While praising Abbas Amanat’s Iran: A Modern History as a “rich, detailed, [and] nuanced” scholarly work, Michael Rubin also notes some glaring omissions:
When he turns to the [1979] Islamic Revolution, [Amanat] does not whitewash reality. He discusses the recruitment of children to the frontlines of the Iran-Iraq war and the televised confessions forced by Iranian authorities engaged in post-revolutionary purges.
Amanat is weakest, [however], discussing the relationship between the United States and Iran. He describes the beginning of the embassy-hostage crisis but glosses over its end. He sometimes gets [individual] episodes wrong: the Iran-Contra affair originated in a desire to influence a post-Khomeini order, not simply to check Soviet influence, and it was German and Dutch firms, not the United States, that shipped chemical-weapons precursors to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
And like many of his academic peers, he prefers simply to ignore terrorism: Iranian-sponsored terrorist groups such as Hizballah are mentioned only in passing and only in the context of the arms-for-hostages deal. There is no mention of the attacks that post-revolutionary Iran has sponsored from Buenos Aires to Beirut to Bangkok. . . . While Amanat’s narrative is excellent, especially up to the Islamic Revolution, sins of omission and his political agenda erode the credibility of his treatment of recent history and, more broadly, undermine what could have been the definitive book on modern Iran.
Read more on Middle East Quarterly: https://www.meforum.org/articles/2018/iran-a-modern-history