The Eagle and the Lion: The United States and Iran

By James A. Bill. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988. 600 pp. $24 (cloth).

Reviewed by Andrew I. Killgore

Professor James Bill earns the thanks of what should be a grateful nation for shredding the remnants of Henry Kissinger's reputation as an international statesman. But that's only an incidental benefit of The Eagle and the Lion. For all Americans, Dr. Bill has written by far the best book yet to appear on relations between the United States and Iran. If widely read, this massive volume will help dispel the combination of endemic American ignorance of Iran and special interest pressures that have bedeviled Iranian-American relations.

The comprehensiveness of The Eagle and the Lion is suggested by Bill's thanks to more than 200 named persons for their help in preparing his volume, the culmination of a quarter century of study. He brings literally thousands of Iranians before the reader, describing how each fits into the political, social, and intellectual mosaic of Iran. With experience spanning decades of Iranian developments, Bill's breadth of knowledge of Iranian personalities and politics has simply never been matched.

The "Good Old Days" of US-Iranian Relations

The author traces US-Iranian relations back to the 1830s when the first American medical and teaching missionaries went to Iran. In retrospect, the next 100 years were the "good old days," although Bill notes that "soulsavers" among the missionaries got nowhere and that many Americans then, as now, were turned off by the shifting nuances of the Iranian personality.

Nevertheless, Iranians were grateful for long American educational efforts in their country and for US support of Iran's successful campaign in 1946 to persuade the Soviet Union to withdraw troops it had sent into Iran during World War II. American standing was high as the 1940s ended.

Chapter two masterfully describes the background and circumstances leading up to 1953, the critical turning point in US relations with Iran. Nationalist opinion was ready for a struggle to gain control of Iran's oil, nationalist Prime Minister Muhammad Mosaddeq gained power, Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi fled his country after losing a power struggle, Mosaddeq was overthrown by CIA-financed mobs, and the shah returned to Tehran with US connivance. America thus began a fateful involvement in internal Iranian affairs. And the deeper the involvement the more the US got in over its head. Russia and Britain had intervened in Iran for more than a century for frankly imperial reasons. Their purposes, at least to the two governments, were clear. Ours were not, and no real consensus on the implications of US involvement existed in Washington or among the American people.

Except for a brief period from 1961 to 1963 when President Kennedy nudged the shah toward reform, Bill describes a troubling quarter century (1953-1978) of Iranian government retrenchment and oppression and of an American love affair with the shah. Abiding American ignorance of Iran, bureaucratic infighting, a US obsession with the Soviet threat, and informal, private decision-making (Bill refers to bankers, arms merchants, and Israel's American minions within and outside the US government) all distorted American policy-making toward Iran both before and after the cataclysm of 1978-1979.

In the last three chapters, Bill brilliantly describes an ignorant United States, mutually antagonistic American foreign policy institutions (State Department, CIA, National Security Council), and special interest pleading that led us on to catastrophe in Iran. Even the best-informed US diplomats, accustomed to explaining their own country to foreigners, have much to learn from Bill's scintillating chapter on Pahlavism in America.

The American Pahlavi Set

This irresponsible Pahlavi network in the US kept such unrelenting pressure on President Carter to admit an ill shah to the United States that the president finally relented against his own better judgment and against the advice of the State Department. All hell broke loose in Iran as a result, leading to the eventual seizure of American diplomats in Tehran, an ill-starred military rescue mission, and the electoral defeat of the Carter presidency.

The Rockefeller brothers, David and Nelson, along with Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, led the Pahlavi inner circle in America. A massive support cast included the Zionist establishment in the US, especially the late Sen. Jacob Javits and other zealous Israeli supporters in Congress and the media. Network point man, Henry Kissinger, described by a distinguished US columnist as the principle architect of the catastrophe in Iran, denied any responsibility for admitting the shah.

Bill notes the May 1972 decision by President Nixon and then-National Security Adviser Kissinger to sell the shah all the non-nuclear weapons he wanted, and to cut off internal US government discussion of the decision. Arguably, the resulting arms-buying binge ($25 billion in less than six years) led to the shah's downfall. Author Barry Rubin, quoted by Bill, called the arms sales decision "shortsighted and almost criminally careless." One can only assume Kissinger, as usual, was playing out his zealous pro-Israel sympathies. Typically, however, the former secretary of state also has sought to obscure his prominent role in that fateful decision.

Bill has a fascinating discussion on whether the US Pablavites, especially the Rockefellers and their employee Kissinger, were motivated by humanitarian concerns to admit the shah, or whether they were concerned to protect the billions the Rockefellers' Chase Manhattan Bank stood to lose if the revolutionary regime in Tehran repudiated earlier Chase loans to Iran. If admission of the shah made it possible for Chase to find Iran in default on loans to the bank, then it could forego loss and even turn a handsome profit, which is indeed what happened. Bill quotes Americans on both sides of this high-stakes political/economic issue.

Bill concedes that even he took part in the all but universal acclaim accorded the shah's flawed regime in the United States. The Eagle and the Lion sets the record straight. It is of such unparalleled depth and comprehensiveness that readers of every part will be enriched by it.

Andrew I. Killgore is president of the American Educational Trust and publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.