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Military History and Social Upheaval
The book's author is a senior CIA military intelligence analyst who has studied Iran's political history and military culture for more than twenty-five years. Ward is a cautious and thorough scholar. He examines the factors that have shaped the strategic assessments of Iran's military leaders from the time of the "Immortals,â[euro] a royal guard of 10,000 men created by the Emperor Xerxes in the 5th century B.C., through the beginning of the 21st century.
Ward outlines several factors that have shaped Iranian identity, security policy, and military culture. The most important of these is Iran's geostrategic location, a point on which most scholars agree. Ancient Persia and modern Iran have witnessed invasions, foreign interventions, and isolation imposed by outsiders (Britain, Russia and the Soviet Union, Iraq, and the United States, to name the most recent). The author notes that throughout Iran's long history, its armed forces have sometimes been called invincible and at other times shamed by their weakness and inability to prevent foreign intervention. The military, Ward observes, excelled when rulers paid attention to it and, not surprisingly, suffered when they ignored it.
A second factor is Iran's history of dual militaries. Ward discusses both the pre-Islamic era of the "Immortalsâ[euro] and the most recent examples--the regular armed forces (artesh) and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (pasdaran), the former modernized by the last shah, and the latter created by the Islamic Republic in 1979 to protect its leaders and the revolution and act as a counterbalance to what was left of the shah's armed forces. Iran's military in the 1970s was one of the largest and best equipped (by the United States), and it was assumed by many in Iran and the region to be second only to that of Israel as the most effective military force in the region. The military's failure to halt the revolution revealed how weak...