Superior inferior
Excerpt
November 16, 2004
iranian.com
From Kenneth M. Pollack's The
Persian Puzzle: The Conflict between Iran and America (Random
House, 2004).
CHAPTER 1 From Persepolis to the Pahlavis To understand the labyrinth of
U.S.-Iranian relations, there are at least three things that you
need to know about the seven millennia of Iranian history before
the twentieth century. The first is that the land that is today
Iran is the heir to a long line of remarkable predecessors. In
its day, the Persian Empire was a superpower like nothing the world
had ever seen -- with a monotheistic religion, a vast army,
a rich civilization, a new and remarkably efficient method of administration,
and territory stretching from Egypt to Central Asia. All Iranians
know that history well, and it is a source of enormous pride to
them. It has given them a widely remarked sense of superiority
over all of their neighbors, and, ironically, while Tehran now
refers to the United States by the moniker "Global Arrogance," within
the Middle East a stereotypical complaint against Iranians is their
own arrogant treatment of others.
The second important aspect of Iran's early history that
still defines the Iranian state and has had a tremendous impact
on U.S.-Iranian relations is that for the last five hundred years,
Iran has been the only Shi'i Muslim state in the world. Though
90 percent of all Muslims are Sunni, there are a number of countries
where Shi'ah make up either a majority (Bahrain, Iraq, Iran)
or a significant minority (Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Yemen).
But only Iran adopted Shi'i Islam as its state religion.
Although the Sunni-Shi'ah divide is not as caustic as other
interreligious splits, it is not a trifle either. There are important
aspects of Shi'ism that have helped shape Iranian political
culture in ways that are quite different from that of other Muslim
nations. What's more, it has heightened both Iran's
sense of uniqueness and its sense of isolation. For Iranians, Shi'ism
is a key element of their culture, and for many Arabs and other
non-Iranians, the terms "Shi'ah" and "Persian" were
long considered synonymous.
Last, for roughly a century and a half beginning in the early
1800s, a weak Iranian state became prey to powerful external actors,
principally the European great powers. Iranians (Persians, as they
were then still known) were accustomed to looking down on Europeans
as barbarian adherents to a superseded religion and a primitive
civilization. Now, suddenly, they were trouncing the shah's
armies, carving up their lands, making and unmaking governments,
monopolizing their markets, and treating their land as battleground,
playground, and campground with no regard for the needs or desires
of the Iranians themselves. It was humiliating; it was frustrating,
and it was frightening for Iranians to be so vulnerable and so
constantly manipulated by these foreign powers. And it reinforced
a powerful sense of xenophobia coupled with an inferiority complex
among Iranians to complement their superiority complex.
Elaine Sciolino has covered Iran since the revolution and is
one of the most knowledgeable journalists writing on Iran, yet
even she admits in her book Persian Mirrors that "whenever
I think I understand Iran, it throws me a curve." Iran is
a maddeningly complicated state and society, and even a cursory
understanding of its motives today requires knowing a fair bit
about the forces that have shaped the nation over time.
Ancient History
When the first tribes entered Iran after the
last ice age, they found an inhospitable land. The territory of Iran
is fenced in
by three great mountain ranges -- the Alborz in the north, the
Zagros in the west and south, and the Mekran in the southeast.
In the center is a great plateau that is itself mostly uninhabitable.
Two vast deserts, the Dasht-e Kavir and the Dasht-e Lut, in the
east of the central plateau, render roughly half its territory
unfit for agriculture. It has few navigable rivers.
The mountains and deserts, the poor soil, and the lack of good
rivers made communications difficult in ancient Iran. As a result,
the population became deeply fragmented. In those parts of the
land that were fit for agriculture, secluded villages and isolated
towns -- with only a few big cities -- became the rule. Nomadic
tribes who depended on herding livestock inhabited the rest. Because
of the discrete separation of so much of the population, Iran became
a patchwork of ethnic, religious, tribal, and other groupings,
all of whom seemed to find constant reasons for conflict with their
neighbors.
Thus, it may seem odd that so difficult a land would produce
one of the world's first great multiethnic empires. Perhaps
a hard land made for hard people who could then conquer their softer
neighbors? Whatever the reason, for centuries of the ancient world,
the empire that emerged from ancient Iran was a superpower in a
league by itself.
The first people to settle and establish a civilization in what
would become Iran, however, were hardly world beaters. The Elamites
lived in the far southwest of the land, close by to what was then
the great civilization of Sumer -- mankind's first true
civilization, the home of the biblical Garden of Eden, and the
ancient precursor of modern Iraq. Elam suffered from the superior
power of the Sumerians as much as it benefited from their more
advanced culture and technology.
In the second millennium b.c., migratory waves from eastern Europe
brought the Indo-European race of Aryans into Persia. Three groups
of Aryans swept in and settled in different parts of the country:
the Scythians, who conquered the far northwest from their strongholds
around the Black Sea; the Medes (or Mada), who settled in a wide
swath of land in the center of the country; and the Persians (or
Parsa), who eventually made their home in the south, in what would
eventually become Iran's Fars (derived from "Pars")
province. Other elements of the Aryan race would spread westward
from their primordial homeland into northern Europe, to constitute
the Germanic and Scandinavian peoples whom the Nazis would make
so much of.
For many centuries, it was the Medes who dominated ancient Iran.
They were forced to unite quickly and develop an effective society
to stave off the fearsome Assyrian Empire to their west. At that
time, Assyria ruled Mesopotamia and much of the Near East with
a highly developed and highly brutal war machine. In constant warfare
with the Assyrians, the Medes rarely fared well, but, aided by
the Zagros Mountains, they were ultimately able to hold back the
Assyrian incursions.
Although the term "Mede" would remain in European
usage as a synonym for "Persian" for millennia, little
has survived of their history or society. The era of the Mede ascendancy
saw the birth of one of the world's first monotheistic religions -- Zoroastrianism.
Zoroaster ("Zarathustra" in Greek) lived from roughly
628 to 551 b.c. and preached of a single great god, Ahura Mazda,
of whom all other gods were simply poorly descried parts. Zoroastrianism
was deeply concerned with the eternal relationship between good
and evil, and many scholars believe that, even in modern Iran,
Zoroaster's focus on this permanent struggle remains an important
element lurking beneath the surface of much religious and secular
philosophy. Khomeini's obsession with the struggle between
good (epitomized by Islam and Iran) and evil (the West, the United
States) is often described as a manifestation of this deep-seated
Iranian trait. Zoroastrianism was also the first religion to preach
the notion that humans would face judgment after death based on
their actions in life, and that each soul would then spend eternity
in either Paradise or perdition. Zoroastrianism became the chief
religion of the Medes (and the Persians) and would dominate Iranian
spiritual life until the Islamic conquest more than a thousand
years later.
Ultimately, most of what we know of the Medes regards their eventual
displacement by the Persians. In 636 b.c., the Elamites were crushed
in battle by the great Assyrian king Ashurbanipal. This defeat
opened the way for the rise of the Persians. The defeat of Elam
(the Persians' neighbors to the west) created room for the
Persians to expand their land and power. With their new status,
the Persian kings allied themselves with the Babylonians, and together
they defeated the Assyrians, sacking the Assyrian capital of Ninevah
in 612 b.c. In about 559 b.c., Cyrus II (later called Cyrus the
Great) took the throne of Persia. It was Cyrus who took a state
that had made itself regionally important, and turned it into the
vast Persian Empire. Drawing on the new power provided by the combined
lands of Persia, Elam, and parts of Assyria, Cyrus turned on the
Medes and conquered them. He quickly followed this victory with
successful campaigns against the Parthians and Hyrcanians farther
to the east, before turning west and smashing the fabulously wealthy
King Croesus of Lydia (in present-day northern Turkey), and incorporating
Asia Minor into his empire. After his Lydian victory, Cyrus turned
south, conquering Babylon, where he freed the Jews from their captivity
and permitted them to return to Palestine -- thereby earning
considerable praise in the Bible's Book of Isaiah. When Cyrus
finally died, he was followed by his son Cambyses II, who added
Egypt to Cyrus's colossal Persian demesne.
In 522 b.c., when Cambyses' son Darius ascended the throne
as the king of kings of Persia, his empire was the greatest in
the world. It stretched from the Aegean to Afghanistan, from the
Black Sea to the Blue Nile. It was estimated to have contained
50 million people, an unimaginable population for that time. So
vast an empire was difficult to govern with ancient communications
and organization, and Darius's greatest achievement was a
thorough internal reform of the empire. He built roads -- 2,500
kilometers' worth of them. He created a system of provinces
ruled by satraps (governors) capable of acting on his behalf. He
instituted a standardized system of weights and measures and introduced
uniform gold and silver coinage. His commercial reforms made Persia
a trading juggernaut that dominated the markets of the ancient
Near Eastern world. And Darius built a magnificent new imperial
capital at Persepolis with an eclectic architectural style that
attempted to blend elements of the motifs of all of the many subject
peoples of the empire.
Darius also mounted the first Persian invasion of ancient Greece,
which looms so large in the Western consciousness. It was Darius
whose forces landed at Marathon in 490 b.c. only to be defeated
by the Athenian hoplite army. Darius's defeat by so tiny
and insignificant a nation as the Athenian city-state spurred his
son and successor, Xerxes, to mount a much grander expedition.
In 480 b.c., Xerxes led a massive force of possibly as many as
200,000 troops across the Hellespont to conquer all of Greece.
At Thermopylae, he was detained by the illustrious, doomed stand
of 300 Spartan warriors and their great king, Leonidas, whose sacrifice
inspired their squabbling countrymen to unite against the Persian
foe. Later that year, the Athenian fleet scored a stunning victory
over the Persians at Salamis, forcing Xerxes to halt the invasion.
The next year, at Plataea, a combined Greek army led by the Spartans
smashed a Persian force, ending the Persian threat to Greece and
setting a limit on Persia's westward expansion.
A century and a half later, Greece would come back to bite the
Persians. In 334 b.c., Alexander the Great, king of Macedon and
the leader of a Greek confederation, invaded Persia. For the Greeks,
Persia was the world's great superpower and had been for
as long as any could remember. Attacking it was the ultimate act
of defiance, and anyone who could conquer it would achieve fame
unmatched for all the ages. This was precisely the sort of challenge
that appealed to the young, headstrong Macedonian monarch. In 334,
Alexander crossed the Hellespont with a force of about 35,000 men
and proceeded to conquer the greatest empire the world had ever
known. In 331, he defeated the Persian Army at the Battle of Arbela
(in modern-day northern Iraq) by charging directly at the Persian
king, Darius III, who fled the field and so demoralized his troops.
The next year Alexander occupied Persepolis and burned it. Eventually,
he would push on into Afghanistan and India, before turning back
when his exhausted troops mutinied.
Having conquered Persia, Alexander was determined to rule it;
he reorganized the empire and attempted to fuse his Greco-Macedonian
base with his new Persian conquests. He instituted a common currency,
made Greek the "official" language of the entire empire,
devised a unified bureaucracy, and even went so far as to order
10,000 of his Greek soldiers to marry Persian women at a mass ceremony
at Susa in 324. But Alexander contracted a fever and died the very
next year, and without him, his empire could not hold together.
It was divided up among a number of his generals. Mesopotamia fell
to Seleucus, who made his capital at Babylon and used it as a base
to conquer the Iranian heartland. For the next century, the Iranian
lands were ruled by the Seleucid Greeks, who brought Hellenistic
influences to Persia.
The Seleucids were eventually displaced by the Parthians -- a
central Asian people descended from the Scythians, who were, in
a sense, returning to their old stomping grounds. The Parthians
were able to conquer and hold Mesopotamia as well as the Iranian
lands, and for several centuries they contested control of Armenia
and the Levant with the Roman Empire. The Parthians left almost
no surviving records, and scholars speculate that they may not
have kept any themselves. But the Parthians too would pass, defeated
in 227 a.d. by Ardeshir of Sasani, who would establish in their
place the Sassanid Empire. The Sassanids ruled Iran until they
in turn were overthrown by a new power rising in the south, Islam.
The Islamic Invasion
The Sassanids fought ten wars with Rome, many more with the migrating
Huns, and developed a highly centralized state firmly grounded
in Zoroastrian teachings. But by the sixth century a.d., they were
losing their grip on power thanks to revolts among their military
nobility, internal discontent, and a series of costly and unsuccessful
wars against the Byzantines. They were certainly not ready for
the storm that broke upon them in the middle of the next century.
In 622, the Prophet Muhammad made his famed hijra (migration)
from Mecca to Medina, beginning the Islamic era. Two years later,
his followers defeated the Meccans in the Battle of Badr, bringing
the new religion back to his homeland and inaugurating the first
of the Islamic conquests. The new faith spread like wildfire among
the tribes of western Arabia, firing them with a zeal that made
them nearly invincible in battle. Within a year after Muhammad's
death in 632, the entire Arabian Peninsula had fallen to Islam.
Five years later, victory at the Battle of Qadisiyah would bring
them control of Ctesiphon, then the capital of Mesopotamia. The
Islamic armies then broke the power of the Sassanids at Nahavand
in 642, although not until 700 was Iran fully pacified.
In some ways, the Islamic conquest changed everything for the
Iranians, and in other ways it did not change that much. The Iranians
were slow to convert to the new religion. Not until the ninth century
were a majority of Iranians Muslims. Unlike many other lands of
the Islamic empire, Arabic did not entirely supplant Persian as
the language of the masses -- the elites learned it, but most
of the population continued to speak variations of Pahlavi, the
Persian tongue of the Sassanids. Moreover, the Muslim conquerors
actually adopted a great deal from their Iranian subjects. They
retained the Sassanid monetary system, incorporated Sassanid court
ceremonies into their own, and borrowed many Sassanid administrative
mechanisms, including the office of vizier (minister) and the divan
(a budgetary office). The practice of veiling and seclusion of
women -- wealthy, freeborn noble women -- came from the Persians,
too, although both customs were also practiced to some extent by
the Greeks and Romans.
Under the first two Islamic dynasties -- the Umayyads and
the Abbasids -- Iran remained firmly within the orbit of the
larger Islamic empire. However, the decline of the Abbasids in
the tenth and eleventh centuries allowed Iran's rulers to
begin to assert a degree of independence from the center. This
process was reinforced by climatic change. Over the centuries,
irrigation had introduced salinity into the Iranian soil, leading
to desertification, which forced formerly settled agricultural
communities to adopt nomadic ways of life that made them more difficult
to control by centralized authority.
Overall, these patterns left Iran vulnerable to invasion by warlike
tribes from central Asia -- greatest among them the Seljuk Turks,
who conquered Iran in the early twelfth century. Nevertheless,
the Seljuks recognized themselves to be culturally inferior to
their Persian subjects, and they quickly adopted many local practices.
Not all Iranians accepted the Seljuks, and one group of Isma'ili
Shi'ah created a secret sect that sent out fanatical members
to murder their political opponents. In Arabic, these zealots were
called the Hashashiyyun (because it was believed they smoked hashish
before departing on their missions), which became corrupted in
European usage to "assassins."
Of far more devastating consequence were the Mongol invasions
that began in the thirteenth century. First Genghis Khan blazed
a trail of slaughter and destruction across Iran, followed by his
grandson Hulagu, who extended the bloody Mongol conquests farther
west, sacking Baghdad in 1258. The Mongols did terrible and, in
many cases, permanent damage -- destroying fragile underground
water tunnels and massacring so many Iranian males as to radically
alter parts of Iran's topography and demography. A second
wave under Tamerlane (Timur the Lame or Timur Lang) in the fourteenth
century was gentler only by comparison with its predecessors -- the
razing of the great cities of Isfahan and Shiraz being cases in
point. The Mongols were skilled at obliterating things but poor
at building anything lasting of their own. They left behind little
but a legacy of misery after their passing.
Shi'ism Comes to Iran
In the wake of the chaos left by the Mongol rulers, Iran became
a cockpit to be fought over by a variety of Turkic and Afghan peoples.
For that reason, it is somewhat remarkable that an indigenous group,
the Safavids, would finally succeed in reunifying the country --
the first native dynasty to rule the land in more than a millennium.
The Safavids began as a militant Sufi (mystic) sect of Shi'i
Islam. After conquering the great northwest Iranian city of Tabriz
in 1501, the Safavids moderated many of their more extreme beliefs
-- such
as the notion that their leaders were divine -- and launched
a series of offensives that soon brought the rest of the traditional
Persian realm under their control. However, this stability came
with a price: they demanded that all of the inhabitants, the vast
majority of whom were Sunni Muslims, convert to Shi'ism.
Thus it was the Safavids who brought the Shi'i version
of Islam to Iran. Although Shi'ism is often associated with
Iran because Iran is the largest Shi'i country today, its
origins have nothing to do with Iran. Instead they derive from
the earliest days of the Islamic empire.
After the death of the Prophet Muhammad, there was disagreement
among his followers over who should be named his successor (caliph)
as leader of the Muslims. Although an important minority of the
original companions of the Prophet favored ‘Ali, cousin and
son-in-law of Muhammad, the majority backed Muhammad's longtime
companion and father-in-law, Abu Bakr. ‘Ali eventually became
the fourth successor to the Prophet, but his murder in the garrison
town of Kufa in southern Iraq reopened the debate on succession.
(He was assassinated in 661 by a dissident soldier, one of a group
who opposed his lenient treatment of the rebellious governor of
Damascus, Mu'awiya.) Upon the death of ‘Ali, his followers,
or partisans, demanded that the succession remain within the family
of the Prophet and to its only survivors, the sons of ‘Ali -- Hasan
and Husayn. Members of the dominant merchant clans of Mecca and
Medina, however, backed the claims of another prominent tribe,
the Umayyids, led by Mu'awiya. Hasan gave up his claim and
Mu'awiya was named caliph.
But not everyone accepted Hasan's decision. Those followers
of ‘Ali who rejected Mu'awiya became known as the "party
of ‘Ali" or, in Arabic, the Shi'at ‘Ali,
later abbreviated to Shi'ah. ‘Ali's youngest
son, Husayn, became the leader of the Shi'ah, although he
made no claim to the caliphate as long as Mu'awiya lived.
When Mu'awiya died in 680, Husayn hoped to claim the caliphate,
but he and seventy-one of his followers were waylaid at nearby
Karbala by a far greater force under Yazid, the son of Mu'awiya,
who (naturally) believed that the caliphate should pass to him.
Husayn and his followers were slaughtered at Karbala on the tenth
day of the month of Moharram. Husayn and his brother Abbas were
buried in Karbala, which became -- together with their father's
tomb in Najaf -- the holiest sites in Shi'i Islam. The
tenth day of Moharram, the day of Ashura ("tenth" in
Arabic), became the holiest day of the Shi'i religious calendar,
when the faithful wail and even flog themselves bloody to excoriate
themselves for, figuratively, not having come to the defense of
Husayn at Karbala. Indeed, the martyrdom of Husayn and the mythology
of the fatally doomed cause became important touchstones of the
Shi'i faith.
The Shi'i and Sunni sects of Islam have a great deal in
common -- far more, arguably, than the doctrines of Protestant
and Catholic Christianity, for example. And although born of a
blood feud, the Sunni-Shi'i split has not been a particularly
gory one; again, there is nothing in Islamic history like the appalling
wars of the Reformation that devastated Europe during the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. A key distinguishing feature of Shi'ism,
however, is the concept of the Imamate. Shi'is believe that
the succession from the Prophet rightly should have passed to ‘Ali
and then to ‘Ali's blood line. Most Iranians are Twelver
Shi'ah, the mainstream Shi'i denomination. As their
name implies, Twelvers believe that there were twelve imams: ‘Ali,
then his sons Hasan and Husayn, and nine others. The twelfth imam
was taken into hiding to protect him from the enemies of Shi'ism
when he was just a baby, and later it was announced that he had
entered into a form of occultation and would return only at a much
later date in messianic fashion as the Lord of the Age, the Mahdi,
who will begin an era of justice followed by ultimate judgment
for all mankind.
The concept of the imamate is important because it contributes
to another key difference between Sunni and Shi'ah. In its
simplest form, the Sunni faith maintains that God has given mankind
everything we need to live our lives properly in the form of the
Quran and the sayings and histories of the Prophet, the proper
interpretations of which were finalized in the ninth and tenth
centuries. Shi'is believe that the imams were themselves
divinely guided, and so it fell to them to lead the community in
righteous fashion, which they did by definition. The loss of the
twelfth imam consequently posed a problem for the Shi'ah:
Who was going to lead them? This problem led eventually to a reliance
upon men called mujtahids -- those capable of practicing ijtihad
(the ability to interpret the holy scriptures). These were religious
leaders responsible for guiding the community in the absence of
the imam. At the pinnacle of the Shi'i religious hierarchy,
the most respected and revered mujtahids were granted the title
marja-e taqlid (source of emulation). Effectively, the concept
behind this structure held that only those most learned in Islamic
jurisprudence (the mujtahids) were capable of interpreting the
scriptures to determine how men and women should live their lives
in the absence of the twelfth imam. Everyone else had to look to
a source of emulation (a marja-e taqlid), who were always highly
respected mujtahids, and follow their example to live righteous
lives. In the nineteenth century, the notion of a marja-e taqlid
al-mutlaq (the "absolute" or "supreme" marja-e
taqlid) as the ultimate exemplar for all Shi'ah to follow
also entered Shi'i theology and would become the root of
Ayatollah Khomeini's concept of velayat-e faqih, or "rule
of the jurisprudent."
The emergence of the mujtahids and the concept of the marja-e
taqlid at the peak of it all gave rise to a fairly elaborate religious
hierarchy within Shi'ism that is not matched by Sunni Islam.
Would-be mullahs (a Persian term for a cleric that in Arabic is
rendered ‘alim) begin by attending a seminary, a madrasah,
often in one of the great centers of Shi'i learning (called
hawzas) at Qom in Iran or Najaf in Iraq. From there, they might
go on to be the local mullah in a village or teach under the guidance
of a higher-ranking cleric in one of the seminaries themselves.
In time, as they demonstrated their learning, their familiarity
with the Quran and other Islamic scripture, and their ability to
deal with questions posed by their students or congregants, they
might be accepted as a hojjat-ol Islam ("proof of Islam").
If their wisdom and prestige were to continue to rise, they might
be acclaimed as an ayatollah ("sign of God"), which
requires them to write a lengthy dissertation elaborating on how
people should conduct themselves in day-to-day life as a guide
for their followers. Finally, at the very top, is the exalted rank
of ayatollah al-uzma (grand ayatollah, literally "greatest
sign of God"), which is a relatively recent rank that was
used to distinguish the very top ayatollahs after "title
inflation" raised many lesser figures to the rank of ayatollah
and so diminished its cachet. All of the grand ayatollahs were
marjas, and in the nineteenth century, a marja-e taqlid al-mutlaq
was then named from the handful of grand ayatollahs.
The Qajar Dynasty and the Early Modern Era in Iran
Having brought Shi'ism to Iran, the Safavids
held power from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. In 1722, Ghilzai
tribesmen
from Afghanistan conquered much of Iran, effectively emasculating
the dynasty. Various external and internal groups contested power
in Iran until 1795, when the Qajars -- a Turkic tribe who had
migrated to Iran from Central Asia in the fourteenth century --
were able to defeat their rivals and claim the throne of a reunified
Persian state.
The Qajars would not rule happily for very long. The world was
changing all around Iran, and not necessarily to its advantage.
The rise of maritime commerce meant that many of the trade routes
that had once passed from the Far East through Iran to the West
now sailed around the mountainous land altogether. Without that
trade, Iran's cities declined. This, coupled with further
growth in nomadism, further weakened the strength and control of
the central government. Meanwhile, the European states were growing
powerful and creeping ever closer to Iran. In 1763, the Iranian
ruler Karim Khan granted the British East India Company the right
to build a base and a trading post at Bushehr on the Persian Gulf.
More dangerous still, to the north, the Russians were slowly digesting
new conquests in the Black Sea area and setting their sights on
targets even farther south.
Persia (as it was then still called) and Russia first came to
blows in 1804, when their imperial ambitions collided in Georgia.
In a nine-year war, the Russians prevailed decisively, forcing
the Iranians to cede all of their lands in the Caucasus and to
agree to give up the right to maintain any naval forces in the
Caspian Sea.19 But in the age of the Great Game between Russia
and Britain, as these opponents sparred and fenced across the length
of Asia, Russia's victory could only increase British interest
in the country. With the shah (king) of Persia still smarting from
his drubbing by the Russians, it was not difficult for British
envoys to convince him to sign a protectorate agreement with His
Majesty's government. The Definitive Treaty of 1814 pledged
British support for Persia in return for Persian promises that
no other foreign troops would be allowed into Iran and that only
British officers would be allowed to train the Persian Army -- a
French training mission having formerly served that purpose since
1807.
The signing of the Definitive Treaty officially made Iran a pawn
in the Great Game. The shah had hoped to use British support to
defend his realm against the Russians in the near term and use
British military assistance to rebuild his army so that he could
eventually avenge his losses to the Russians. The European powers
had other things in mind. The Russians sought to rule Persia. The
British saw Persia as yet another buffer to the "jewel in
the Crown" of India. Thus they wanted an independent Persia,
stable and strong enough to withstand the Russians but not strong
enough to constitute a threat to India itself. Inevitably, it was
the Iranians who lost out in this struggle.
In 1826, the Persians launched an offensive into the Caucasus
to try to regain the lands they had lost in 1813. Their timing
was terrible. The British were then allied with the Russians against
the Turks in the War of Greek Independence and so provided no aid
to Iran against the Russians. After some initial Persian victories,
the Russians regained their balance and began to systematically
demolish the shah's forces. By 1828, the Persian armies had
been so badly mauled that the shah was forced to sign the humiliating
Treaty of Turkmanchai. It confirmed Persia's loss of all
of its former possessions in the Caucasus, forced Persia to grant
economic concessions and extraterritorial privileges to Russian
citizens, and saddled the shah's government with enormous
war reparations. It was a stunning blow to Iranian self-confidence,
and it would not be the last.
Many of the trends established at the beginning of the century
would plague Iran right till its end. A variety of vicious circles
emerged that slowly sapped the strength of the Qajar state. Desertification,
changing trade patterns, the growth of European manufacturing (which
could produce better goods more cheaply than traditional Iranian
handicrafts workshops), and the persistent problems of communications
across Iran's mountains and deserts helped impoverish the
nation and weaken the central government. However, the shahs of
Persia were slow to recognize this weakness and continued to embark
on foreign wars that generally turned out to be not just humiliations
but expensive ones to boot.
Over time, various Iranian political elites did recognize the
increasing gap between themselves and the Europeans in military,
commercial, and bureaucratic efficiency, and attempted to institute
programs of broad reform similar to those attempted by their Egyptian
and Turkish coreligionists. However, Persia lacked the wealth of
either Egypt or Turkey to purchase European weaponry, manufacturing
plants, and expertise. Thus these efforts at reform were often
costly failures that Iran could not afford. Nor were they helped
by the international financial markets, which saw a century-long
decline in the price of silver -- the basis of Persia's
currency -- thus making it ever harder for the Iranians to pay
for imports. More damaging still, the decline in the silver market
caused massive inflation in Persia, prices rising by 600 percent
between 1850 and 1860.
Copyright© 2004 by Kenneth Pollack. Excerpted by permission
of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights
reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted
without permission in writing from the publisher.
About
KENNETH M. POLLACK is director of research at the Saban
Center for Middle
East Policy at the Brookings Institution. From 1995 to 1996 and
from 1991 to
2001, he served as director for Gulf affairs at the National Security
Council, where he was the principal working-level official responsible
for
implementation of U.S. policy toward Iran. Prior to his time in
the Clinton
administration, he spent seven years in the CIA as a Persian Gulf
military
analyst. He is the author of The Threatening Storm and Arabs at
War. He lives
in Washington, D.C
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