King of Kings Quotes

“Casual listeners might have also missed the significance of something the ayatollah had said at the Behesht-e-Zahra cemetery on February 1. Announcing that he intended to personally choose a government “by virtue of the acceptance the people have granted me,” Khomeini went on to say that this government would be “based on divine ordinance, and to oppose it is to deny God as well as the will of the people.” The full meaning of this became apparent at the February 5 press conference only when Khomeini claimed to have assumed the velayat-e-faqih, or guardianship of the jurists, an archaic tenet of the Shia faith that no other cleric had invoked, let alone claimed to possess, in living memory.”
― Scott Anderson, King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation

“At the Pentagon, the professor was led into a large conference room—“twelve people were sitting there with yellow pads”—where he proceeded to give a two-and-a-half-hour seminar on the history and politics of the Iranian opposition movement. He finally realized he’d misread his audience. “I’m speaking of the Iranian situation as if it’s a gathering of academicians,” Farhang was to recall, “but what really was mind-blowing to me was the incapacity of these people to see a movement [outside] the Cold War framework. [To them] all revolutionary movements were pro-Soviet.” In other words, no matter how broad-based the Iranian revolutionary movement was at the moment or how unifying a figure Khomeini appeared to be, the bedrock conviction of Farhang’s Pentagon listeners was that it was only a matter of time before the Reds usurped the cause and seized power. “This was the belief, and this belief was rooted in the Cold War framework,” Farhang said. “It had no evidence, but they assumed that it’s the only thing that can happen.” The professor tried to counsel otherwise, arguing that this belief represented a fundamental misunderstanding of Iranian society, but finally gave up.”
― Scott Anderson, King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation

“At the close of his memo, he turned to the question that had lurked in the back of so many minds as the shah’s position had deteriorated through that long autumn: After Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos, after so many American retreats around the world in recent years, had the administration done enough to save the Iranian leader? “I believe the U.S. government, and the president personally, have more than adequately discharged our obligations of loyalty to the shah,” Sullivan wrote. “We cannot—repeat not—by continued avowal of that loyalty, do for the shah what he has been unable or unwilling to do for himself…. In short, we must put the shah behind us and look to our own national interests as foremost in Iran.”
― Scott Anderson, King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation

“That certainly seemed to be the view in Washington, as Ebrahim Yazdi discovered on December 12. A few days earlier, President Carter had given a tepid answer when asked if he thought the shah would survive the current crisis. Now, in the immediate wake of the Ashura high-water mark, the King of Kings was clearly riding high with the Americans again. “I fully expect the shah to maintain power in Iran and for the present problems in Iran to be resolved,” Carter proclaimed that morning. “I think the predictions of doom and disaster that came from some sources have certainly not been realized at all. The shah has our support and he also has our confidence.” But not if Yazdi could help it. Sitting for an interview with The MacNeil/Lehrer Report that same afternoon, the doctor bravely insisted that the orderliness of the Ashura processions was thanks to the discipline and calming influence of Khomeini-appointed parade marshals, skipping over the fact that most such marshals were actually acolytes of the moderate Shariatmadari. Carrying the point further, Yazdi stressed that the massive turnout on Ashura once again showed the people wanted an end to the dictatorship but, much like the civil rights marchers in the American South in the 1960s, were determined to achieve it by peaceful means. Henry Precht, the Iran desk officer, had been invited to appear in the same MacNeil/Lehrer segment with Yazdi but reluctantly declined; the same State Department stricture against having contact with the Khomeini camp that had scuttled an earlier proposed meeting with Yazdi remained in place on December 12. On the other hand, Precht reasoned this stricture couldn’t possibly be so broad as to extend to a “chance encounter” with Khomeini’s advisor at a Washington restaurant. In a bit of diplomatic sleight of hand, Precht suggested to the MacNeil/Lehrer producers that after Yazdi’s taping they take him to dinner at Dominique’s steak house in downtown Washington. When Henry Precht and Ebrahim Yazdi met at the steak house that evening, it marked the first time that an American government official had sat down with a member of Khomeini’s inner circle since the Iranian Revolution began.”
― Scott Anderson, King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation

“But in such improbable settings, history is sometimes made. Early the next morning, October 5, Yazdi was taken to the Shatt al-Arab Hotel in nearby Basra, where he was reunited with Khomeini and the others. As more hours of tense waiting passed—clearly, Iraqi authorities had yet to decide what to do with them—Yazdi used the time to press the ayatollah and his son on the merits of setting up shop in Paris should they get out of their current predicament alive. One objection Khomeini raised was that he’d heard the French made their bread with lard, or pork fat, which was strictly haram in Muslim societies. It took some finessing on Yazdi’s part to assure his mentor that there were exceptions to this rule, and besides, it wasn’t as if there were a host of non-lard-based bread-producing countries clamoring for his presence. By late morning, Yazdi had largely won Ahmad Khomeini over to the French idea. Shortly after, the patriarch relented as well, but only until a more suitable haven in a Muslim nation was found.”
― Scott Anderson, King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation

“As to the identity of those who had raged through Tabriz, Metrinko swiftly rejected the regime’s claim of “Islamic-Marxists”—and he wasn’t the first to note the inherent contradiction of that label. Instead, he pointed to “the unemployed and the lowest of the working classes, the disaffected and very volatile strata of the male populace who have nothing to lose by rioting and who are easily led by instigators.” As he noted, Tabriz had seen a massive influx of young and poorly educated men from the countryside in recent years. In the city, the luckiest among them toiled long hours in mindless and low-paying factory jobs, and all were condemned to an unrelievedly drab existence. “Given the pervasive and grim religious environment” in which these men dwelled, Metrinko wrote, “with its emphasis on the restricted role of women and condemnation of such mundane pleasures as the cinema and places where women ‘expose’ themselves to men—i.e. organizations such as social clubs, hotels, the Youth Palace, and the Iran-America Society…it is no wonder that such a group can be led into emotional and violent action. Religion is one of the few remaining constants to this class of people, and their limited conception of Islam and veneration of the Shiite hierarchy are among the few things they can retain in a society in which they feel abandoned and threatened.” Of course, what Metrinko was describing was in no way unique to Tabriz. Almost every city and sizable town in Iran possessed such a benighted underclass—which suggested the next wave of riots might come almost anywhere and at any time.”
― Scott Anderson, King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation

“The inherent danger of this arrangement is the chance that someday an idea of truly exceptional idiocy will come along, and there will be no one with the foresight or courage to stop it. By all evidence, it was this exact phenomenon that led to the fateful editorial in Etalaat.”
― Scott Anderson, King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation

“Yet as 1978 began, Iran still bore many of the distinguishing characteristics of dictatorships everywhere. The most obvious of these was fear. With the regime promoting the idea that its SAVAK security apparatus was all-seeing, most Iranians continued to be extremely guarded when voicing complaints about the state. Then there was that other feature intrinsic to dictatorships, one that often leads to grinding inertia or grievous self-inflicted wounds: stupidity, a default mode of profound, even impregnable passivity that grows more acute the closer one gets to the locus of power. This passivity is also rooted in fear, of course, the worry of losing one’s standing within the power structure—or, in more robust dictatorships, of losing one’s head—but it is the constant second-guessing of what might please the strongman or his representative at the next level up the governing ladder that causes the lower-level functionary to gradually lose the ability to act or think independently at all. To the contrary, the best and safest course in this timorous society is to never question or initiate, to simply go along with whatever edict or passing whim works its way down the chain of command. In just this way, the senior government minister subjected to the babblings of the strongman hears only brilliance, while the lowliest traffic policeman accepts without question that today he shall ticket only blue cars or allow only right-hand turns.”
― Scott Anderson, King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation

“By almost any measure, as 1978 dawned, Iran was one of the Middle East’s “better dictatorships.” While certain professional classes or minority groups were distrusted and persecuted by the regime, they were not slaughtered en masse as in Hafez al-Assad’s Syria or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Its jails continued to hold some twenty-five hundred political prisoners, but that figure was greatly reduced from a few years earlier and a minute fraction on a per capita basis when set against Muammar Qaddafi’s Libya or Houari Boumediene’s Algeria. Iran’s ruling class was venal and corrupt and existed largely outside the law, but with nowhere approaching the blanket impunity or squalid decadence of the royal families of Saudi Arabia or Kuwait. What’s more, Iran was becoming a better dictatorship all the time. As a result of the shah’s recent political and judicial reforms, the opposition had far more maneuverability than in most other nations in the region, and whereas Iranian prisoners had been routinely tortured by the regime’s thugs in the past, international human rights investigators reported that in 1977 the number of new cases had been cut to precisely zero.”
― Scott Anderson, King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation

“Even at that eleventh hour, Alam couldn’t bring himself to blame the shah for any of this. Instead, it was somehow the fault of all those around the king, the sycophants and toadies whom Alam had constantly warned against. “As Your Majesty’s loyal servant,” he wrote, “I urge you to take stern action against the traitors and incompetents who have betrayed us.”
― Scott Anderson, King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation

“But the darkening national mood wasn’t Farah’s imagination. By the time of the ceremony at Reza Shah’s shrine, Iran’s bursting-at-the-seams quality was giving over to paralysis. The electrical blackouts, once sporadic and of short duration, had become almost daily occurrences and stretched to hours at a time. The continuing flood of food imports had by now thoroughly gutted the rural agricultural base, driving even more young men into Iran’s teeming urban ghettos. Simultaneously, the state was being schooled on a couple of basic economic laws, specifically that in a globally interconnected economy neither recession nor inflation can be confined. In the West, the oil shocks of 1973 and 1974 had triggered both an economic downturn and a conservation movement, sharply reducing the demand for Middle Eastern oil. At the same time, the spike in oil prices had triggered a knock-on inflationary effect on almost every other product or commodity the world produced, so Iran was now paying markedly more for everything from a Chieftain tank to a bag of imported rice. So hard was the economic brake applied that by the early summer of 1976 the Iranian government was compelled to take out the first in a series of massive international loans.”
― Scott Anderson, King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation

“process, he now had something new to offer the Americans: money. One huge side benefit of the 1953 coup was a dismantling of the British monopoly on Iran’s oil industry—not at all coincidentally, it was handed over to a consortium largely composed of American oil companies—and a dramatic increase in state oil revenues. This meant the king could now shop for many of the items on his armaments wish list rather than beg for them as he had been compelled to do in the past. Except that now, instead of pleading insufficient stockpiles, the United States and other Western governments were apt to refuse his money on the pretext that such a sale might spur a regional arms race or, most insultingly, because the Iranian army wasn’t yet capable of handling a particular weapons system. Lurking in the background of these considerations, though, was the West’s lingering concerns over just how firmly the King of Kings was in control, of what might happen if he were again put to the test.”
― Scott Anderson, King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation

“the shah saw that in his campaign to woo America, he faced a puzzle in two parts. First, given the United States’ well-earned reputation for inconstancy in its foreign relations, for oscillating between isolationism and militarist adventurism, it seemed the only sure way for any other nation to win its permanent attention was to be deemed indispensable, to be so vital to American political or military or economic interests that it would fight to maintain the relationship. But what did Iran possess to make it indispensable? Second, even if such indispensability was achieved, how to convince the Americans that he, the shahanshah, was the person to deliver and maintain it? The answer to the first part of that puzzle lay in somehow converting at least one of the two features that had brought Iran such unending sorrow in the past—location and oil—into a blessing.”
― Scott Anderson, King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation

“The highlight of his journey was a thirty-minute conference with Truman on the morning of November 18, 1949. The shah had clearly prepared for the event, for he swiftly launched into a detailed disquisition on the challenges facing his country and the vital role it could play in the growing confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. That role could be assumed, however, only if the Iranian military was vastly expanded and given up-to-date American weaponry. The Iranian monarch expounded on this topic in a subsequent meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for the first time displaying that encyclopedic knowledge of sophisticated weapons systems for which he would later become famous.”
― Scott Anderson, King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation

“By early 1942, the first of what would become thirty thousand American troops began arriving to help man the Persian Corridor, the now-joint Anglo-American operation to ferry supplies north to Stalin’s armies. The arrival of the Americans, as flush with war materiel as the British were skint, also caused the shah to fundamentally rethink his approach toward regaining his kingly powers. Ironically enough, considering the West’s past depredations of his kingdom, his new challenge was to persuade the United States, clearly an emerging superpower, to make Iran a client state. In this way, he and Iran might finally find the “third force” his father had so eagerly sought and escape the binds of the Great Game chessboard. It was a quest that would take him decades.”
― Scott Anderson, King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation

“But in his eagerness, it seemed the shah hadn’t fully appreciated the matter of regional politics—which came right back to oil. Thanks to the existing Western monopolies, the Truman administration regarded Iranian oil as essentially British oil, and Saudi oil as essentially American. Since Iran and Saudi Arabia were local rivals, an American move to bolster Iran’s military could only alarm Saudi Arabia and threaten the United States’ pleasant arrangement there. On top of this was the stumbling block that none of the shah’s grandiose pronouncements before the Joint Chiefs of Staff could surmount: the unanimous assessment of Pentagon war planners that even massive quantities of military aid to Iran could never produce the scenario he envisioned, that if it came to war, Iran’s collapse before a Soviet juggernaut would be measured in days, if not mere hours. In sum, in the early postwar era, the United States saw little reason to make a substantial investment in Iran, to regard it as anything more than a third-tier nation.”
― Scott Anderson, King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation

“In the late 1940s, this answer was most definitely not oil. At that time, the United States was still awash in domestic oil and could further draw on foreign fields close to home in Mexico and Venezuela. What’s more, Iranian fields were still locked up by the British and, thanks to a badly managed renegotiation of the original concession, looked to remain so until 1993. Further, a massive find in Saudi Arabia in 1938, one that dwarfed that of Iran’s Masjid-i-Suleiman field, had quickly gone under the management of an American consortium; should the United States ever be in substantial need of Middle Eastern oil, it would naturally first turn to the Arabian American Oil Company, or Aramco, in Saudi Arabia. With these factors stacked on end, the notion that Iranian oil might be used to coax American interest was pointless to even consider in the early postwar period.”
― Scott Anderson, King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation

“To instill a new sense of nationalism, he derided the name Persia as a foreign invention and changed it to Iran, which translated as “the land of the Aryans.”
― Scott Anderson, King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation

“As Robert Huyser approvingly noted, Shapour Bakhtiar seemed to possess the same properties as tea—“the hotter the water, the more his strength came out”—”
― Scott Anderson, King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation

“put it, “He had, more than any man of his generation, a talent for sitting still.” In that stillness, others tended to find what they wished.”
― Scott Anderson, King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation

“In all these efforts, Yazdi was aided by another characteristic of Ruhollah Khomeini’s, a most unusual one. To the cleric’s solemnity, his seeming impenetrability, people brought their own projections; as the historian James Buchan eloquently put it, “He had, more than any man of his generation, a talent for sitting still.”
― Scott Anderson, King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation

“Mohammad Reza Pahlavi had the misfortune of ruling over a place where faith regularly trumped fact, where delusion and reality fused.”
― Scott Anderson, King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation

“if one were to make a list of that small handful of revolutions that spurred change on a truly global scale in the modern era, that caused a paradigm shift in the way the world works, to the American, French and Russian Revolutions might be added the Iranian.”
― Scott Anderson, King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation

“but the groundswell of Islamic protest that swept the shah from power in 1979 marked the modern world’s first successful religious counterrevolution against the forces of secularism, the beginning of an international resurgence of sectarianism that continues to reverberate today.”
― Scott Anderson, King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation

“the Iranian Revolution would take on the profound significance that it has, that its legacy would mark it as one of the most important political developments of the modern age. If at first glance this seems a tad hyperbolic, consider what that revolution has wrought. In the forty-six years since its success, the Western and Islamic worlds have engaged in what many on both sides regard as an existential confrontation, one marked by revanchist religious fundamentalism and state-sponsored terrorism on one side and by paranoia and ultranationalist bigotry on the other. It has colored almost every political and economic development in the Middle East during that time, a gamut that spans everything from the Arab-Israeli conflict to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to international trade and energy policy. While the effects of the revolution have obviously been most profoundly felt within Iran itself, they have been only slightly less so in the United States. The collapse of the Iranian monarchy brought an abrupt end to one of the most important economic and military alliances the United States had established anywhere in the world. Its aftershocks led to the fall of an American president and the advent of a new administration intent on re-exerting American influence abroad through massive rearmament and the sponsorship of proxy wars. The radically altered Middle Eastern chessboard created by the revolution has led directly to some of America’s greatest missteps in the region over the past four decades—to name but two, the 1983 intervention in Beirut that left nearly three hundred American servicemen dead and the early embrace of Iraq’s despotic Saddam Hussein—and it has been a crucial contributing factor in most others: the disastrous 2003 American invasion of Iraq, its ham-fisted approach to the Syrian civil war and the rise of ISIS. Today, the specter of revolutionary Iran continues to drive American foreign policy in such disparate corners of the Middle East as Lebanon and Yemen and Israel; remains a point of division between Washington and its European allies in how best to deal with Iran’s ongoing and highly contentious nuclear energy program; and poses a chief complicating factor in Western efforts to aid Ukraine in its fight against Russian invaders.”
― Scott Anderson, King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation

“Yet the occasion posed a couple of troubling questions should anyone have chosen to take notice. The violent demonstrations of November 15 had left well over a hundred injured, including twenty-nine policemen, making it the worst day of civil unrest in the nation’s capital in nearly a decade. Fistfights between the warring factions had extended even into the city’s emergency rooms, requiring hospital security guards to segregate pro- and anti-shah demonstrators awaiting medical treatment. Many of the estimated four thousand Iranian students who had come to Washington to denounce the shah were drawn from their nation’s middle and upper classes, and if this was the outlook of those who had most greatly benefited from his rule, what might it say about those inside Iran who lacked such privilege? And while most of the anti-shah demonstrators identified as leftists, they had been joined by members of several conservative Muslim religious groups, so that interspersed with the placards decrying the monarch as a right-wing fascist and American lackey were others accusing him of betraying Islam. Some of those in this latter category carried placards bearing the likeness of one of the shah’s bitterest critics, an aging cleric virtually unknown outside Iran named Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. When was the last time that Washington, or any nation’s capital, saw secular leftists and religious fundamentalists march together in common cause?”
― Scott Anderson, King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation

“O Cyrus, king of kings, rest in peace, because we are awake, and we shall always stay awake.”
― Scott Anderson, King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation

“In the United States, white Christian nationalists are responsible for a string of mass shootings that have left scores dead, and were in the vanguard of the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.”
― Scott Anderson, King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation