# Shawcross and the Shah

## Peter W. Rodman

Reports that William Shawcross has mellowed in his middle age are still a bit premature. His latest book, a dramatic and sometimes moving description of the exile, illness, and death of the Shah of Iran, shows a remarkable personal sympathy for the fallen Shah -- shunned by former allies, exploited by hangers-on, ill treated by constantly changing teams of doctors, and yet retaining an incredible dignity to the end.¹ Regrettably, brilliant journalism and elegant writing are marred here by a cliched political analysis when the author delves into the deeper subjects of the Shah's rule, his downfall, and American policy.

### I.

Shawcross, British journalist and son of the eminent jurist Hartley (later Lord) Shawcross, declares an interest in Iran dating back to the 1960s -- his father was once President of the Iran Society in Britain -- and his contacts and sources on the life of the Iranian court are clearly extensive. From hundreds of interviews he has pieced together the tragic story of the Shah's ordeal from his flight in January 1979 to his death in July 1980, as he sought a haven first in Egypt, then in Morocco, the Bahamas, Mexico, the United States, Panama, and then back again to Egypt. Except for Egypt's President Anwar Sadat, who welcomed his fallen friend with loyalty and courage, most of the countries on that list were notable for their eagerness to get the Shah out quickly or to exploit his presence for some financial or other benefit. In Panama came the ultimate embarrassment of being the guest of strongman General Omar Torrijos, who counted on some political payoff from doing the Carter Administration this favor, toyed with the thought of extraditing the Shah back to Iran, and fantasized about seducing the Empress Farah while she and her ill husband were virtually captive in Torrijos's island retreat. Torrijos's henchman was a promising young colonel named Manuel Noriega.

As for medical treatment, Shawcross presents one of the most striking recorded examples of the apparent truth that the rich get the worst medical care possible. Eight teams of doctors of varying nationalities, one after the other, provided their

Peter W. Rodman was a member of the National Security Council staff during the Nixon administration.

¹ William Shawcross, *The Shah's Last Ride: The Fate of an Ally* (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988, 463 pp., $19.95)

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services and conflicting advice, elbowing and denigrating each other in what the Shah himself called a "medical soap opera." He died of cancer, in circumstances that lead one to believe his life might have been prolonged with better treatment.

Shawcross muses on the nature of political loyalty, highlighting the courage of Sadat (who was the most forthcoming, and at the most risk to himself) in contrast with the cold calculation of other world leaders who had been allies, even fawning allies, of the Shah while he ruled but who turned their backs as he wandered in exile like the Flying Dutchman of legend. For these leaders and their countries, Iran's strategic importance remained, no matter who governed it, and their need to cultivate good relations with the new regime outweighed personal loyalty to the departed emperor.

## II.

Shawcross's sympathetic portrayal of this sad drama has already earned him a blast from *The New Republic* for selling out. It's the sort of book that Shawcross's old target Henry Kissinger would approve of, jibed Fouad Ajami in his review. I doubt it. It's not merely that Shawcross can't resist taking petty potshots at Kissinger, even while crediting him for his personal crusade on behalf of admitting the Shah into this country. More serious is the disappointingly cliched account of the Shah's rule, told here in flashbacks that cover the highlights of Iran's modern history and relations with the United States. The book is weak in its attempt at strategic analysis of what accounted for the warm mutual embrace of the two countries. Likewise in its analysis of the Shah's downfall. While the centerpiece of the book is the Shah's final journey in exile, the prior history makes up much of the book's length -- as well as providing its essential moral backdrop -- and the weakness of that history is a major and distracting flaw. It is journalism, not profound historical or political analysis, that we are getting here.

This book, like many other accounts, attributes the Shah's overthrow to his megalomania and the corruption and brutality of the system over which he presided. Shawcross gives the Shah credit for the enlightened aspects of his modernization (industrialization, education, land reform, health care, women's rights), noting the opposition that these policies provoked from the most reactionary elements of the society. An extraordinary celebration staged amid the historical ruins of Persepolis in 1971, to mark the supposed 2500th anniversary of the Persian Empire, is (rightly) cited for its decadence, hubris, and ill-fated provocation to the conservative Shiite clergy.

The cliches have to do with the American role in fostering this megalomania, which is much asserted here, though with an argumentation that remains obscure even with repetition. Much

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weight is put on the visit of Nixon and Kissinger at the end of
May 1972 and the subsequent U.S. decision to permit the Shah to
select from the U.S. conventional arsenal to build up his own
military force. According to George W. Ball, this U.S. policy
"inadvertently encouraged the megalomania that ultimately
contributed to the Shah's downfall." In Shawcross's excited
telling, "the implications were to be catastrophic."

On closer inspection, Nixon's decision on arms supply turns
out to be something rather less apocalyptic. At issue, in fact,
was the American bureaucracy's traditional reluctance to sell its
most advanced technology to any but NATO allies; that is, the
Pentagon experts' preference (in those days) to encourage Third
World customers to buy less sophisticated U.S. equipment which we
presumed they would be better able to man, maintain, and protect.
Nixon and Kissinger disagreed with the Pentagon experts, seeing
little reason to prejudge or dictate which particular systems
were or were not within Iran's capability when the geopolitical
value of Iran as a strategic bulwark in the Gulf was the basic
premise of our policy.

Only a few years earlier, in 1968, Britain had announced its
historic and stunning decision to depart from the Gulf and
relinquish its protectorate arrangements and all bases east of
Suez by the end of 1971. Shawcross discusses this event, but
briefly and superficially. British withdrawal from the Gulf
promised to leave a yawning strategic vacuum in a region of vital
importance. In those days -- at the height of our Vietnam trauma
and global military retrenchment -- the idea of the United States
replacing Britain as protector of the Gulf was out of the
question. As the fractious emirates of the lower Gulf lurched
toward independence, and border disputes and tribal rivalries
festered, the stability of the Gulf area was no foregone
conclusion. The U.S. Government studied the question, as
Shawcross notes. Its conclusion was that Iran and Saudi Arabia,
both staunch friends of the West, were the natural legatees to
share the British tutelary role; for all their own rivalry, they
shared an overall strategic perception of the threat of
radicalism and Soviet interference and the vital tie with the
West.

This was surely the only sensible solution. Years
afterwards, in the late 1980s, the United States was indeed
forced to expand its own military role in the Gulf, and had the
fortitude to do so despite residual nervousness in Congress. But
this was hardly foreseeable in 1972, nor likely then to be
thought desirable; it occurred only in crisis circumstances that
were, indeed, part of the continuing unfolding consequences of
the Shah's departure.

When Nixon visited Tehran in May 1972, the strategic trends
in the broader Near East region five months after British

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withdrawal from the Gulf were even worse than might have been anticipated. Egypt was still a Soviet ally, with a Friendship Treaty and 15,000 Soviet troops. Syria had invaded Jordan, with Soviet support, a year and a half earlier. The Soviets had more recently signed a Friendship Treaty with Iran's arch-rival Iraq (the same Iraq that later did invade Iran). The case for expanded military support for Iran was powerful -- and the French and British were ready and eager to sell advanced equipment if we were not.

Whoever was right in the 1972 argument with the Pentagon, the idea that the Shah's purchase of older aircraft or somewhat fewer of them would have prevented the Iranian revolution has to be one of the silliest of the notions that have become current on this subject in the last 10 years.

The claim is not made that these military purchases impoverished the country; on the contrary, the oil wealth later to come was enough to fuel a modernization that, by all accounts, went too fast. Rather, the theory of Ball and Shawcross is an elusive psychological hypothesis about fueling the Shah's "Messianic mission," loss of his "sense of proportion," "megalomania," and other abstractions about his mental state which are singularly not susceptible to proof or substantiated by any concrete indicia of cause and effect. Even Shawcross admits the difficulty of explaining the Iranian revolution by "isolat[ing] factors from one another."

The causes of the revolution were indeed manifold, and Shawcross is not wrong to speak of regime corruption, SAVAK cruelty, social dislocations and unfulfillable expectations, the Shah's isolation, vacillation, and hesitancy, and other flaws. As Kissinger later pointed out, however, the Shah's political failure represented a failure of Western liberal thought as much as of anything else. The Shah followed all the best progressive advice in modernizing; few developing societies have been able to combine rapid industrialization with simultaneous political development toward democracy. Those who brought him down, of course, did not replace his rule with democracy but with a more barbaric tyranny that undid most of his social reforms. By these people, in Kissinger's words, the Shah was "despised less for what he did wrong than for what he did right." Humility ought to dampen any temptation to second-guess how he should have gone about his country's political maturation in step with its rapid economic growth.

In retrospect, the Shah probably erred in not developing or permitting the evolution of political institutions that would have given at least the middle class, the natural allies and supporters of modernization, a political stake in the system. He flirted with the idea occasionally -- apparently his wife was a strong advocate -- but in the end, the classes of society that

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ought to have been his natural allies against obscurantism were
disaffected and demoralized (as well as blissfully ignorant of
what they were helping to bring about by their desertion of him).

Even so, it is still not self-evident that the outcome was
foreordained, particularly given the many tactical blunders made
by the Shah himself and by the Carter administration over the
protracted period in 1978-79 in which the final crisis gradually
unfolded. Shawcross telescopes this period, leaving us little
basis for judging whether, for example, the Shah's hesitancy in
the initial phases let matters get out of hand or whether a
stronger initial reaction might have permitted a different
evolution.

### III.

Shawcross is a journalist of some range and style, and
genuine talent. There can be no doubt he is a man of the Left,
yet he has the virtue of not being entirely predictable.
Whatever this book's analytical lapses, its sympathy for the Shah
is more than has been fashionable. Shawcross's two earlier books
on Eastern Europe -- one on the Dubcek experiment of 1968 and
another on Hungary after 1956 -- cannot be faulted for their
portrayals of Soviet brutality. His first book on Cambodia,
*Sideshow*, while unreliable if not discredited in most significant
respects,* at least acknowledged the atrocities of the Khmer
Rouge at a time when some on the Left were still denying them.
(More recently he has even begun to edge away from *Sideshow*'s
absurd thesis that U.S. policy was the principal cause of the
Cambodian genocide.) Later, when Hanoi turned against the Khmer
Rouge and it became more fashionable to condemn the latter,

Shawcross produced a second book on the Cambodian holocaust, *The Quality of Mercy*, which condemned both Vietnamese and Cambodian communists in full measure. One of the heroes of that second book is even an American official -- our Ambassador in Thailand, Morton Abramowitz -- for his exertions on behalf of Cambodian refugees. Anyone who has earned the wrath of Noam Chomsky for his Indochina writing, as Shawcross has, can't be all bad. The extraordinary openness of our government to journalistic and Congressional enquiry has, of course, been of great benefit to Shawcross, and he has had the grace (in the foreword to *Sideshow*) to express his admiration of a society in which such freedom exists. This, too, is not the conventional wisdom of the left.

*See my debate with Shawcross in *The American Spectator*, March and July 1981.

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Yet, when all is said and done, there is in his work a
cynicism about American policies, and even Western political
values, that he cannot completely suppress. It goes far deeper
than just an aversion to geopolitics. His intellectual
restlessness has taken him in strange directions. In his 1970
book Dubcek, he lamented the crushing of the Prague Spring -- as
not only a Cold War tragedy but the snuffing out of an ideal:
"For Dubcek was trying to create a Marxist democracy genuinely
responsive to the wishes and aspirations of its people. If he
was succeeding, he has then provided the world with a real
alternative to the blind arrogance of American capitalism, to the
apparently endemic marriage of inefficiency and dissatisfaction
of the bourgeois-democratic mixed economy, and to the mindless
inhumanity of the Soviet dictatorship."

An extraordinary passage, albeit written 19 years ago.
Rejecting equally the systems of the "bourgeois-democratic" West
and the brutal Soviet Union, Shawcross saw hope in, yes, a more
benign form of communism -- a system he presumably saw as
potentially more efficient and satisfying than the conventional
representative governments of the West. His Dubcek book was full
of excitement at the role of the intellectuals in the Prague
Spring, their ideological commitment, and the heady atmosphere of
that period. The democratic West seemed to bore him, if not
repel him. In his book on Kadar we find also the remarkable
assertion that only a minority of the Hungarian people "would
consider themselves out-and-out anti-communists." Today, I'll
bet he finds the Gorbachev experiment exhilarating, though
perhaps his residual (and very European) suspicion of both
superpowers remains, and he may be disillusioned there too.

So he is a man of the Left, but probably still searching for
an elusive ideal. Unlike many of his brother intellectuals he
has had the clarity of vision to recognize some of the horrors
that parade under the "socialist" banner. There is a thread of
bitterness and disillusionment, though, in much of his writing,
as well as a certain naivete about how the disasters he writes
about with such passion might have been avoided. His is a
restless mind, and not entirely a closed one; a spirit that
perhaps is doomed, like the Shah, to continue to wander in vain
in search of a resting place.