Claims of Moral Iranian Corruption without Documented Facts
Scott Anderson, King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation (New York: Doubleday, August 5, 2025). Hardcover: $35, 6X9”. 512pp. ISBN: 978-0-385548-07-6.
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“…History of one of the most momentous events in modern times, the jaw-dropping stupidity of the American government, and the dawn of the age of religious nationalism. On New Year’s Eve, 1977, on a state visit to Iran, President Jimmy Carter toasted Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, King of Kings, Light of the Aryans, Shadow of God on Earth, praising Iran as ‘an island of stability… due to your leadership and the respect and admiration and love which your people give to you.’ Iran had the world’s fifth largest army and was awash in billions of dollars in oil revenues. Construction cranes dotted the skyline of its booming capital, Tehran. The regime’s feared secret police force SAVAK had crushed communist opposition, and the Shah had bought off the conservative Muslim clergy inside the country. He seemed invulnerable, and invaluable to the United States as an ally in the Cold War. Fourteen months later the Shah fled Iran into exile, forced from the throne by a volcanic religious revolution led by a fiery cleric named Ayatollah Khomeini. The ensuing hostage crisis forever damaged America’s standing in the world. How could the United States, which had one of the largest CIA stations in the world and thousands of military personnel in Iran, have been so blind?... A dictator blind to the disdain of his subjects and a superpower blundering into disaster. The Iranian Revolution, Anderson convincingly argues, was as world-shattering an event as the French and Russian revolutions. In the Middle East, in India, in Southeast Asia, in Europe, and now in the United States, the hatred of economically-marginalized, religiously-fervent masses for a wealthy secular elite has led to violence and upheaval—and Iran was the template.”
This incident is not a strange isolated case of stupidity, but rather the normal recurring incident-type in world-history across its span. Political speech is all propaganda. Speeches are ghostwritten for leaders by those who can be bought to argue for a cause that is entirely contrary to the interests of the country the leader speaking is from. This is exemplified in the near-identical pufferies of Middle Eastern dictators Trump has been spewing on his Middle East trip this May 2025, as he is accepting billions in bribes from the monarchs of these same countries. American politicians have been puffing the British monarchy every time they visit the Mother Country since shortly before US’ split from Britain.
This book is divided into sections by dramatic stages: incline in “civilization”, “the unraveling”, and the “downfall”. The “Preface” starts with a misprediction by the CIA in 1977 that in the upcoming decade “there will be no radical change in Iranian political behavior”, just before the revolution. This is a good intro into just what “catastrophe” the blurb is referring to. The blunder is in predicting upcoming political turmoil, as opposed to puffing a dictator, as I assumed. Absurdly, apparently the president puffing the Shah before the revolution was Carter, who “had campaigned on a reformist, clean-government platform.” Though the top rule of politics seems to be to always lie about everything, so in this sense this is the norm. Instead of focusing on these problems, the narrative turns to the protests in Washington of this visit. Then, the author mentions that he was there on the Ellipse on this day among reporters between the protesters and counter-protestors. Then, gunfire is mentioned to heighten tensions: stressing that the celebratory firing was taken as a threat and prompted anti-shah demonstrators to rush forward at the pro-shah folks who fled. While this intro is reasonably informative and dramatic, “Chapter Eight: The Unholy Alliance” starts with a rather dull description of “a seemingly unending stream of buses and cars” in Iran, and other dull details. This dullness is unsuitable because it is describing “300,000 men, women and children… one-quarter of the population” had gathered to protest in Tabriz. Yet again the focus is on the protesters instead of on the corruption. When corruption is mentioned throughout it tends to be noted as a generalization about “an entrenched system of payoffs and sinecures and favor trading” from previous “centuries” in the police and government. Pages later a few more details are noted that there was a “culture” in Tehran of “corruption, the scramble of defense contractors to ‘win over’ the right government minister or palace courtier with bribes and fixer fees. So brazen was this ‘5 percent’ trade that even very senior Western diplomats were brought in on the act.” What? I had assumed the blurb was saying that it was Carter and the Americans who were corrupt because they were puffing a monarch and willingly ignoring his misdeeds and a chance that he might be overthrown because of having been corrupted. But throughout this book the claim is that Middle Eastern countries are uniquely corrupt, while British and American corruption is a rare occurrence. For example, Peter Ramsbotham is said to have recalled that he was regularly asked what the “going rate” was for corruption”, but no evidence is given for just what corruption this British ambassador was involved in. There is a mention that the “American defense industry” was bribing “American admirals and generals”: they were “taking kickbacks from defense companies”. Then, a hypothetical example is given of how this worked, instead of a documented case of corruption. Perhaps, such corruption is never outed or prosecuted, and that is why a document case cannot be named. The closest to a specific is the mention that the “1972 Nixon-Kissinger weapons pact” meant that “congressional approval” was no longer needed, and now corrupt weapons deals could be “sealed on a mere handshake from the shah.” Then, the narrative returns to vaguely accusing Iran’s government of unspecified corruptions. It is especially important to figure out just how corruption works in the Middle East and American at this moment, while Trump is working on his “corruption-trip” there to collect bribes such as an over-billion-dollar-plane.
This is not a good book. There are some decent bits of narrative, but most of it is empty words that keep repeating talking-points without explaining much of anything regarding just what happened, or why. A reader who reads this book throughout might figure this out, but they will be very sad about their reading-experience by the time they reach the end.
Pennsylvania Literary Journal: Spring 2025 issue: https://anaphoraliterary.com/journals/plj/plj-excerpts/book-reviews-spring-2025

Required reading for anyone that wants more background on the genesis of today's relationship between Iran and the USA. How we hitched ourselves to the wrong horse through the overthrow of a democratically elected leader.