Abstract
For more than a decade prior to the Iranian Revolution, the government of the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, had been the primary American surrogate in southwest Asia. Then in January 1979 the Shah was compelled to leave his country. The government of the Islamic Republic of Iran since that time has charted its own course in foreign policy, fully independent not only of the United States but also of the two governments that had for more than a century interfered regularly in Iranian affairs, Britain and Russia. It might be expected that years after the revolution the memory of external control and the bitterness toward the United States would be fading. Yet Iranian soldiers fighting Iraq and large Iranian crowds attending Friday prayer continued to chant ‘Death to America’. Iranian officials continued to describe the United States as their greatest enemy. How can this deep and persisting enmity be explained?
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Notes
Morgan Shuster, The Strangling of Persia (New York: 1912).
See for this episode Abraham Yeselson, United States-Persian Diplomatic Relations, 1883–1921 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1956) p. 164.
Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation (New York: Norton, 1969).
Kermit Roosevelt, Countercoup: The Struggle for Control of Iran (New York: McGraw Hill, 1979) The book illustrates the point rather than making it.
For an Iranian perspective, typical of left nationalists, see Bahman Nirumand, Iran: The New Imperialism in Action (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969).
Richard Cottam, Nationalism in Iran (Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1979) See the discussion of the Iran Party Manifesto, pp. 234–35.
For an advocate’s picture of the economic and social accomplishments under the Shah, see Jehangir Amuzegar, Iran: An Economic Profile (Washington: Middle East Institute, 1977).
Farhad Kazemi, Poverty and Revolution in Iran (New York: New York University Press, 1980).
Robert Graham, Iran: The Illusion of Power (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978) This is an excellent account of the influence system operating in the Shah’s Iran.
See Richard Cottam, ‘Arms Sales and Human Rights: The Case of Iran’, in Peter G. Brown and Douglas MacLean (eds) Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Policy (Lexin Qton, MA: D.C. Heath, 1979).
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Answer to History (New York: Stein and Day, 1980).
Ambassador Sullivan’s account is a candid appraisal of the decisional locus, William Sullivan, Mission to Iran (New York: Norton, 1981)
It should be read along with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Power and Principle (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1983) pp. 354–400.
Hamilton Jordan, Crisis: The Last Year of the Carter Presidency (New York: Putnam, 1982).
The theory of graduated compellence is advanced in Thomas Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966).
See for Iraqi statements on the war, Tareq Y. Ismail, Iran and Iraq: Roots of Conflict (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1982).
For a description of Iraqi television depiction of Iraq as the leader of the Arab world in Fall 1980 see Daniel B. Tinnin, ‘Iraq and the New Arab Alliance’, Fortune, 3 November 1980, pp. 44–46.
This point is developed at length in an article by H. Musavian, ‘From Persian Gulf War to World War’, Tehran Times, 6 June 1984, p. 3.
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© 1987 Hafeez Malik
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Cottam, R.W. (1987). The United States and Revolutionary Iran. In: Malik, H. (eds) Soviet-American Relations with Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08553-8_11
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