Thirty years after the Shah was overthrown in a revolution, Iran is embroiled in an upheaval that appears to be threatening the grip of the Ayatollah over the country. There are striking ironies between what happened in 1979 under the Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, and what is happening today under Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the incumbent supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The way the Shah fell out with his Western allies, especially the United States, over arms build-up in the mid-1970s, has eerie parallels to the way the mullahs in Tehran have fallen out with Washington over Iran’s nuclear weapons program, among other issues. What has been dramatized today as the Iranian Revolution, Part II, is a delicate, almost inscrutable power game, fueled by suspicions and deep-seated mutual distrust on both sides.
It wasn’t always like that.
At the height of the love affair between Iran and the West in the 1950s up through the 1970s, the Shah could do no wrong. To fend off any possible communist incursions, the United States poured millions of dollars into Iran to shore up the Shah. The oil windfall of the late 1970s, brought on by the Arab-Israeli war, was also a blessing to Iran. The Shah took advantage of the profits to rebuild his country and a new middle class was born. The downside of the boom, of course, was that it created in the Shah a new taste for luxury and power beyond the pale. He went to extraordinary lengths to sustain his appetite. He created the SAVAK, a special (and much loathed) security and intelligence force, trained and backed by the United States, which helped him to rule with an iron fist and isolated him from the people.
Washington did not seem to mind, at least not in the early stages of the Shah’s neurosis.
A blog by Jeb Sharp on Iran-U.S. relations quoted Henry Precht, the young American intelligence officer who managed arms sales between the United States and Iran under the Shah, as saying, “They promised the Shah that he could buy whatever he wanted and no one would quibble with him. Everything up to but not including nuclear weapons. So, that was my marching orders, facilitate, don’t get in the way of this process…. Then came the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. Oil prices rose dramatically. Suddenly, the Shah was flush with money. He bought massive quantities of the most high-tech weaponry money could buy. US officials were unsettled by the consequences of their bargain.”
Eventually, the Shah’s opulent lifestyle and tight hold on power through the security forces isolated the middle class, sidelined the communists and the mullahs, and narrowed the political space. Moreover, Pahlavi’s new hunger for high-tech military weapons—some argue that he laid the foundation for Iran’s nuclear program—isolated him from his Western allies, especially from Washington. By the time he was overthrown in 1979, he was a sad, broken man; betrayed and completely on his own.
Today’s Echoes
In much the same way the Western press is falling over itself for a Mir Hossein Mousavi sound bite today, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, according to one account, took 132 major interviews with the leading Western media organizations in only 112 days in office.
But the honeymoon, if ever there was one, between the then supreme leader of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khomeini (who died on June 3, 1989) and the West did not last. The West was hoping for another straw man. The Iran hostage crisis had come as a rude shock to the United States. It revealed, to the disgust and confusion of the West, that a bad guy had succeeded an unknown.
Following the Iran hostage crisis, it could be said that relations only went from bad to worse. The revolution was one of the major reasons why Jimmy Carter lost the presidency to Ronald Reagan, and relations between Tehran and Washington have been characterized by a cat-and-mouse diplomacy ever since. It’s nadir was marked by former President George W. Bush’s inclusion of Iran in the now-infamous “axis of evil.” Iran’s cozy relationship with North Korea, the recent denial of the Holocaust by its top leaders, its uranium enrichment program, and suspicions that it actively supports radical Islamic groups in Lebanon and Palestine have been at the heart of its conflicts with the United States and other Western countries.
The attempt to brand the post-June 12, 2009, demonstrations as Iran Revolution, Part II, may be correct in a sense. There were no mobile phones or citizen journalists during the first revolution. Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter have given the post-election crisis a voice and resonance that could only have been imagined 30 years ago. Yet it will still take some time before the mullahs in Tehran loosen their grip on power.
I was amused to see some demonstrating students interviewed. They called on President Barack Obama to speak out. But ultimately, only citizens—not outsiders—can change their own destiny. To be sure, Washington would like to see the Ayatollah (and President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad) lose grip and fall as quickly as possible. But this is wishful thinking.
In its impotent rage, the United States is quite happy to be seduced into believing that the protest against the June 12 election means that Iranians are now faced with two choices: the present order or a new one dominated by Western values. I think the truth lies closer to the first option than most are willing to admit. The catastrophic foreign policy bungling of the Bush years (especially with regard to the Middle East), the war on Iraq, the shame of Guantanamo, and the unilateralism of the last eight years have seriously undermined the credibility of U.S. foreign policy.
I suspect that even though voters in many parts of the Arab world may not like the existing political order, they’re reluctant to trade their present condition with the hypocrisy and double-standards that have characterized past relations with the West.
It will take more than the traditional cry of free speech and assembly to dislodge the mullahs and bring about the second revolution. Iranians, whose job at the end of the day it is to free their country, must be finding it hard to come to terms with the fact that those who are urging them on to the barricades now are the same people at the root of their problems 30 years ago. Where is the evidence of change?
Azu Ishiekwene has been an investigative reporter, a features writer, a member of the editorial board, and the editor of Punch Titles, Nigeria’s highest selling newspapers. He is currently the executive publications director of Punch and writes a weekly Tuesday column. He is the author of Nuhu Ribadu, a book on Nigeria’s stalled anti-corruption war, the chair of the CNN/MultiChoice African Journalist of the Year Award panel, and a member of the board of the World Editors Forum.