continues, the more lives will be lost. Glenn Greenwald's wonderful idealism will not save these lives. His support for the only reliable opposition figure could. But I'm not holding my breath.
Powerfully relevant. Thank you for writing this.