The Bloody Lesson the Ayatollah Took from the Shah
On November 6, 1978, whereas riots raged all through Tehran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, addressed the nation in a rhetoric of conciliation. “I’ve heard the voice of your revolution,” he mentioned. The Shah promised to right the regime’s errors, liberate political prisoners, name parliamentary elections, examine the corruption in his midst, and ease the crackdown on dissent in opposition to a nationwide opposition.
However, as had occurred so typically within the historical past of brittle regimes, the dictator’s gesture of conciliation was learn as desperation. In a village outdoors Paris, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini constantly attacked the Shah with derision. The “despotic regime of the Shah” was weak, he had mentioned earlier, and was “drawing its final breaths.” And now, regardless of the Shah’s speech in Tehran, there could possibly be no compromise.
Two months later, the Shah, affected by most cancers, fled Iran and commenced the indignity of travelling from one nation to the following, in search of a suitable place of exile. He died in July, 1980, in Cairo.
The present chief of the Islamic regime, Khomeini’s successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is eighty-six. He is likely one of the longest-reigning dictators on the planet. He’s keenly conscious of the story of the decline and fall of the previous regime. And now, with the Islamic Republic dealing with dramatic demonstrations in dozens of cities throughout Iran, Khamenei is confronted with a dilemma not in contrast to the Shah’s. With the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and different devices of power as his bludgeon, Khamenei has chosen bloodshed over conciliation. The regime’s try and shut down the web and different technique of communication has dramatically slowed reporting, but human-rights teams say that Iranian authorities have already killed as many as 2 hundred demonstrators.
“Sadly, if the Ayatollah is taking any lesson from the Shah, it’s that the Shah was weak and caved,” Scott Anderson, the creator of “King of Kings,” a historical past of the revolution printed final yr, instructed me. “Brutally talking, if the Shah had been more durable and had instructed his troopers to indiscriminately kill folks within the streets, he may need been saved. The query now could be will the common soldier on the road shed an increasing number of blood. How far will they go?”
The leaders of the regime, numerous consultants instructed me, derived darkish instruction not solely from their historic enemy, the Shah, however from subsequent historical past. Within the late nineteen-eighties, the Soviet chief, Mikhail Gorbachev, tried to modernize his regime by democratizing the political system, ending censorship, easing the Chilly Warfare with america, and introducing market mechanisms into the economic system. His conclusion was that “we can’t dwell this fashion any longer”; a regime guided by Communist ideology and confrontation had left the Soviet Union in a state of generalized poverty, isolation, and confrontation. And but, though many situations improved by Gorbachev’s liberal insurance policies, he additionally risked the existence of a fragile system. Lastly, he couldn’t management the forces he had unleashed, and, by the tip of 1991, the Soviet Union had collapsed and Gorbachev was pressured from workplace.
Khamenei got here to energy in 1989, on the peak of “Gorbymania.” The spectacle of the autumn of the Soviet Union led him and the Iranian regime to develop extra suspicious of the West and of any signal of inside reform. “I’ve now reached the conclusion that america has devised a complete plan to subvert the system of the Islamic Republic,” Khamenei mentioned in a speech to authorities officers, in July, 2000. “This plan is an imitation of the one which led to the collapse of the previous Soviet Union. U.S. officers intend to hold out the identical in Iran, and there are plentiful clues [evidencing this] of their egocentric, typically hasty remarks made through the previous few years.”
