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The Iranian crisis is far from over; in fact it may still be in its early stages. Nevertheless, the mythmakers are already hard at work. According to one school of thought, the cause of the recent uprisings and the fall of the Shah is to be sought in the “very bad economic situation.” According to another, the crisis was provoked by the great “social injustices” in Iran. According to a third, it was the “stifling political atmosphere” which caused the explosion. All of these may be true, but what do they explain? The economic situation in most Third World countries (and indeed in many others) is certainly much worse than in Iran; social injustice is equally glaring; the political atmosphere at least as stifling. Why, then, Iran?

Partly it was a failure of the ruling elite. The Shah was isolated, cut off from the people whose aspirations he thought he embodied. As Lord Curzon wrote in the early 20th century about another Shah: “The exigencies of his rank and position render it almost impossible for him to receive the assistance which tried and independent counselors can afford. The attitude and language employed toward him are those of servile obeisance and adulation: ‘May I be your sacrifice, Asylum of the Universe’ is the common mode of address adopted by subjects of the highest rank.”

The language in which the Shah was addressed had changed somewhat since Curzon's days, but it does seem to be true that while no one had dared to lie to the Shah's father, few dared to tell the truth to the son. Mohammed Reza Pahlevi showed an awareness of this problem when he wrote that in Iran the entire tradition surrounding the Shah accentuated his loneliness, and that though he himself was less forbidding in demeanor (his own words!) than his father, his role inevitably kept him at arm's length from other people. But the Shah was still convinced that he could rely on God's support, that God had ordained him to do for Iran things that no one else could do.

Indeed, after a shaky, uncertain beginning the Shah had been quite successful. The “White Revolution” of 1963 was given qualified acclaim even by many of his critics; the Muslim clergy, which condemned it at the time as the work of the devil, came reluctantly to accept it, especially after the oil windfall of the 1970's, leading to a growth rate of 35 per cent and 42 per cent in 1974 and 1975 respectively, opened breathtaking vistas to Iran's development. In the early 1970's, with the Shah at the height of his power and his political opponents in a state of disarray, Iran seemed to be making quick progress.

But the appearance was deceptive. In fact, the enormous oil royalties were mishandled by the Shah's regime; by 1975 the boom was out of control, and by 1976 it was clear that Iran was vastly overspending. The official goals, which included a more or less complete welfare system, were over-ambitious in every respect. By October 1976, the Shah admitted partial failure:

We have not demanded self-sacrifice from people, rather we have covered them in cotton wool. Things will now change. Everyone should work harder and be prepared for sacrifices.

But nothing is more difficult in politics than to carry out an orderly retreat, and even when the boom ended, everyone still expected its benefits to last forever.

In retrospect it is obvious that these years should have been used to reform the political system and to broaden its base. Instead, there were manifestations of a growing arrogance. In 1974, the Shah announced that within the next quarter of a century Iran was bound to become one of the world's five mightiest powers, and his minister of finance predicted that it would be among the first five in per-capita income as well. Dazzled by the enormity of the windfall, the Shah failed to understand the grave difficulties the country would have in absorbing the new wealth. More important still, the Shah and those surrounding him did not realize that an old-style monarchy was no longer effective in providing legitimacy to the regime. It was not only the economy that had to be modernized, but also the political structure. A growing number of people, including most of the educated class, found the medieval pomp and circumstance humiliating and ridiculous.

This was the real weakness of the regime—not that it was a “tool” of U.S. “imperalism,” or that it engaged in savage repression and widespread corruption. Both of these charges are seriously exaggerated.

It is true that the CIA had saved the Shah in the early 1950's—with an investment of less than half a million dollars—but thereafter he had followed an independent nationalist policy. It is also true that Iran received American help in the 1950's, but Yugoslavia received more than twice as much, and no one accused Tito of being an American satellite. Since the early 1960's, the Shah frequently used Washington for his own purposes; it would be difficult to point to many instances in which he was used by the Americans. (In 1963, the Shah promised the Soviet Union that he would not provide bases to foreign powers on Iranian soil, and for the next ten years excellent relations prevailed between the two countries; the Soviets even condemned the anti-Shah demonstrations of the “reactionary mullahs” in the 1960's. All this changed only in the 1970's, when Moscow switched its support to Iraq and the radical elements in the Gulf.) The nationalization of the oil companies in 1973 was hardly a step serving Western interests; among OPEC members, moreover, Iran was until recently among those pressing for very substantial rises each year.

Thus, the Shah's foreign policy was not pro-Western, but pro-Iranian. As he saw it, Iran could not in any case count on long-term American and European support, in view of the general decadence of those societies. If he looked for American military supplies, it was for the obvious reason that without such assistance Iran, like Afghanistan, would be sucked into the Soviet sphere of influence. Such a policy of trying to avoid Russian domination has been followed traditionally by all Persian rulers and will also be followed by future ones no matter what their political philosophy—unless, of course, their loyalty happens to be not to Iran but to a foreign country.

This is not to say that the charges made against the Shah's rule were completely without grounds. There was corruption, the new wealth was unequally distributed, and Savak, the political police, engaged until about two years ago in brutal repression. To take these accusations one by one: the Shah himself was a very wealthy man, and was not out for personal gain, but the same could not be said of all his numerous family and many of his ministers and other hangers-on. Corruption in Iran, as in most Oriental countries, is an endemic problem; in this connection it is useful to recall that until quite recently officials were not paid by the state but were expected to enrich themselves through time-honored ways and means. The new prosperity magnified this sort of corruption, against which the periodical clean-up drives were quite ineffectual.

Prosperity also brought about greater income inequality, as Charles Issawi and other students of the Iranian economy have pointed out. This is a phenomenon common to all rapidly developing countries, whatever their social system, and it was further accentuated by regional differences between the prosperous northern provinces and the more backward southern regions. But this inequality was not the main factor swelling the anti-Shah movement: Teheran, with one-tenth of Iran's population, accounts for one-third of the country's expenditure, and it was precisely in the capital (and in some religious centers such as Qum) that the opposition was strongest.

Lastly, the question of repression. There has been a great deal of violence in Iran since World War II. Two prime ministers have been assassinated (Ali Rasmara and Ali Mansur), and there have been attempts to kill others, as well as the Shah. The Iranian government under the Shah responded by mass arrests, by torture, and by executions. According to sources hostile to the regime, there were about 20,000 political prisoners in the early 1970's; the Shah admitted to only 3,000. But even if the higher figure was correct, it was still proportionately smaller than in countries such as Cuba; and even if more death penalties were imposed in Iran than elsewhere, the number of actual killings was higher in neighboring Iraq, to give but one example. Yet there were no demonstrations in Western capitals in favor of human rights in Cuba or Iraq, and this, of course, is the decisive factor. The impression was created in the Western media that Iran was a more brutal dictatorship than others, whereas it was in fact only less effective.

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The anti-Shah movement gained momentum not at a time of increased repression, but on the contrary, at a time when the regime was trying to reform itself and to offer a greater degree of liberty, partly under pressure from outside. Was the collapse inevitable? Robert Graham concludes, at the end of a massive indictment of Iranian government incompetence and folly:

To cast the Shah as the villain is in one sense misleading. There is nothing to suggest that another leader or group of leaders in Iran would have done better or behaved much differently under the circumstances. It would be surprising if the same basic motivations did not apply: namely, preservation of personal power, a concern with prestige, a chauvinistic pride in seeking Iranian solutions, and a general impatience with detail. The Shah's critics decry his authoritarianism, but there is scarcely a liberal tradition in Iranian history.¹

Fred Halliday, the author of a study of Iran written from an extreme left-wing point of view, reaches conclusions which are not much different. Noting the internal division of the Iranian Left, its preoccupation with rhetoric, its tendency to look for ideological guidance from notions borrowed from abroad, the subservience of the Tudeh (Communist) party to the Soviet Union, Halliday expresses skepticism about the Left's ability to administer power, let alone to produce a democratic alternative to the Shah.²

Circumstances, one has to agree with Robert Graham, were not propitious, and the oil boom turned out to be not a blessing but a curse. But the disaster was not foreordained. If there is a lesson to be learned, it is surely that in our age a more effective (and repressive) method of dictatorship is needed for survival in Third World countries than old-fashioned autocratic monarchy. If the Shah had been able to transform himself into a Middle East Castro, all would have been forgiven—the indifferent economic performance, the political oppression, the intellectual regimentation.

A comparison with the late Colonel Boumédienne of Algeria is quite instructive on this point. Boumédienne's achievements were hardly impressive—about a third of the Algerian workforce is unemployed, wholly or in part, despite the boost given to the country's economy by oil revenues. Any criticism of the regime is severely dealt with, and the erstwhile leaders of the Algerian revolution have been assassinated or are in prison. Boumédienne was in a way a more farsighted ruler than the Shah; he would have never permitted tens of thousands of students to leave for abroad and have paid for their studies. In Iran the breakthrough of the opposition came after freedom of assembly had been granted de facto, which is again something Boumédienne would never have done. The Shah released his chief political antagonist (Mossadeq) after a short while; Boumédienne kept the man he overthrew in prison to the last day of his life. There is a great and growing inequality of both income and living standards in Algeria, but this, unlike the case in Iran, is discreetly hidden. Much has been written about overcrowding and high rents in Teheran as one of the causes of the revolution there, yet in Algiers sixteen people on the average live in one apartment; the rents, outside the slums, are every bit as high as in Iran; and even if Boumédienne did not die a rich roan, some of his colleagues in the leadership amassed fortunes as the result of property speculation. Yet because of the crucial difference in how the regime was conducted, when the Algerian leader died, he was mourned by many millions of his compatriots as a hero and liberator, a man of the people. This image was also accepted almost without question abroad. On a single day Le Monde devoted five solid pages to the memory of a great democrat and humanist, while, according to the (Manchester) Guardian, Boumédienne was a “good man” and a “good liberal.” This, of a man whose regime was more anti-democratic than the Shah's.

The Shah, in contrast to the Castros of the world, was quite incapable of playing the part of a “man of the people”: cold, remote, a bad public speaker, he had considerable political intelligence but utterly lacked both charisma and the demagoguery needed to be a successful modern-style dictator. He did not even pretend that he was an egalitarian. Nor was he familiar with the uses of contemporary myths and the techniques of modern mass manipulation. He labored under yet another considerable handicap, that of having been at the helm of his country for almost four decades. During this period, Egypt was headed by Farouk, Neguib, Nasser, and Sadat; Syria and Iraq by dozens of colonels, generals, and prime ministers; America by seven Presidents; and even Russia by at least four sets of rulers. Only in Iran did the same ruler stay on and on; as a result, all the complaints and all the frustrations were directed at him. In a volatile country, he became the target and the victim of the natural human desire for variety and change.

But even with this great handicap the Shah could still have done better. He could have either destroyed the power of the Islamic clergy, thus continuing the policy of his father, or alternatively, if he felt he was not strong enough to do so, he could have made greater concessions so as not to antagonize them. He could have worked for a reconciliation with the middle class, which in its majority had supported Mossadeq's “National Front.” This class greatly benefited under the Shah's rule, but it lacked and wanted political power, which the Shah had no desire to share. The treatment of the intelligentsia was equally short-sighted. The Shah showed far more sensitivity in dealing with workers and peasants than with the intelligentsia, whom he did not even try to understand. He was accustomed to being flattered, but he did not flatter others, he did not infuse enthusiasm, and he did not try to heal old wounds, to persuade, to placate, to make friends. He did not care whether he was loved but rather deliberately cultivated the image of the stern, remote, but just autocrat. And thus in the end he found himself in greater isolation than the last of the Czars.

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