Among the dozens of thinkers from Aristotle to Toynbee who postulated repeating patterns of historical stages and turning points, only one, Ibn Khaldun, embraced a specific chronology. He maintained that historical moments begin with the sudden access to power of a group enthused with a transformative ideology. Throughout the first 40 years of the group’s ascendancy, it carries much of society with it and is able to implement its agenda. During the next 40 years, the ruling order finds its grip slipping as memories of the bygone glory days rapidly fade. The 40-year period that begins after that amounts to a withering on the vine during which the ruling order loses legitimacy and resorts to tyranny awaiting the soon and inevitable rise of an exciting new ideology,

Attempts to map Ibn Khaldun’s model onto real historical chronologies end up, more often than not, with the historian concluding that the “40-year” part of the scheme should be treated metaphorically. Yet Ibn Khaldun insists on it, basing his calculation, for religious reasons, on scripture, to wit, the 40 years Moses and the Israelites spent in the wilderness after escaping slavery in Egypt. God ordained, he argued, that the wanderers could not enter the land of milk and honey until the last of those who remembered their degradation in Egypt had passed away.

Since none of the Muslim ruling elites of Ibn Khaldun’s day demonstrated his predicted/retrodicted pattern from rise to demise, historians have felt comfortable relegating his temporal specificity to a footnote and focusing instead on what he says about the nature of ascendant ideologies. I think this is a mistake, however. If one looks at the very origin of Islam and its leaders’ creation of an unparalleled imperium, the 40-year interval works exceptionally well. Unfortunately, the religious views of Ibn Khaldun’s contemporaries included an unchallengeable belief that God’s hand had guided the rise of Islam, which made it impossible for him to proclaim that it was just a manifestation of a universal and inherently secular law of history.

Instead of pressing further with my interpretation of Ibn Khaldun’s inspiration, I wish to switch now to how his 40-year cycles fit with American history and with our current political dilemmas. I shall argue that the foundation of the republic constituted the accession to power of an elite committed to a charismatic vision. Two generations, Lincoln’s four-score and a bit, passed at the end of which an unbridgeable national schism exploded in civil war.

The war ended with the North taking endless victory laps and the South marinating itself in dreams of the Lost Cause. Eighty-one years separate Fort Sumter from Pearl Harbor. A desperately divided depression-era public was believed by zealots on both left and right to be on the verge of fundamental restructuring, if not revolution.

Engagement in what most Americans came to believe was a life-and-death struggle between Nazism and democracy reset the country’s ideological compass, much the way the Civil War had. Growing up in a family that viewed FDR as the most evil of leaders, I can see a plausible post-1945 comparison with the northern hubris and southern sorrow and dejection during the Reconstruction Era

Eighty years have now elapsed since Pearl Harbor. The bland but confident post-World War II society I grew up in barely exists in mindset of a legion of politically aware Americans who see it only in terms of segregation, McCarthyism, Orientalism, and the abhorrent Feminine Mystique. The opposing legion who thinks the old days weren’t so bad have no intention of backing down.

Many analysts have opined that the country has never been so divided since the Civil War. I’m not so sure. Economics defined the Great Depression in technical terms, but in my opinion the national divisions of that era were no less dire than they were in the pre-Civil War days of the Dred Scott decision and Bloody Kansas. The difference between them came down to the slain warriors of 1860-1865 falling on American soil while those of 1941-1945 lost their lives at places like Omaha Beach and Guadalcanal.

From the perspective afforded by Ibn Khaldun’s theory of history, there is no escaping the demise of a governing and unifying ideology, once charismatically established through bloody struggle. The divisions within our country, whether social, economic, or sectional, haven’t changed all that much since the War of 1812, the last hurrah of the revolutionary era. Once the mythic memory of the Founding Fathers, or the Grand Army of the Republic, or the Greatest Generation fades to nothingness, those divisions will always resurface.

So what are we headed for? Another civil war seems unimaginable. And yet? How about a foreign war? The squandering of blood and treasure in the Middle East has had no lasting effect on the national polity other than replenishing the national reservoir of men and women with weapons training.

The war in Ukraine thus looms as a possible instrument for recharging our national political batteries. Handfuls of Putin-lovers aside, both Red Staters and Blue Staters sympathize with unfairly beleaguered white folk, armed to the teeth, facing a foe that talks about nothing so much as the bygone greatness of the Great Patriotic War against the Nazis. After all, the USSR lost its mojo after the Cuban Missile Crisis, which came 45 years after the Bolshevik Revolution, and collapsed completely in 1993 after 85 years of existence.

Are Russia and the United States looking for the same thing in terms of a charismatic national ideology? I think so. They could go to war with one another and see who survives, of course, but I think it is more likely that the outcome of the Ukraine war, a classic proxy conflict, will tell us whether we can ever get our own mojo back, or whether we will remain on the road to a new Fort Sumter.

Richard W. Bulliet is professor emeritus in history at Columbia University.

Copyright ©2022 Richard Bulliet — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 13 April 2022
Word Count: 975
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If I were Saudi Arabia’s MBS, the news out of Kabul would be making my heart go pit-a-pat. A conservative, undemocratic, Sunni religious government is taking form on the eastern frontier of his greatest enemy, the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The reborn Taliban emirate comes equipped with a strong battle-tested army, now bolstered by surrendered American weapons. But it will need money and assistance on how to function in the modern world.

Saudi Arabia, together with its allies Kuwait and the UAE, has an abundance of the former and decades of experience with the latter. It also has a history of financing religious militancy in Afghanistan going back to the Mujahideen fight against Soviet occupation.

In 2013, these anti-democratic Gulf allies showered billions of dollars on Egypt after General Sisi overthrew its elected Muslim Brotherhood government. So they can surely come up with whatever the Taliban emirate needs to repair war damage in Afghanistan and reverse its election-based democratic governing system. And MBS won’t be disturbed by a little unfairness toward women or a few reprisals against people the Taliban don’t like, such as the Hazara Shi‘ites.

It will not be lost on any Saudi strategic thinker that throughout Iran’s long history, only Alexander the Great and the Muslim Arabs have conquered the country from the mountainous west. But its eastern frontier is spectacularly vulnerable. The Israelis might come to see things in a similar light.

So long as the United States was Afghanistan’s overlord, Iran had little reason to fear actual military adventures by its Gulf adversaries. Washington, after all, would firmly resist any attempt to draw it into yet another Middle Eastern war. Moreover, Iran’s support for Yemen’s Houthis on Saudi Arabia’s southern flank has caused endless consternation in Riyadh.

But if Saudi Arabia were to become the big brother of the Taliban, Iran would have to consider seriously the prospect of a two-front war. Just imagine the political impact of Iran’s foes stationing a squadron of nuclear-capable aircraft at the Bagram airbase.

What would be the downside of MBS making the Taliban an offer of support too good to be refused? Particularly if he also formalized a joint Saudi-Taliban agreement to suppress al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, which both parties see as dangerously disruptive movements despite some religious similarities? And perhaps extend to Afghanistan MBS’s public relations promise to improve, ever so slowly, the status of women?

Will Pakistan object? Will China? Will Russia? No, no, and no. As for Washington, the Saudis’ long-term friends in both political parties could easily see this outcome as making a tasty omelet out of broken eggs.

Richard W. Bulliet is professor emeritus in history at Columbia University.

Copyright ©2021 Richard Bulliet — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 23 August 2021

Word Count: 436

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In 1827 Admiral Edward Codrington, in command of a British squadron observing the ongoing war between Greek rebels and the Ottoman sultan, sailed past the entrance to Navarino Bay, caught sight of the Turkish fleet lying at anchor, and blasted it to the bottom of the bay. The absence of a state of war between Great Britain and the Ottoman Empire notwithstanding, Codrington was celebrated and promoted because beating up on Turks seemed to a lot of Brits like an intuitively good thing to do. Then, since the overextended Ottomans did not respond militarily, the incident was officially declared “an untoward event.”

How does the assassination of General Qassem Soleimani stack up as a modern parallel? No state of war exists between Iran and the United States, but most Americans do seem to believe that beating up on Iran is an intuitively good thing to do. No credible casus belli has been adduced to justify the drone strike on Baghdad airport that killed Soleimani. Iran chose to make only a token military response, even though it was universally acknowledged that a more severe response would have had both right and reason on its side. And after a few tense days everyone let out their breath. Nothing done. Just one of those things. An “untoward event.” But events do have consequences, even though “untowardness” may make them hard to clarify.

The path of clarification starts with asking how a general like Qassem Soleimani achieves celebrity status, and thereby martyr eligibility, in a clerical quasi-democracy that has not formally been at war with anyone for thirty years. What distinguishes the Iranian Revolution of 1979 from the Arab Spring events of 2011 is the success the Iranian revolutionaries had in removing from military command the colonels and generals who had been personally vetted by the Shah, that is, all of them. Those who were not executed or put on the retirement list made their way into exile, where some of them actively encouraged military action against the Islamic Republic. They achieved their greatest success by helping persuade Saddam Hussein to initiate a war that lasted for eight years, ending in a stalemate. This war, called by the Iranians “The Imposed War,” ended up cementing two potentially opposing currents of Iranian public opinion: nationalism and support for a regime dominated by clerics. This ideological fusion brought the regime a generation of domestic support and still contributes to its relative — by Middle Eastern standards — stability.

Catastrophic as the Iran-Iraq War was, the post-Arab Spring civil wars in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Libya have done greater damage to those countries. Iran emerged from its war in 1988 more-or-less unscathed physically and with incipient internal unrest among Kurds and Baluchis firmly tamped down. In addition, the leftist Mojahedin-e Khalq counter-revolutionaries had been either executed or forced into exile during the war years. Even those American neocons who continue to worship at the altar of regime change do not visualize the Iranian population dividing into rival ethnicities, sects, or regions. The same cannot be said of the four Arab countries where wars continue.

Given the close relations between the Arab militaries and their foreign backers, primarily, in recent decades, the United States and Russia/USSR, it should not be surprising, I suppose, that army officers and militia commanders, ended up coopting the popular disorder generated by the Arab Spring. But I was surprised anyway. I had argued since well before the Arab Spring that the Arab officer corps based their dominance less on military competence than on two quite different sources of support: first, ever since the 1950s, the ideological belief among imperialists in both East and West that modern armies were the vanguard of national modernization and that bonds of clientage generated by weapons sales guarantee regional stability; and second, a 700-year legacy of internal political and economic domination focused on the role of senior military officers. Where Western theorists were inclined to see military officers as “change agents,” I saw them as neo-Mamluks wedded to government of, by, and for the officer corps. The shift to European-style officer training that began in the nineteenth century had failed to eliminate a long-standing tradition of officer privilege even when the recruitment of officers evolved away from the traditional preference enjoyed by Turks and Circassians.

Neo-Mamluk officers, I opined, paid more attention to building villas, marrying their children into the civilian elite, and gaining a preponderant influence in all parts of the economy, both military and civilian, than they did to economic efficiency, competent satisfaction of human needs, and listening to public grievances. Because the avowedly Muslim political movements and parties of the late twentieth century promised to correct these horrific governmental failings, I thought they should be allowed to run for office and, if elected, to enjoy at least a brief trial period to see whether they might do better. This vision of what the Arab Spring might accomplish collapsed in every country but Tunisia; but there, where the officer corps shaped by Habib Bourguiba was weakest, it has not done too badly.

Given the horror of combining religion with politics that most liberal-minded Americans express — based on a near total ignorance of both political and religious forces in the Islamic world — I now realize that any effort by elected Muslim activist governments to forcibly retire all of the senior commanders in the Egyptian, Syrian, Libyan, or Yemeni armies would have been read by the West, Russia, and the Gulf monarchies as an intolerable threat to regional security, a threat serious enough to warrant outside intervention of one sort or another. Yet officer corps destruction is exactly what the Americans did in Iraq after the 2003 invasion. Whether the resulting chaos there contributed to how the United States appraised the responses of regional military forces to the Arab Spring demonstrations in 2011 is hard to say. It is possible that a mass forced retirement of Egyptian generals with whom the US military had long-standing dealings was literally unthinkable inasmuch as it would have resembled the revolutionary elimination of the Shah’s generals. To this day, I wonder whether the United States actively or tacitly endorsed beforehand the Saudi and Kuwaiti-supported coup that toppled the Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt and installed yet another incompetent and insensitive neo-Mamluk dictatorship under General Sisi.

It may be that American policy-makers, looking back at the Iranian Revolution as an unparalleled disaster — those poor hostages were held, unharmed, for over a year! — felt among themselves that military dictatorship of any stripe was more desirable than Muslim political activism. Their fairly consistent posture, since 1980, of seeing the Islamic Republic as an evil theocracy and a regional sponsor of terrorism suggests that they deeply regret not prodding the Iranian army in 1979, perhaps with American military help, to slaughter protesters in the streets in order to keep the Shah in power. If so, then perhaps the hope I had nourished of new ideological forces supplanting the Arab neo-Mamluk officer corps and introducing democratic government was never more than a fantasy.

Though Egypt is safely, from an American point of view, back under military control, the 1950s model of officers being the vanguard of modernization is in tatters. The generals precipitously cashiered by American occupying forces in Iraq collaborated in establishing ISIS. Most Syrian army officers have remained loyal to the Assad regime through a series of atrocity charges. And Ali Abdullah Saleh, the late dictator in Yemen, along with the current General Haftar in Libya, actively participated in fragmentation of their countries. Meanwhile, the rulers of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the UAE have switched from bribing other Arab states to support their regimes to aggressively intervening in Yemen’s civil war and rattling their (or America’s) sabers when talking about the future of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Gulf.

In the midst of all this chaos, General Soleimani was the one and only military figure to gain public distinction as someone who had the skill, resources, and political backing to achieve his mission… whatever that mission may have been. Three way of thinking about Soleimani’s mission come to mind: the Shi’ite crescent, defense in depth of Iran’s borders, and strengthening within Iran a neo-Mamluk alternative to clerical rule.

Shi’ite Crescent It is often argued that Soleimani’s mission was to build a coalition of pro-Iranian Shi’ite forces, both state-sponsored and quasi-military, for the purpose of furthering Iranian hegemony in the Middle East, threatening Israel and Saudi Arabia, and expelling the United States from the region. This interpretation dominates official US thinking about Iran and has been adopted/fostered by Israel and America’s allies in the Gulf. It has so far been a poor predictor of Iranian actions, however.

Defense in depth It can alternatively be argued that the role of the Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) as the out-of-the-country strike force of the Iranian military is less to cobble together an unwieldy coalition of militias and proxies, whose goals do not always align with those of the Islamic Republic, than to sustain a degree of ferment outside Iran’s borders sufficient to dissuade potential foes from waging war directly on Iran and thereby risk opening a Pandora’s box brimming with unimaginable perils. Throughout its forty years of existence, a conviction that imperialist powers and their regional friends are determined to eliminate the only regime that institutionally bases itself on Islam has been a given in Iranian governing circles. Defense of the revolution has always outweighed the dream of spreading it.

Neo-Mamluk aggrandizement The third possibility pertains to the steady growth in power and entrenchment of the Revolutionary Guard elite in Iran. For years, I have wondered about what IRGC officers serving in Syria talk about with their senior counterparts in the less-than-formidable Syrian army. Luxury housing? Business opportunities? The IRGC earned its war fighting credentials in prolonged combat during the eight-year conflict with Iraq. The Syrians, on the other hand, prior to 2011, hadn’t fought a serious war since 1967. Yet the officer corps enjoyed extensive perquisites and was deeply entrenched in the country’s economy. Did the visiting Iranians envy their Syrian counterparts’ privileges? Did the thought arise in their minds that their fellow countrymen back in Iran should learn to esteem the IRGC leadership more highly?

To my mind, this question of what General Soleimani stood for should be at the center of an assessment of his targeted assassination. If you follow the Shi’ite crescent theory, you may argue that the general was the linchpin in a very broad, long-term strategy of Iranian regional hegemony, and hence a proper and important target. (Ignoring the addled presidential mind that proclaims that Soleimani also “said bad things” about the US, had the blood of hundreds of Americans on his hands by virtue of “inventing” IEDs, and was planning immediate, or maybe not so immediate, attacks on some US assets somewhere.) If you kill the spider at the center of his web, doesn’t that also rip apart the web? I don’t believe that any policy-make anywhere thinks this, or thinks that Soleimani cannot be replaced with by an IRGC commander of parallel skills.

On the other hand, from a defense in depth standpoint, the assassination was a proof of concept. The U.S., for whatever reasons, wanted to do something warlike to Iran so it launched a drone strike assassination and almost simultaneously sent third party messages saying: “No further action is in the works, so please don’t raise the stakes with lethal counterstrike.” Result? The U.S. flexes its muscle at the cost of creating a popular Iranian martyr. No other damage done to Iran, but the U.S. has demonstrated, as it did following the rocket attacks on the Saudi oil fields, that it wants to steer clear of making an attack on Iran proper. Kim Jong Un must wish that he had a proxy war crumple zone of his own somewhere so the U.S. could vent its supreme leader’s yearning for headlines in a similarly harmless demonstration.

Whichever take one prefers between these two formulations of General Soleimani’s mission, the IRGC shoot-down of a Ukrainian jetliner taking off from Tehran airport threw a monkey wrench into the works. Should demonstrators weep for the martyred general? Or for the dead air passengers? Or for their country’s military ineptitude? America’s chest-beating at having blown up another evil mastermind and shown the world that it knows how to win the war on terror drops to page eight as everyone’s fear of an airliner crash takes over the front page. Iran’s eagerness to mourn its dead hero is dimmed by news that his organization can’t maintain trigger discipline. America’s supreme leader makes light of the injuries his troops sustained during the Iranian response strike on a base in Iraq. And Iran’s supreme leader, who has a long history of championing the IRGC going back to the Iran-Iraq War, implies that one dead general is more of a tragedy than 176 innocent travelers, and fails to charge the top command of the IRGC, which initially lied about its involvement, with incompetence. I cannot imagine that even a President Trump, in the event of, say, Secretary of Defense Esper’s plane being downed over Iraq by a SAM, would continue to lash the American citizenry into a revenge-seeking frenzy if the U.S. Air Force, on alert, shot down a fully loaded Emirates jetliner the very next day.

I think it is fair to speculate that Ayatollah Khamenei’s support for the IRGC goes beyond political expediency and betrays a growth in IRGC power that threatens the integrity of the clerical state. As it continues to expand its already massive footprint in Iran’s military and civilian economy, and as it continues to conduct successfully its in-depth defense of its homeland, the IRGC may be reaching the point of being invulnerable in the Iranian political arena, just waiting for a ripe opportunity to formally institute an Arab-style neo-Mamluk regime. The succession to 80-year-old Khamenei as Supreme Leader may tell the tale.

So back to Admiral Codrington’s “untoward event.” The phrase connotes something unexpected and irregular conceived on the spur of the moment to advance an as yet unformed policy. Queen Victoria was embarrassed by what happened, but once the Greeks won their independence, the British saw the Battle of Navarino as not such a bad thing. Similarly, if Soleimani’s martyrdom, followed by the IRGC air defense calamity, should be followed within the next couple of years by a coup in Tehran formalizing an IRGC neo-Mamluk regime, won’t that make the policy-makers in Washington happy? They “understand” generals and juntas. They’ve been dealing with them for decades, even when they are vociferously anti-American. Besides, Washington has never put much effort into understanding Muslim clerics, or their popular appeal.

So one shouldn’t be surprised if yesterday’s untoward event becomes tomorrow’s shrewd military intervention.

Richard W. Bulliet is professor emeritus in history at Columbia University.

Copyright ©2020 Richard Bulliet — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 03 February 2020
Word Count: 2,469
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The era of Dealocracy will begin on January 20 when Donald J. Trump is sworn in as the 45th president of the United States. People searching for precedents for Trump’s sudden rise have suggested prototypes from Andrew Jackson and Huey Long to Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.

Eighteenth century England may offer better models, however. Mining and steel magnates at home, and the merchant adventurers like the “factors” of the British East India Company abroad, shaped the country and contributed more to its prosperity than a whole series of monarchs and prime ministers. Assuming one is willing to forget the misery of the poor at home and the enslaved, indentured, and brutalized workers abroad.

In 1987, The Art of the Deal, Donald J. Trump’s inaugural venture in self-invention, hit the bookstores. Its credited co-author, journalist Tony Schwartz, claimed he wrote the text by himself, but the million-or-so readers understood it as Trump’s autobiography and philosophy.

The book’s 11-step credo offers a model of Trump’s campaign strategy and coming administration:

Think big = “Make America great again.”

Protect the downside and the upside will take care of itself = Reverse course if the heat gets too great.

Maximize your options = Say and do whatever strikes you as opportune.

Know your market = Read your domestic and foreign constituencies accurately.

Use your leverage = Bully, cajole, bribe, and pander to your supporters at home and abroad.

Enhance your location = Invest in every part of the country and the globe.

Get the word out = Tweet often and sensationally.

Fight back = Let no slight go unpunished.

Deliver the goods = [Try to] fulfill campaign promises.

Contain the costs = Spend as little government money as you can.

Have fun = Does anyone believe that Trump is not having fun?

This list can usefully be applied to the British East India Company and other private merchant enterprises of the eighteenth century. But it fits poorly with more recent American notions of government. President Calvin Coolidge said in 1925:

“The chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world. I am strongly of the opinion that the great majority of people will always find these the moving impulses of our life.”

But that was before Roosevelt’s New Deal, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, and Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition. Today, a single-minded focus on business, on “the deal,” threatens almost a century of domestic social progress.

The business of the Trump administration, however, will not be rooted in that progress. Judging from the president-elect’s words and appointments, it will be rooted in world-wide deal-making. This is where it departs from the 18th century precedent.

The European merchant companies were governments unto themselves, particularly in territories where their “factors” — traders, soldiers, and administrators—turned areas of business enterprise into colonies, and then, when they became too costly, bequeathed the colonies to their home governments.

Today’s merchant companies are transnational, and their investors aggressively focus on realizing profits. They seek no colonies and deploy no armies, but they deeply believe that “the business of the American people is business.” As his cabinet appointments of CEOs and billionaire investors indicate, Donald Trump will carry this credo into the White House.

When a factory is saved from relocation to Mexico, the president will claim credit. When education, health, housing, and welfare face cutbacks because they do not contribute to the bottom line, the president will distract the citizenry by pointing to his successful deals.

Other presidents may have dreamed of having such latitude, but reality has always caught up with them. Will reality overturn Trump’s vision?

Most critics look to foreign affairs for hints of cataclysm. International relations theorists — has anyone in Trump’s cabinet read them? — agonize about China, North Korea, Syria, Palestine, Iran, human rights, NATO, refugees, and immigrants.

But international relations theory is rooted in the now-ended two centuries of ideological struggles for hearts, minds, and territory that extended from Napoleon to the fall of the Soviet Union. The merchant companies of the eighteenth century cared about profits and did whatever they needed to do to ensure them. This included military conquest, brutalization of colonial subjects, and neglect of their welfare.

Trumpian Dealocracy may not be so callous, but it will surely put American advantage ahead of such traditional foreign policy goals as democracy, loyalty to allies, and strengthening of human rights. In the name of containing costs, it will also avoid military commitments abroad.

One should not be surprised if Dealocracy boosts the American economy. Nor should one assume that other billionaires will not see Dealocracy as the crowning achievement of their own business and investing careers. Liberals and progressives believe ardently that Trump’s rise to the presidency is a freakish anomaly that will assuredly be reversed, better sooner than later. But it is also possible that Dealocracy will be with us long enough for the New Deal to read like ancient history.

On the other hand, the two greatest figures in the East India Company, Robert Clive and Warren Hastings, were, respectively, investigated for corruption and impeached.

Richard W. Bulliet is Professor of History Emeritus at Columbia University.

Copyright ©2016 Richard Bulliet — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 December 2016
Word Count: 856
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For rights and permissions, contact:
rights@agenceglobal.com, 1.336.686.9002 or 1.212.731.0757

Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri, Vadim Nikitin, John Stoehr, and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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The Iranian Revolution created the Islamic Republic of Iran, but that republic was transformed by the eight-year Iran-Iraq War. Without this combination of two national traumas, today’s Iran would be little different from today’s Pakistan.

Under the Shah’s rule, Iran resembled Pakistan. A privileged and educated elite conversant in Western languages dominated the government while the masses lived meager lives in thousands of villages that provided minimal access to education, health care, electricity, and transportation. Members of this privileged class rarely visited a village and treated poor villagers and servants with disdain. Senior military officers were personally vetted by the Shah and were part of the elite. Women outpaced men only in illiteracy.

The revolution’s greatest success was the systematic extension of education and social services to every part of the Iranian countryside. Its greatest initial failure was its attempt to instill religiosity into every aspect of Iranian life. This failure not only generated dislike of the clergy among many segments of the population, but it undermined every effort to normalize Iran as part of the international community.

Many foreign governments looked upon the war that began with Saddam Hussein’s attack on Iran in 1980 as a conflict that would sap the strength of two disreputable regimes. Who won? Who lost? In the long run, Saddam’s nationalist dictatorship would fall amidst the shock and awe of American invasion fifteen years after the war ended.

But what of Iran? Eighteen years after the war’s conclusion, the Islamic Republic is seen by many as an ambitious hegemonic power in the Middle East. It has not fallen apart internally, it has remained largely free of the terrorist scourge, it has carried out a series of credible elections, and it has negotiated a much-needed pause in its nuclear program.

Americans who visit Iran today enjoy touring historical monuments and are impressed by visible evidence of the country’s modernity. They take little notice, however, of the photographs of war martyrs that adorn light posts along the main streets of Iranian towns and cities.

From the outset of what the Islamic Republic terms “The Imposed War,” the country’s battlefield losses were publicly acknowledged and memorialized, while Saddam’s regime tried to conceal its own losses. The war brought Iranians together in a way that was unique in the country’s history. Patriotic pride, identity, and solidarity overtook and surpassed religiosity as the hallmarks of national character.

Compare this with World War II. In 1962, eighteen years after that war’s end, Americans seldom mentioned their war dead. Painful memories were repressed. Prosperity was abroad in the land, and the challenge of the student counterculture was just beginning. How different from the Civil War, Americans to this day remember and lament.

Russians, on the other hand, remained immersed in their memories of “The Great Patriotic War” and the tragic losses they sustained. For all his dictatorial ways, Stalin was remembered as the man who absorbed the worst the Germans could throw at his country, and prevailed. Veterans proudly show off their medals down to the present day.

Besides bolstering Iran’s national identity, the war with Iraq produced an equivalent to America’s G.I. Bill for educating returning veterans. Where the U.S. legislation benefited uniformed servicemen and women, the less formal Iranian system established university admission quotas for members of “martyr families.” This played a major role in channeling the sisters, wives, and mothers of slain soldiers into higher education, thus contributing to a majority of Iranian university students today being female.

In sum, the revolution exiled or retired most of the civilian and military elite, delivered social services to the masses, and established a regular and participatory governing system, albeit one that falls short of an ideal democracy. The downside? All this was done in the name of Islam, which raises the hackles of opponents inside and outside the country.

The war galvanized and unified the population behind an unprecedented patriotism, created a deep and lasting memory of the sacrifices made by the military, and incidentally helped stimulate an increase in female higher education. The downside? The Revolutionary Guard Corps acquired power and privilege.

Iran today is thus the product of two convulsive events and is much stronger and more unified that it would have been without either of them.

Richard W. Bulliet is Professor of History Emeritus at Columbia University.

Copyright ©2016 Richard Bulliet — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 12 December 2016
Word Count: 709
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For rights and permissions, contact:
rights@agenceglobal.com, 1.336.686.9002 or 1.212.731.0757

Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri, Vadim Nikitin, John Stoehr, and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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