Even as the first western journalist to interview Ayatollah Khomeini, I had no inkling of what was to come. Perhaps we should have learned from history
W
atching Iran in flames, I can’t help wondering whether history is coming a grotesque full circle 47 years after the fall of the US-backed Pahlavi dynasty, or whether western powers are simply repeating past errors by attempting violent regime change from outside.
As a young reporter, I had a ringside seat for part of the 1979 revolution that overthrew Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and installed an austere Islamic republic headed by a Shia Muslim cleric with the titles of “leader of the revolution” and “guardian jurist” (vali-e faqih).
Barely two years out of university, with a history degree specialised in the French Revolution, I was catapulted into covering a live revolution as epochal – and bloody – as the French and Russian convulsions. As a trainee correspondent for Reuters in Paris, I befriended exiled Iranian revolutionaries hanging out in the Latin Quarter in the months before Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was expelled from Iraq in 1978 and granted temporary asylum in France.
