Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Iraq. And yet the Iranian regime was quietly despised at home in many quarters, where the
concept of Islamic Revolution, because Iranians have actually experienced it, has meant
power cuts, destruction of the currency, and mismanagement. The battle for Eurasia, as I
have explained, has many fronts, all increasingly interlocked with one another. But the first
among equals in this regard is the one for the hearts and minds of Iranians, who comprise,
along with Turks, the Muslim world's most sophisticated population. Here is where the
struggle of ideas meets the dictates of geography: here is where the liberal humanism of
Isaiah Berlin meets the quasi-determinism of Halford Mackinder.
For as irresistible and overpowering seem the forces of geography, so much still hangs
on a thread. Take the story of the brilliant eighteenth-century post-Safavid conqueror Nader
Shah. Of Turkic origin, from Khorasan in northeastern Iran, Nader Shah's Persian Em-
pire stretched from the Transcaucasus to the Indus. His sieges numbered Baghdad, Basra,
Kirkuk, Mosul, Kandahar, and Kabul, places that bedevil America in the early twenty-first
century, and which were rarely strangers to Iranian rule. Had Nader Shah, as Michael Ax-
worthy writes, not become deranged in the last five years of his life, he could have brought
about in Iran “a modernizing state capable of resisting colonial intervention” from the Brit-
ish and Russians in the nineteenth century. But rather than be remembered as the Peter the
Great of Persia, who might have dramatically altered Iranian history from then on for the
better, his regime ended in misrule and economic disaster.
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Or take the fall of the Shah in 1979. Henry Kissinger once told me that had Jimmy
Carter's administration handled the rebellion against the Shah more competently in the
late 1970s, the Shah might have survived and Iran would now be like South Korea, a dy-
namic regime, with an imperfectly evolved democracy, that always has its minor disagree-
ments with the United States, but which is basically an ally. The Shah's regime, in his view,
was capable of reform, especially given the democratic upheaval in the Soviet Empire that
would come a decade later. Though blaming President Carter for the Shah's fall may be
too facile, the possibilities raised by even a slightly different outcome to the Iranian Re-
volution are still intriguing. Who knows? I do know that when I traveled throughout Iran
in the 1990s, having come recently from Egypt, it was the former that was much less anti-
American and anti-Israeli than the latter. Iran's relatively benign relationship with the Jews
stretches from antiquity through the reign of the late Shah. Iran's population contains hope
and possibilities.
Or take the opportunity offered to the United States following the attacks of September
11, 2001, when both Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mohammed Khatami con-
demned the Sunni al Qaeda terrorism in no uncertain terms and Iranians held vigils for the
victims in the streets of Tehran, even as crowds in parts of the Arab world cheered on the
attacks; or the help Iran gave to the U.S.-led coalition against the Taliban later that year; or
the Iranian offer for substantial talks following the fall of Baghdad in the spring of 2003.
