Parthian shot.

• Author: Pillar, Paul R.
• Position: 'Guardians of the Revolution: Iran and the World in the Age of the Ayatollahs' and 'Immortal: A Military History of Iran and Its Armed Forces' - Book review

Ray Takeyh, Guardians of the Revolution: Iran and the World in the Age of the Ayatollahs (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 328 pp., $27.95.

Steven R. Ward, Immortal: A Military History of Iran and Its Armed Forces (Washington, PC: Georgetown University Press, 2009), 380 pp., $29.95.

In an episode in Ray Takeyh's newest book, a government contemplates invading Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Saddam cannot be trusted, argue several of the decision makers. "Given the slightest opportunity Saddam will continue his aggression," says one of them. The most senior decision maker declares that the oppressed Iraqi people would, if freed from tyrannical rule, opt for a political system in line with his own values. Moreover, people throughout the Middle East would choose such a system if given the chance. The government decides to launch the invasion--with little planning for what would follow a defeat of Saddam's army, no expectation of a prolonged and costly occupation, and a belief that Iraqis would welcome the invaders as liberators.

This story is not about the George W. Bush administration's invasion of Iraq in 2003 but instead the Islamic Republic of Iran's attempt at an invasion in 1982. This followed the Iranians' reversal of Saddam's gains in the war he had started by invading the Republic two years earlier. The episode underscored some of the common interests of the United States and Iran--in this case shared opposition to the late Iraqi dictator and others who might emulate him. The story also shows the depth of Iranian concern about threats in their immediate neighborhood and a confidence in their ability to counter those threats. The enormous miscalculation the leaders of the Islamic Republic made in 1982 by trying to carry the war into Iraq led to six more years of one of the costliest conflicts in the modern Middle East, and it placed a deep imprint on Iranian perspectives and thinking that continues today.

U.S. policy makers could have applied some useful lessons from the Iranian experience to their own encounter with Iraq, of course. Yet, there are even-more lessons from Iranian history to apply to the U.S. encounter with Iran itself. Americans, characteristically a historical, have trouble looking back even as far as the beginnings of the Islamic Republic, which is now a generation ago, let alone to earlier Iranian history. In contrast, that history flows through the veins of Iranians; it shapes their fears and ambitions, and even their strategies, in readily recognizable ways. And, boy, what a history: today's Iran is the linear descendant of a millennia-old nation and culture that has experienced periods of expansive empire, subjugation to foreign rule and most everything in between.

With Washington and Tehran taking tentative first steps toward a new relationship, the former needs all the insights it can get about the historically based hang-ups of the latter. The two books under review are welcome aids to that understanding. Steven Ward's Immortal is a narrative of Iran's wars from the time of Cyrus the Great to the present. It is an exceptionally well-informed military history that conveys a sense of the sweat and sacrifice, and of the grandeur and the blunders (not to mention the essentials about major campaigns and battles).

The book's title derives from a name first applied to an army corps in the time of Xerxes: the Immortals, who replaced all casualties immediately and thus conveyed the impression of never suffering any losses. The term also evokes the perseverance that repeatedly has characterized Iran's confrontations with its adversaries, as well as the seeming indestructibility of its armed forces.

Ray Takeyh's Guardians of the Revolution addresses a narrower slice of Iranian history: the three decades of the Islamic Republic, with particular emphasis on foreign policy and how domestic-political struggles have shaped that policy. It provides a narrative background to the insights in his earlier Hidden Iran. Takeyh's two books together offer as instructive a portrait as one can find of politics in Tehran and why it generates sometimes maddening Iranian postures toward the outside world.

The glory of the ancient empires, from the first great dynasty of the Achaemenids to the reign of the nomadic Parthians to the subsequent rise of the Sassanians, is a source of pride to Iranians today, as it has been throughout Iran's history. It is a story that runs from the sixth to fourth centuries BC, through six...