The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran Read Online Free

remarkable age of twenty-two. A self-described impersonal and analytical man, he was a brilliant scientist and had arrived at the Pentagon as a member of Kennedy defense secretary Robert McNamara’s “whiz kids.” Brown had spent most of the 1960s earning the deserved reputation as a moderate and a realist, but when it came to the Middle East, Secretary Brown generally agreed with Brzezinski’s more hawkish assessment of Soviet intentions. He shared Brzezinski’s concern about Soviet dominance of thePersian Gulf: “Soviet control of this area would make virtual vassals of much of both the industrialized and developing worlds.” 13
     
    Despite this discord, the stakes remained low for Washington, as the shah appeared to be firmly in power and in America’s pocket. In January 1977, the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research produced an optimistic report that echoed the intelligence community’s views of the shah’s prospects for political survival: “Iran is likely to remain stable under the shah’s leadership over the next several years. The prospects are good that Iran will have relatively clear sailing until at least the mid-1980s.” 14 On a stopover in Tehran in December 1977, at the end of his first year in office, Carter reemphasized his support for the shah during a lavish New Year’s Eve gala, noting that under the leadership of the shah, Iran “is an ‘island of stability’ in one of the more troubled areas.”
     
    B ut all was not as rosy as the U.S. intelligence community believed for the Pahlavi dynasty. In the early 1960s, the shah actively encouraged modernization and secularization. He forced land redistribution, especially of the vast holdings of Shia clerics, which struck at the heart of their wealth and power. The shah ordered state-owned businesses sold; the enfranchisement of women, including their ability to hold political office; and the removal of Islamic dogma from schools. The shah largely dismissed Islam as a backward force that impeded the formation of a new, modern Iran. The by-products of his brand of modernization were rapid social change and increased instability. 15 While Iran’s newfound oil wealth remained in the hands of a small elite, rural unemployment grew, and the population of Tehran multiplied fivefold as peasants poured into the city in search of work. 16
    In 1975, the shah canceled elections and abolished the two nominally independent political parties in favor of a single party dedicated to the Pahlavi regime. Any pretense of a constitutional monarchy vanished. The opposition movement grew, as did the murmur of discontent in the streets of Tehran, stoked by thousands of underemployed students freshly educated in Western universities.
     
    From the beginning, one of the most vocal opponents of the shah’s designs was a religious scholar from Qom, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Alarmed by Khomeini’s unwavering vitriolic criticism of the secularization of society, the shah had ordered the sixty-year-old cleric imprisoned in 1963and exiled the following year. Khomeini settled in the Shia holy city of Najaf, Iraq, where he continued his incessant monologues against the “corrupt” Pahlavi dynasty and its chief supporter, the United States. Khomeini remained revered by multitudes of Iranian people. He developed a mystical persona among both secularists and Islamists opposing the shah. Khomeini preferred to stay above the political fray, providing broad policy guidance and leaving the details to his key advisers. Many Western observers mistakenly viewed this leadership style as a sign that Khomeini intended to serve in the traditional role of a Shia imam: influential and powerful, but aloof from secular politics. Ayatollah Khomeini, however, had a clear view of where he wanted to take Iran, and it was not in the direction of either a Western democracy or a constitutional monarchy. He called for a purge of all corrupt influences and for the Islamization