Can Revolutions be Predicted: Can Their Causes be Understood?

Abstract

It is a frequent refrain of the literature on the Iranian or “Islamic” Revolution of 1978–79 that the revolution could and should have been predicted if only more people had found out and heeded what Iranians were thinking. The criticism is widely made of U.S. representatives in Iran that, by the late 1970s, they had renounced all attempts to find out what was going on in the minds of Iranians, and were complacently convinced that nothing could go wrong with the shah’s regime. This popular line of argument, which is accurate to the degree that it describes official U.S. ignorance, is found recently in the generally excellent and comprehensive book by James Bill, The Eagle and the Lion.¹ The question remains whether, if the Embassy people had not renounced local intelligence functions and had met more people and reported what they were thinking and doing, they would have predicted, even as a reasonable possibility, the Islamic revolution. All the evidence is to the contrary. To take the best control group: U.S. scholars of modern Iran, who were doing research there in large numbers in the 1970s, did not predict anything like the revolution that occurred.

From CONTENTION, I, 2(1992): 159-182. Two of my responses on this subject are published in issues 3 (1992) and 5 (1993).