TRIUMPH AND DESPAIR
In Search of Iran’s Islamic Republic By Mehran Kamrava
Hurst
This book could hardly have appeared at a timelier moment. Iran’s acknowledgement that it has supplied drones to Russia has catapulted the Tehran regime to centre stage in the global crisis sparked by the war in Ukraine. Mehran Kamrava takes the reader to the roots of Iran’s rift with the West, from the appearance of Ayatollah Khomeini as the mastermind behind the protests that swept the nation in 1978, through the creation of the Islamic Republic, to the country’s own current domestic political turmoil. As Kamrava points out, it didn’t take long for the Ayatollah’s revolution to adopt state terror as its main tool for consolidating power. The rule of extremist Islamic law meant accept and obey or suffer the consequences – in fact, not all that different from what occurred in post-revolutionary France, Russia or China. Kamrava shows how the elderly Ayatollah, now referred to as ‘the Imam’, outsmarted, outmanoeuvred and outmuscled his former partners turned opponents, one by one. Efforts were deployed to ensure that Khomeini went unchallenged. The establishment of the new order was soon followed by a reign of terror, again, not without historical precedent in other countries. Khomeini’s death in 1989 was quietly cheered by many who hoped for a gradual relaxation of state intolerance at home and rapprochement with foreign powers. Instead, after a succession of elected leaders failed to fulfil these hopes, the Mahmoud Ahmadinejad administration, which came to power in 2009, revealed how authoritarianism remained deeply embedded in Iranian politics and the military.
A key to understanding the pragmatic essence of
Iranian foreign policy is an awareness of its sharp ideological and sectarian rhetoric, often fuelled by American hostility and suspiciousness by Tehran’s Arab neighbours, especially after the 2011 Arab uprisings. ‘The ensuing zero-sum game that often characterises Iran–US and Iran–Gulf relations … neither serves interests nor helps facilitate regional peace and stability,’ the author argues.
This leaves the world with a hybrid political system whose totalitarian features and impulses far outweigh its responsiveness, accountability and representative nature. Kamrava offers a glimmer of hope that transcends the intolerance of a myopic regime. ‘Political systems come and go,’ he writes, ‘but people endure. The people of Iran are certain to endure far beyond the Islamic Republic.’