In the 1960s and 1970s, Iran was different. Rock-and-roll bands competed to outdo each other as women in short skirts danced the night away doing the “Tehran twist.”
Teenagers and families flocked to Caspian beaches. Hollywood and Iranian blockbusters played in Tehran cinemas. When I studied as a Ph.D. student in Iran in the 1990s, my tutors related their motorcycle trips across Europe, getting visas easily at every border. Two decades before, revolutionaries marched through the streets and savvy Iranian investors opened Shemshak, a ski resort at 10,000 feet and just a short drive from Tehran.
The shah was a dictator, albeit one seeking to modernize the country, not simply technologically but also socially. The core of Ayatollah Khomeini’s antipathy toward the monarchy was less its lack of democracy and more the shah’s liberal social agenda. Khomeini opposed both of the shah’s efforts to make all Iranians equal under the law and advance women’s equality. Unraveling the stranglehold the ayatollahs had over certain judicial matters was not so much a religious issue for the clerics but a financial one. Khomeini may have promised democracy, but that was just a rhetorical tool to distract naive Westerners and convince them that his theological vision posed no threat until it was too late.
The Islamic Revolution was a historical tragedy, and, until the last moment, its success was far from assured. The shah realized his cancer was terminal in 1974 but kept his diagnosis a secret. The shah lacked energy when he most needed it, especially in the winter of 1979. At a number of key junctures, Khomeini also got lucky. That many within the Carter administration refused to recognize the true threat Khomeini posed may have tipped the balance. So too, of course, did the fact that France facilitated Khomeini’s return to Tehran.
Even after the Revolution, it was unclear whether Khomeini’s theocracy would last long. In November 1979, Khomeini’s Brown Shirts and youthful supporters stormed the U.S. Embassy precisely because they objected to its efforts to reconcile with the new government. The day before Islamist mobs sacked the embassy, Steven Erlanger, a young reporter who decades later would become the chief diplomatic correspondent for the New York Times, declared the religious phase of Iran’s revolution to be over. It was the dual crises of the hostage crisis and Iraq’s invasion that allowed Khomeini to snatch political victory from the jaws of defeat.
Iran’s descent into theocracy shocked the West. Just as they would 30 years later after the Arab Spring, publishers scrambled to commission books to explain why events blindsided the West. They commissioned professors — Nikki Keddie and Ervand Abrahamian, for example — who wrote histories suggesting the Islamic Revolution was the natural course of Iranian political evolution rather than an anomaly.
At the time, many realized how tendentious their theses were, but, with time, the generation who remembered pre-revolutionary Iran’s reality died. Less than one-fifth of the American population today was 20 years old or older when the revolution swept Iran. As such, almost anyone in a position of responsibility during the Carter administration or before is long since retired.
This has enabled false conventional wisdom to set in, which sees both the Islamic Revolution and Iran’s anti-Western orientation as natural and permanent. These core assumptions, meanwhile, constrain America’s policy options. Too few people in the State Department or National Security Council assess policies based on their ability to return Iran to the natural order. Hence, former President Barack Obama legitimized the Islamic Revolution at a time of existential crisis, while today the Biden administration snatches defeat from the jaws of victory: Rather than allow the revolution to collapse under the weight of its own incompetence, Biden throws both the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei a lifeline.
Iranians are capable of democracy; they almost achieved it in the first decade of the 20th century. It is time the White House stops throwing obstacles in their way.
Michael Rubin (@mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
