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The Iranian Revolution and the Islamic Republic, Revised Ed.

Edited by Nikki R. Keddie and Eric J. Hooglund
Reviewed by By John C. Campbell
Spring 1987
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Edited by Nikki R. Keddie and Eric J. Hooglund
Syracuse University Press
1986
264 pp.
$14.95

A substantially revised edition of a collaborative work on Iran (reviewed in Foreign Affairs, Spring 1983). For a quick look at today's problems and policies, and particularly at the internal situation on which knowledge is scanty, this is an excellent handbook. The authors whose assignment was to cover international relations (Gary Sick, William Miller and Richard Cottam) are no more complimentary in their comments on American policy than is R. K. Ramazani in the work noted above-and this was before the arms sales revelations.

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Essay, Oct 1977
On Power: Oil Power in the Middle East
John C. Campbell

Iran, in the view of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, has a great imperial past and a greater imperial future. In the next few years it is to assert its dominant role in the Persian Gulf region and the nearby reaches of the Indian Ocean. By 1990 it will attain the status of a Britain or a France in the global hierarchy of powers. Seeing this dream of the future, the Shah is already acting as if it were reality. Meanwhile, his neighbor across the Gulf, Saudi Arabia, talks less of empire but gradually extends its influence through the Arab world. Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the Saudi Minister of Oil and Industry, can virtually dictate the world price of oil as long as he speaks for his king. He can lead the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) or he can break it. He can please the Americans by being "moderate" on the oil price, and at the same time can remind them that he expects them to move Israel toward a settlement acceptable to the Arabs. The United States worries about its rising imports of oil, which increase its vulnerability to the decisions of OPEC, but takes comfort in the fact that it has a friend in Riyadh.

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