Abstract
The 1973 Arab–Israeli War
Galen Jackson, ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023. £68.00/$89.00. 202 pp.
Heroes to Hostages: America and Iran, 1800–1988
Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. £25.99. 433 pp.
The Political Ideology of Ayatollah Khamenei: Out of the Mouth of the Supreme Leader of Iran
Yvette Hovsepian-Bearce. Abingdon: Routledge, 2017. £39.99. 398 pp.
America and the Yemens: A Complex and Tragic Encounter
Bruce Riedel. Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2023. £19.99/$27.00. 104 pp.
Hezbollahland: Mapping Dahiya and Lebanon’s Shia Community
Hanin Ghaddar. Washington DC: The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2022. £46.00/$60.00. 132 pp.
The 1973 Arab–Israeli War Galen Jackson, ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023. £68.00/$89.00. 202 pp.
The 50th anniversary of the 1973 Yom Kippur War has led to a slew of new books. The commemoration comes at a particularly troubling time, with Israel having once more fallen victim to a surprise attack. This time, it was not a coalition of Arab states but the militant Palestinian group Hamas that shocked a complacent Israeli national-security apparatus. As in 1973, Israel finds itself consumed by a large-scale military campaign, with commissions of inquiry sure to follow.
‘Intelligence failure’ is a phrase often used by politicians seeking to blame spy agencies for their own misjudgements. In 1973, there was plenty of evidence that the Arab states were gearing up for another war to avenge their ignominious defeat during the Six-Day War. As with Hamas’s war-planning, it was hard to miss the Arab states’ preparations. Yet Israeli officials convinced themselves that the critical Arab state, Egypt, could not mount an attack until it had fully absorbed the Soviet weaponry it had received, something officials believed would take several years. This proved a gross miscalculation, as Risa Brooks demonstrates in her chapter on how Egypt subtly transformed its armed forces into a more effective military machine.
All edited books suffer from certain shortcomings. This volume is no different, and could have focused more on Israel’s domestic political scene and the nature of its alliance with the United States. However, this deficiency is more than made up for in careful chapters on Syria’s role and the politics of petroleum. Hafez al-Assad stands as one of the more tragic figures in this melo-drama, as he really seemed to have gone to war to destroy Israel. His senior partner, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, was more focused on a symbolic victory to jolt the Americans into launching a peace process. The ploy worked, and eventually the Carter administration negotiated a separate agreement between Israel and Egypt that eliminated the possibility of another inter-state war in the Middle East.
Given the latest conflict in Gaza, there will inevitably be comparisons with the surprise attack of 1973. The differences are more pronounced than the superficial similarities, however. In 1973, Egypt wanted a limited war as a pathway to peace, and after it left the ranks of the Arab radicals, an uneasy truce came to Israel’s various frontiers. Hamas is not seeking to revive a peace process, but simply to traumatise Israeli society and thwart the Abraham Accords that had normalised relations between Israel and a number of Gulf Arab states. Prior to the attack, it was thought that Saudi Arabia would be the next country to sign a peace pact with the Jewish state.
In the coming months, a reckoning awaits Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who must eventually explain to his shell-shocked country how he missed all the signs of danger on its southern flank. Commissions of inquiry will make their assessments and the blame game will ensue, but it is hard to see how a politician who prides himself on providing security can withstand the torrent of criticism sure to come his way. The Gaza war is far from over and may yet engulf the entire region. We can hope that cooler heads will prevail, but we are not living in a reasonable age.
Heroes to Hostages: America and Iran, 1800–1988
Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. £25.99. 433 pp.
Books about America’s relations with Iran are plentiful in the academy and beyond. Most are polemical accounts decrying various aspects of US policy. The trajectory is usually the same: America transformed from what many Iranians believed was a benevolent actor into another imperialist state manipulating Persian politics. This is why Heroes to Hostages is such a welcome addition to the literature: it offers a deeply researched and dispassionate account of this thorny relationship.
American curiosity about Persia began with missionaries seeking souls. There were very few converts, but well-meaning Americans staffed plenty of hospitals and schools. All this left a favourable impression as the United States stood aside from the Great Game whereby Britain and Russia carved out their spheres of influence. This game was never a one-way street, as many Persian politicians used their connections to London and Moscow as leverage against their rivals. Indeed, Whitehall had a very cosy relationship with the clerical estate.
The direction of American policy changed as the Second World War ended the United States’ splendid isolation. Suddenly, thousands of US troops found themselves in Iran to transport supplies to the beleaguered Russian front through the so-called ‘Persian corridor’. America was now represented in Iran by diplomats, generals and spies. Author Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet is fair-minded in chronicling an encounter that was not without its share of misapprehensions. Iran laboured under an occupation that generated shortages and famines as the Allies hoarded food supplies for themselves. In the aftermath of the war, the Soviets refused to withdraw their troops from Azerbaijan, leading to the first crisis of the Cold War. It should never be forgotten that the Truman administration stood by Iran and pressed for the eviction of Soviet forces at the risk of jeopardising the Grand Alliance.
The reign of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi has always presented a challenge for historians, who have regularly sacrificed the presumed objectivity of their craft. CIA complicity in the 1953 coup that displaced the nationalist prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh has been stripped of its complexity and reduced to a plot by an imperialist state diverting Iran’s democratic trajectory. The 1979 revolution is often seen as justified retribution for American sins. Even the hostage-taking of US diplomats in violation of international law has seen its share of justifications.
The author is at her best when navigating this contested terrain. As the Pahlavi dynasty fades into history, a more balanced account of its achievements and shortcomings is finally becoming easier to attain. Heroes to Hostages does not limit itself to power politics, but also focuses on the way American culture penetrated certain sectors of Iranian society. This was not always positive, and there was too much borrowing from the West; the sight of unveiled women in miniskirts and young people flocking to Western films offended not just clerics but also intellectuals concerned about a loss of identity. The revolution did away with the old ways, but did not squash the Iranians’ quest for a more accountable government.
The Political Ideology of Ayatollah Khamenei: Out of the Mouth of the Supreme Leader of Iran
Yvette Hovsepian-Bearce. Abingdon: Routledge, 2017. £39.99. 398 pp.
Sayyid Ali Khamenei stands as one of the most consequential rulers in the modern Middle East, yet surprisingly little is known about him, and no conventional biography is available. This is an odd shortcoming for a leader who has managed to sustain a revolution at home while helping defeat the United States in the region. The Political Ideology of Ayatollah Khamenei will not be the last word on this important figure, but it is the most comprehensive accounting of his ideological perspective so far.
Khamenei was never a conventional cleric. He had an eclectic mind and was interested in Western literature and the radical writings of revolutionary thinkers. He was drawn more to politics than the seminary, and emerged as one of the most influential disciples of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, leader of the 1979 revolution. He was arrested on six occasions, spending time in prison and internal exile. In the popular recounting of the revolution, he is often overshadowed by larger personalities, but his centrality as a bureaucratic infighter should not be ignored.
Shortly after the triumph of the revolution, Khamenei was put in charge of cleansing Iran of Western culture. Libraries were purged of objectionable books, universities were closed while their curricula were revised, and many writers and intellectuals found themselves out of work. One of this book’s more important contributions is to demonstrate how a fixation with cultural purity remains the focus of Khamenei’s career. He continues to give speeches about how the most sinister of Western designs is cultural subversion. To Khamenei, Western films are more of a threat than the American armadas that have patrolled Iran’s coastlines for the past four decades. It is a losing battle, as Iran’s youth are secular in outlook and liberal in cultural disposition. The Supreme Leader likes to deny all this, portraying the country’s youth as aligned with his thinking. It’s hard to know if he really believes his own rhetoric or is merely dissembling. After all, the young people’s rejection of their patrimony would be a terrible blow to the regime.
The Political Ideology of Ayatollah Khamenei is not without its share of problems. It could have used a good editorial scrubbing. There are too many lengthy passages from Khamenei’s speeches. The chapters are chronological but choppy. There is little in the way of analysis or assessment. The context is all but missing, and there are few clues as to why Khamenei made the decisions he did, or how both foreign and domestic actors have influenced his thinking. Still, the book offers a deep dive into a treasure trove of material that is indispensable in understanding Iran’s philosopher-king.
Today, the 84-year-old Khamenei faces the prospect of succession. As the book makes clear, when Khomeini died in 1989, Khamenei was adamant that any bungling of the regime’s first succession process would allow foreigners to exploit the power vacuum to overthrow the government. It remains to be seen whether he has learned important lessons from that episode.
America and the Yemens: A Complex and Tragic Encounter
Bruce Riedel. Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2023. £19.99/$27.00. 104 pp.
Yemen seems synonymous with the word ‘tragedy’. An enclave nestled in the Persian Gulf, it has seen its share of invasions, wars and famines. It is a nation often divided against itself, having been formally partitioned at various points in its history. It has flirted with radical ideologies that proved destructive, and strongmen who only looked out for themselves. It has also assumed a centrality hardly merited by its actual importance. Yemen has been a focus of several American presidents, who have viewed it through either the prism of the Cold War or the cold politics of the Middle East.
In his short and thoughtful book, Bruce Riedel deftly introduces the reader to the many actors and events that have shaped modern Yemen. A practitioner-scholar in the best sense, Riedel brings to his task the experience of a seasoned policymaker who has seen it all, and a scholar with an informed perspective. In the 1960s, the Middle East was fractured between radical Arab states and traditional monarchies. This was the Arab Cold War, and the superpowers lined up behind their respective allies. It was in Yemen that the cold war got hot. The battle between Marxists and monarchists eventually dragged Egypt and Saudi Arabia into the morass of Yemeni politics. When Israel launched its daring attack on front-line Arab states in 1967, Egypt’s best troops were stuck in a Yemeni quagmire. As with Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam, Yemen was a war that Gamal Abdel Nasser could not win but would not quit.
Today, Yemen is once more the focus of a war. The remnants of the old order are battling a determined insurgency led by the Houthis. A Shia offshoot, the Houthis cannot be described as clients of Iran, having arrived at their radical stance on America and Israel all on their own. Saudi Arabia’s impetuous leader, Prince Muhammad bin Salman, failed to learn the lessons of history, launching a clumsy and cruel invasion of Yemen shortly after coming to power. As Riedel demonstrates, approximately 400,000 Yemenis have died, and the health-care service has all but collapsed. As is usual in the developing world, most of the victims of this war have been children. Riedel chides successive American presidents, both Democrats and Republicans, for indulging the Saudis. The war seems to have subsided not through Saudi victory – despite Riyadh spending billions – but Chinese mediation. It was China that brokered an agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran that saw the lowering of temperatures in Yemen.
More accustomed to war than peace, the Houthis have taken sides in the Gaza war. With Iranian support, they have launched attacks on commercial shipping in the Persian Gulf, disrupting maritime traffic in those critical water-ways. The United States and United Kingdom have launched retaliatory strikes, but it remains to be seen whether such action will deter the perennially reckless Houthis. As another conflict looms in the Gulf, America and the Yemens should prove a valuable resource for both general readers and policymakers alike.
Hezbollahland: Mapping Dahiya and Lebanon’s Shia Community
Hanin Ghaddar. Washington DC: The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2022. £46.00/$60.00. 132 pp.
Hizbullah is one of the most lethal terrorist organisations in the Middle East. Its record includes killing 241 American marines in Lebanon and attacking a Jewish centre in Argentina. It is a terror group with a truly global reach. Hizbullah, more so than any other Iranian proxy, is a direct creation of the Islamic Republic, and is its most prized protégé. In the early 1980s, Tehran began to amalgamate various Shia groups into Hizbullah, beginning a relationship that has brought the group billions of dollars in Iranian assistance. In this important monograph, Hanin Ghaddar focuses on the small Shia enclave of Dahiya, a suburb in southern Beirut, to draw larger and sensible conclusions about Hizbullah.
Dahiya might be overwhelmingly Shia, but it features its own class stratifications. Hizbullah’s message of Shia inclusion has evidently not stopped it from seeking to enrich its elite, aid its supporters and deny resources to those deemed insufficiently loyal. Brutality and targeted killings have been the hallmarks of its power grab, but it has also participated in electoral politics and gained control of state ministries, whose funds it has misused for its own purposes. At a time when Lebanon’s financial order is collapsing, Hizbullah’s state-within-a-state is doing more harm than the usual inefficiencies and corruption of Lebanese leaders.
The core question that this monograph addresses is whether Hizbullah is losing support within the Shia community. For a long time, Hizbullah was assumed to be a vanguard organisation that forced Lebanon’s Sunni and Christian notables, who had long divided power among themselves, to pay attention to the Shia slums. Hizbullah developed a sophisticated armed militia, but it also created social services, hospitals and schools that attracted Shi’ites with little affection for its anti-America and anti-Israeli crusades. The group all but dispensed with the other Shia political organisation, Amal, and made itself central to Lebanon. And then came Israel’s departure in 2000 from its security sector in southern Lebanon, a withdrawal that was largely attributed to Hizbullah’s hit-and-run tactics. The organisation seemed to have reached the peak of its influence.
All of this began to change in the wake of some catastrophic mistakes. In 2006, Hizbullah engaged in a war with Israel that devastated Beirut. While Hizbullah was not defeated, its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, made the unusual admission that, had he anticipated the scale of Israeli retaliation, he would not have inflamed the southern border. This was cold comfort for those Lebanese – many of whom were Shia – whose homes and businesses were destroyed during the Israeli strikes.
Then came the Arab Spring and the revolt against Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Iran was determined to enter the fray and save Assad, and made use of Hizbullah troops to do so. Suddenly, the Shia militia was involved in slaughtering hundreds of thousands of Sunnis. Assad survived, but it is hard to see how that benefited Hizbullah in a multi-confessional Lebanese society. With the advent of Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack against Israel, Hizbullah is once more threatening intervention, with all its attendant consequences for Lebanon.
The price of being Iran’s proxy and surrogate in the region has indeed been costly. As this monograph demonstrates, many Shi’ites are beginning to question the price they have paid for Hizbullah’s subordination of Lebanese interests to Iran’s revolutionary priorities.