America and Iran: A History, 1720 to the Present by John Ghazvinian (review)

Few histories of ties between countries have received as much scrutiny as those between Iran and the United States. In attempting to tackle this history in a single volume, dating back from the present to when the United Kingdom's North American colonies first paid attention to the tumultuous Afghan invasion of Iran in 1720, John Ghazvinian has embarked upon a difficult task. Adopting a thoughtful framework, he divides this 300-year history into four chapters corresponding to a Hayden White–worthy narrative structure: Spring (to the 1921 rise of Reza Khan, later known as Reza Shah after 1925), Summer (to the US- and UK-backed coup of 1953), Autumn (the ensuing period of absolute rule by Mohammad Reza Shah), and Winter (from 1979 to now). Ghazvinian's passionate "conviction . . . that the current state of antagonism between Iran and America is wholly unnecessary" could give good soul-force to the book (p. xvii). He writes with a flair that, while at times excessive, makes the book readable.

Not unlike the story it tells, the book has an auspicious beginning. Covering the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Ghazvinian pays patient attention to diverse sources such as colonial newspapers in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, references to Persia in the educational culture of North America and ideas about Iran among the American Founding Fathers. Ghazvinian's telling of the 1851 treaty between the US and Iran—achieved by pioneering negotiations between each country's diplomats, only to be rejected by the US Senate, and then wither on the vine following the assassination of Iran's reformist premier Amir Kabir—reads as an ominous precursor to what has often ailed the ties between the two countries: reformers and peacemakers on both sides facing unfortunate timing and unsuitable circumstances. These early chapters are well-researched and substantial. Perhaps the best in the book is Chapter Three, "The Amateurs," which closely follows the indeed-amateurish conduct of diplomacy between the two nations in early days. Ghazvinian passionately reconstructs the well-documented desire of Iranian progressives in the aftermath of the 1906 constitutional revolution to build links with the US as a bulwark against the colonialist powers of Europe; a desire best captured in the biographies of American allies of the democratic struggle in Iran, such as Howard Baskerville, who remains a household name in Iran but is little known in the US. Such hopes were cruelly betrayed in 1953 when the US helped overthrow Iran's democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddeq.

But the auspicious beginning of the book sadly does not carry on as its potential is squashed early on for two connected reasons. First, the robust research underlying the initial chapters disappears soon thereafter. Second, despite his claim that this was to be a book "unencumbered by . . . ideological baggage" and "without the filter of a political agenda" (p. xvi), Ghazvinian simply adopts the perspective of Iran's current authoritarian rulers for most of the book. This need not be automatically disqualifying. There are, after all, good histories written by partisans of various states, so long as they are based on solid research. But Ghazvinian does not just repeat the myths of the Islamic Republic's reading of history, he does so unimaginatively while presenting a set of tired clichés and simply omitting historical facts whenever they are inconvenient.

For reasons of space, I can mention just some episodes from the book here. For the post-1953 period, the author offers a cartoonish image of Mohammad Reza Shah as a man, like his father, "focused obsessively on 'modernizing' the country to impress the West" (p. 229); under whose rule "for a lucky few, there would be rivers of champagne, mountains of caviar . . . [while] for most, there would be only stagnation and spiraling poverty" (p. 246), typified by the average cleric who had been reduced to "a scrawny, lice-ridden wretch" (p. 269.)

We could have ignored this florid caricature if the book also offered a well-researched account...