If you were to read only one book on present-day Iran you could not do better than this. Michael Axworthy, a Foreign-Office-expert-turned- academic, has drawn on his own experience as well as archival research to produce a highly readable narrative of the Islamic Republic.

Revolutionary Iran begins with the causes of the 1979 revolution: the oil boom and the subsequent economic downturn as well as Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s grandiose schemes, his pumped-up autocracy and claims to be the “light of the Aryans”. Axworthy evokes the sound and fury of the revolution itself - the cycle of fourth-day demonstrations, the ever- expanding mass protests and the three days of street fighting that put the nail in the coffin of the so-called 2,500-year monarchy. He then describes the establishment of the Islamic Republic: the consolidation of power in the hands of clerics associated with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the marginalisation of other clerics, and the drafting of a truly theocratic constitution of a kind rarely found in the annals of world history.

The story continues with the survival of the republic under unfavourable circumstances - the US hostage crisis, the Iraqi invasion, the bitter conflicts between moderates and radicals within the regime, and the attempted uprising by a radical lay organisation named the Mojahedin. It goes on to explore the decades of economic reconstruction under President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, of political liberalisation under President Mohammad Khatami, and of the emergence of a new form of religious populism, best described as evangelicalism, espoused by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The book concludes with today’s ongoing stand-off between Iran and the US over the nuclear issue, which has generated much on-and- off noise about air attacks, war and the “existential danger” to Israel.

Axworthy’s forte is presenting new information on military matters, offering detail not found in other books. He has gathered this information from his own experience, from interviews with military officials, both British and Iranian, and from data provided by international research organisations. In the process, he debunks three widespread notions. First, he shows that, contrary to government propaganda, Iran’s regular armed forces, in particular the air force, played an important role in fighting off the Iraqi invasion. The regime has systematically underplayed its role and overplayed that of the volunteer militias - the revolutionary guards, known as the pasdaran, and their support battalions, the basijis. Some of the most valuable parts of the book are those on the Iran-Iraq war - on the reasons for Saddam Hussein’s invasion, the military tactics and hardware used by both sides, and the horrendous loss of life reminiscent of the First World War. Some might object that Axworthy is too ready to accept the claims made in Rafsanjani’s self-serving memoirs that he and Khomeini were willing to end the war in 1983. It is hard to believe that they were pressured or hoodwinked into crossing the border by hand-picked pasdaran.

Axworthy’s forte is presenting new information on military matters, gathered from his own experience

Second, he debunks the notion that the Islamic Republic is a threat to the region - a Third Reich armed to its teeth, with ambitions to create a vast empire, and equipped with an unlimited array of panzer divisions. He shows Iran to be instead a fourth-rate power spending less of its gross domestic product on arms than many of its neighbours, including Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and even the tiny Gulf emirates. He writes: “By no means is Iran among leaders in regional or world defence spending. If defence spending is any measure of militarism or a sign of expansionist intent, then Iran is not a militaristic or expansion state.” Iran’s regular and irregular forces are capable of waging partisan warfare if the country is invaded again. But they do not have the capability of reaching out and invading other countries.

Third, Axworthy counters the alarmist claim that Iran is out to obtain nuclear weapons. He argues that its real intention is likely to be obtaining the capability to produce such weapons if need be in some dire future crisis. This is, of course, a capability many other countries have. Although many academics have argued this point, it is good to see the former head of the Iran Section of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office concur.

It is also refreshing to have a Foreign Office hand openly take issue with official policies. Axworthy criticises both the purpose and the workings of the dire economic sanctions imposed on Iran by the UN under pressure from the US and the UK. He implies that the real intention was not to bring Iran to the negotiating table but to placate the Israelis and pull off a “regime change”. He also criticises the tendency of George W. Bush and Tony Blair to blame Iran for problems in Iraq and Afghanistan - problems mostly of those leaders’ own making - even when Iran was in essence aiding the West.

The best parts of Revolutionary Iran are those dealing with contemporary events; less successful are those dealing with historical background. The latter are overly reliant on secondary sources, many of them coloured by the Cold War and Anglo-American backing for the Shah. They therefore tend to perpetuate distortions repeated so many times that they have become conventional wisdom. For example, the book claims that the Soviets set up a republic in Iranian Azerbaijan at the end of the Second World War. In fact, they set up an autonomous provincial government so they could have sure representation inside the Iranian parliament. Similarly, Axworthy holds that the 1953 overthrow of Premier Mohammad Mossadeq was due more to internal politics than outside machinations. This is a royalist myth. A leading CIA analyst, Richard Cottam, writing some years after in a mea culpa of the coup, readily admitted that prominent defectors from Mossadeq’s side, led by Ayatollah Abol-Ghasem Kashani, did not seriously weaken the nationalist government, and the gang of some 3,000 that roamed the streets during the coup provided the military with mere acoustical side-effects. However, they were soon hailed as the heroes of the “Shah- People Revolt” - later billed as the “Shah-People Revolution”. By subscribing to this royalist myth, Axworthy is minimising the crucial roles played in the 1953 coup by the CIA and MI6.

Finally, Axworthy tends to exaggerate the independence of the Shah, describing him as a “partner” rather than a military monarch dependent on the West. Such a depiction runs counter to the facts - not only of the Shah’s own heavy reliance on the West during the revolution itself but also of Iranian public perception throughout the crisis. In fact, Axworthy, despite providing an excellent political narrative of revolution, does not focus sufficiently on the popular perceptions that generated so much heat, passion and fury. At the core of these passions was the deeply held conviction that the Shah was a foreign puppet - a view shared by clergy as well as laypeople, by the religious and the secular opposition, by the left, centre and right, and by religious populists as well as religious conservatives and even moderates.

What drove the revolution was neither the small increase in bread prices nor the slight decrease in employment rolls, but the widely held conviction that the Shah was illegitimate precisely because he had been installed on the throne by foreign powers. In an age of nationalism, he was deemed to lack national legitimacy.