King of Kings

[PeterRS]

A new book likens him to a figure from Shakespearean tragedy: an outwardly haughty and sometimes magnificent figure, inwardly insecure and indecisive, self-regarding only in his own downfall. A Richard II perhaps; even Hamlet.

In a book of many ironies, the fact is that of those close to him, few loved him. Certainly not as much as he loved himself. Most in his country came to loathe him with an intensity that surprised much of the world. “He was a difficult man to like – so suspicious, so certain we were all trying to do him down,” said the British Ambassador, before surprisingly adding, “And yet there was a naked vulnerability about him which made you genuinely sorry for him.”

So writes a reviewer in The Guardian of an important and telling book “King of Kings”. The book’s subtitle “The Unmaking of the Modern Middle East” may promise more than it actually delivers, but there is enough to demonstrate that the Shah of Iran was not merely the author of his own downfall. It had vastly greater international consequences. In fact the world has still not recovered from the events of January 1979 when the Shah of Iran finally left his country for good. As the reviewer states, the aftershocks resulting from that departure and what followed are still “not over yet.” 

As has been discussed in other threads, the destabilisation of Iran really started with the actions of the CIA and its British allies when in 1953 they engineered the overthrow of the elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh. In his place they put back on the throne the young Shah, a man whom they considered far more likely to become a pawn of the west. Mosaddegh had planned to nationalise Iran’s oil industry which, till then, paid Iran peanuts. The western governments had no truck with the nationalisation plan, the more so at a time when the Soviet Union was also looking to get its hands on Iran’s oil.

Even when the Shah had become a megalomaniacal figure, he was still courted by the west. By then the west lauded him as a figure of stability in an increasingly unstable part of the world, lavishing on him billions of $$$ in armaments and cash to secure his regime. Then he turned on those masters by siding with OPEC when it raised the price of oil manyfold in the 1970s resulting in a major international recession. In the meantime he allowed a tidal wave of corruption to overwhelm his country. As unrest grew his Savak secret police became a hated organisation.

The author Scott Anderson suggests that the immediate cause of the revolution that brought the severe Ayatollah Khomeini to power was one now rarely discussed. Exactly a year before he was forced from Iran, the Shah entertained US President Jimmy Carter and his wife in Tehran. Carter complimented the Shah on multiple achievements, even as crowds were beginning to demonstrate on the streets against the Shah’s hated rule. The Shah took this as a further acknowledgement of his success. He decided to further vilify the exiled cleric Khomeini then resident in France. He instructed a minister to publish an article about Khomeini being a British agent. This lit an intense fire of indignation and loathing against the Shah. It was one he could not extinguish. 

The reviewer suggests that the book overly concentrates on the US/Iran relationship to the exclusion of others. But it offers a clear-eyed extensive portrait of a man who was to consider himself, like King Lear, more sinned against that sinning.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/jul/28/king-of-kings-by-scott-anderson-review-how-the-last-shah-of-iran-sealed-his-own-fate