The author tells the history of the thirty-seven year reign of the last Shah and its climactic end. He asserts that the Shah's excesses have been greatly exaggerated, that he was a force for stability and modernity. He transformed a nation, built the infrastructure of a modern country, took his people out of poverty and ignorance, created one of the most powerful militaries in the world, fostered the rights of woman and engineered the 1973 oil embargo, which transferred the wealth of the west to the oil powers of OPEC. He believes that what has transpired since his ousting is a travesty, responsible for much of the regional debacle that is the Middle-East.
Mohammad Reza Khan, son of a Cossack brigadier in the service of the Shah, was born in 1919. His father overthrew the government in 1921, appointed himself Prime Minister in 1923 and Shah a few years later. The dynasty was called Pahlavi. Mohammad attended boarding school in Switzerland while his father began the modernization of the rural and impoverished but proud Shia monarchy. He returned after five years in the west and took the throne in September, 1941, a month after an Anglo-Russian invasion led to his father's abdication. As Shah, he accepted a socialist Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadeq, who allied with the Shiite clergy and nationalized Britain's Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. The UK was nearly bankrupted by this turn of events and sought to overturn the decision. The Truman administration demurred. However, Eisenhower and Dulles were much more anxious and concerned about the USSR taking over Iran's oil. The Shah approved the 1953 CIA-inspired coup that deposed Mossadeq and at that point, decided to rule rather than just reign. One of his first acts was to accede to an American takeover of Iran's oil industry.
Iran's long history of Shiite clerical extremism exploded into street violence in 1963. Mohammad Shah was implementing policies of land reform and modernization of the lives of women and children and ran smack into the extremist Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The Shiite radical called for demonstrations, and it took the imposition of martial law to quell the violence in the streets. Throughout the decade, the plans to improve and modernize the country, called the White Revolution, proceeded apace funded by massive amounts of oil revenue. But the unrest and opposition to the Shah's American inspired totalitarianism never wavered and in fact increased as time went on. The Shah was seen as despotic, and Khomeini as the "Iranian Che Guevara", even though his personality was that of a right wing "medieval tyrant". One of the regime's many problems was corruption in and around the extended Pahlavi family. A weak man unable to confront his siblings and their families, the Shah let it go. He surrounded himself with sycophants and lost track of the realities of the country he purportedly ruled. In 1971 as the Shah celebrated the 2500 year anniversary of the Persian state and King Cyrus the Great, Khomeini, exiled in Iraq, first called for the abolition of the monarchy for being incompatible with Islam.
The Shah led OPEC's doubling of the price of oil in response to US support of Israel in the 1973 war with Egypt. Iran's oil receipts went from approximately $4B per year to $20B, and the Shah plowed the money back into the improvements across society that were his focus. The more money put into the country, the worse matters got between the middle class and the monarchy. Fearful of westernized modernization, the people turned to traditional religion. The Shah's attempt to liberalize political life also backfired, because it exposed the corruption in and around the regime. For as many women as he educated and took out of the past, just as many took the veil.
The year 1978 was the last full one of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi's reign. It opened on a high note with a New Year's Eve visit from the US president. Within weeks, there was a massive pushback from the clerics and the revolutionaries when the security forces published a letter criticizing Khomeini. There was blood in the streets. Those who could afford it were buying real estate in Europe and America, particularly in California. Foreign observers were torn; the US Ambassador thought he would last, and the Israeli's advised Tel Aviv to start looking for a different source of oil and to prepare to extradite the many construction workers in Iran. In August, Khomeini's revolutionaries launched full-scale riots and fire-bombings in every city in the country. Terrorism, regardless of who propagates it, is terrible, vicious and violent, but Khomeini's men were outright brutal extremists. The tactics of revolutionaries are often similar and here, by combining violence with propaganda and lies, one is reminded of the Bolsheviks in 1917. The Shah was shocked at his people's ingratitude and made slight changes to the regime that were comparable to the old cliche about shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. In September, he told his inner circle, "If my people don't want me, I won't stay by force." If I may continue the Bolshevik comparison, Khomeini was a minority within a minority. The majority of the clergy were vehemently opposed to his extremism. In November, martial law was imposed, but like every other response from the Shah, it was weak and ineffective. Inscrutable, indecisive, determined not to shed his people's blood and wracked with cancer, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi left Tehran for the last time on January 6, 1979.
Khomeini returned from exile and implemented the Islamic Republic. A reign of terror followed. By the middle of 1980, the Shah was dead. The Carter administration which dithered throughout the crisis and had been hampered by horrible analysis on the ground in Tehran and at the CIA was out of office within two years.
This has been an excellent read and learning experience. I should remember more about Iran and all that happened there, but I don't. The second oil shock had a major impact on finances and life in America. Interest rates were sky high, the economy was in a stall and there were lines at the gas stations. I remember the Iran Air terminal at JFK going from being packed to a ghost town in 1978.
One disappointment in this narrative is the very limited discussion about geo-political matters. The Cold War barely rates a mention. Since Iran bordered the USSR, this seems to be a bit of an oversight. Similarly, Saudi Arabia, Iran's Sunni competitor, is discussed only tangentially. The only review at length that I can find was in the Times. The reviewer, an Iranian journalist, feels that Cooper went too easy on the Shah and understated the severity of the security forces. Since the author does not do a very good job explaining the disconnect between a regime that poured money into a society that hated said regime, perhaps the NYT reviewer is correct.
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