Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (139 page)

The Islamic fundamentalists, mainly but not exclusively Shi’ites, struck again and again at the forces of stability in the Middle East. They tried hard to overthrow the regime in Egypt and finally succeeded in murdering Sadat in 1981. In 1979 they seized the shrine of Mecca by force, in an attempt to destroy the Saudi royal family, and were ejected from its underground labyrinth of tunnels only after a week of bitter fighting. There was another gruesome incident on 30 July 1987 when 155,000 Iranian Shi’ite pilgrims rioted, tried to seize Mecca, and were slaughtered in their hundreds by Saudi police. But their most resounding success came in 1978–9 when they toppled the Shah of Iran from his Peacock Throne. This cataclysmic event, much misunderstood, casts a searchlight on the forces at work in modern times. The regime should have been immensely strong. It had been armed to the teeth by the Americans and British, as the residual ‘stabilizing force’ in the Gulf after the Western military withdrawal. The monarchy, immensely ancient and respected as an institution, was the one unifying force in a country which was essentially a collection of racial, religious, cultural, linguistic and geographical minorities, most of whom hated each other and many of whom looked to the throne for protection. By contrast, the Shi’ite fundamentalists of Qum and Meshed spoke only for a section of the Muslims, and their leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini, was much hated as well as loved and feared. The Shah was not overthrown because he was pro-West, or a capitalist, or corrupt, or cruel – most Middle Eastern rulers were cruel and by their standards he was a liberal – and least of all because he was king. The truth is he destroyed himself by succumbing to the fatal temptation of modern times: the lure of social engineering. He fell because he tried to be a Persian Stalin.

It was in the blood. His father was a Persian Cossack officer who seized power in 1925 and modelled himself on Ataturk, the great secularizer; later he came to admire and envy the ruthlessness with
which Stalin collectivized the peasants. He said grimly: ‘I have made the Iranians realize that when they get up in the morning they must go to work, and work hard all day long.’
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He personally defenestrated an idle minister. His son came to the throne as a child in 1944, ruled from the age of twenty-one but entered on his grandiose visions only in the 1960s with the rapid increase in oil revenues. He began by giving away the royal lands to the peasants, then changed his mind and decided, like Stalin, to modernize the country in his own lifetime. There was no more popular demand for this than in Soviet Russia: it was revolution from above, what the Shah called the ‘White Revolution’. His schemes changed from simple investment planning to megalomaniac social engineering in a series of leaps. Planning was first introduced in the late 1940s: the first Seven Year Plan involved a modest investment of $58 million mainly in agriculture, primary products, roads and cement. The second Seven Year Plan, 1955–62, jumped to a billion dollars, on roads, railways and dams for power and irrigation. A third, Five Year Plan spent $2.7 billion, 1963–8, on pipelines, steel and petro-chemical industries and, moving into the social field, began to shove people around for the first time. The Fourth Plan, 1968–72, spent $10 billion on roads, ports, airports, dams, natural gas, water, housing, heavy metallurgy and agro-business. The Stalinist phase began with the Fifth Plan, 1973–8, which started with a spending target of $36 billion, quickly jacked up to $70 billion when oil prices quadrupled.
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For the financial year 1978–9, the Shah’s last, some $17.2 billion went on development alone, three hundred times the cost of the entire first plan, plus a further $8.5 billion on health, education and welfare, as well as $10 billion on military spending.
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The planners, educated abroad and known as
massachuseti
(after the famous Institute of Technology, MIT), had the arrogance of party
apparatchiks
and a Stalinist faith in centralized planning, the virtues of growth and bigness. Above all, they lusted for change. There was an inferno of extractive expansion: gold, salt, lime, phosphorus, gypsum, marble, alabaster, precious stones, coal, lead, zinc, chromite, iron, and the sixth-largest copper industry in the world, newly built in Central Iran with 25,000 miners living in brick barracks. Four nuclear reactors were started, plus a nationwide rash of factories producing cars, diesel engines, elevators, bicycles, water-meters, asbestos, foundry-sand, glucose, aluminium, clothes, tractors, machine-tools and arms. The Shah boasted that his White Revolution combined ‘the principles of capitalism … with socialism, even communism …. There’s never been so much change in 3,000 years. The whole structure is [being turned] upside down.’
³⁶
By trying to spend too much too fast he bought himself inflation. To
put the brake on inflation, he organized student-gangs to arrest ‘profiteering’ merchants and small businessmen. This merely gave youth a taste for violence and cost the throne the bazaar.

That might not have mattered for the Shahs had hitherto always been able to invoke the conservative countryside to tame urban radicalism. But the Shah’s gravest error was to alienate the countryside, whose peasant sons formed his army. Having given the royal lands and the confiscated estates of the clergy to the peasants, he found, predictably, that output declined. In 1975, having thus turned Iran from a food-exporting to a food-importing nation, he changed the policy and embarked on collectivization. The model was the 1972–5 Dez irrigation project in northern Khuzestan, which had taken back 100,000 hectares of prime farmland, given to the peasants only five years before, and turned everything and everybody over to what was called ‘consolidated agricultural management’. Thus yeoman farmers were turned into a rural proletariat, earning a dollar a day and living in cinder-block two-room houses, back-to-back in new ‘model towns’ called
shahraks.
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The law of June 1975 in effect extended this model to the whole country, forcing the independent peasants into several hundred ‘agro-business units’ or vast ‘farm corporations’ or into 2,800 co-operatives. It is true that the peasants, while relinquishing their freeholds, got shares in the new companies. But in essentials it was not very different from forced collectivization.
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The scheme involved knocking 67,000 small villages into 30,000 larger ones, each big enough to justify clinics, schools, piped water and roads. Large families were broken up. Menacing convoys of bulldozers and earth-moving equipment, often of stupendous size, would descend, without warning or explanation, upon 2,000-year-old village communities, and literally uproot them. The place-names of tiny hamlets, even orchards, were changed. The agricultural planners and the ‘justice corpsmen’, as they were called, behaved with all the arrogance of the party activists Stalin used to push through his programme, though there was no resistance and no actual brutality.
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The programme as a whole was a deliberate assault on tribal diversity, local patriarchs, family cohesion, provincial accents and tongues, regional dress, customs and interest groups, anything in fact which offered alternative centres of influence to the all-powerful central state. It was fundamental to the White Revolution that the ultimate freehold of all land and property resided in the crown, that is the state. Thus the Shah, despite his liberalism and his public posture as a pillar of the West, was pursuing a policy of radical totalitarianism. He argued: it shows that if you think that it is only through bloodshed that you can make a revolution, you are wrong.’
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But it was the Shah
who was wrong. The elders were pushed into the
shahraks
but their grown sons went into the cities and formed the Ayatollah’s mob; and their brothers in the army were reluctant to shoot them when the time came. The Shah was reluctant too. Collectivization is impossible without terror; and he had not the heart for it. When it came to the point, at the close of 1978, he felt he had been betrayed by his ally, President Carter.
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But he also betrayed himself. In the end he lacked the will to power.

Both Shah and President betrayed the Iranians. They handed over a nation, including many defenceless minorities, to a priesthood which had no tradition or training for the exercise of political power.
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The result was a barbarous terror exercised by a small group of fundamentalist despots, acting in the name of an islamic Republic’ established in February 1979. In the first two years of its existence it executed over 8,000 people, convicted in Islamic courts of being ‘enemies of Allah’.
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The Khomeini terror moved first against the former regime, slaughtering twenty-three generals, 400 other army and police officers and 800 civilian officials; then against supporters of rival Ayatollahs, 700 of whom were executed; then against its former liberal-secular allies (500) and the Left (100). From the start it organized the execution or murder of leaders of ethnic and religious minorities, killing over 1,000 Kurds, 200 Turkomans, and many Jews, Christians, Shaikhis, Sabeans and members of dissident Shi’ia sects as well as orthodox Sunnis.
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Its persecution of the Bahais was particularly ferocious.
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Churches and synagogues were wrecked, cemeteries desecrated, shrines vandalized or demolished. The judicially murdered ranged from the Kurdish poet Allameh Vahidi, aged 102, to a nine-year-old girl, convicted of ‘attacking revolutionary guards’.

Khomeini’s harassment of Iran’s Sunni minority (many of them Iraqis), and reciprocal measures against Persian Shi’ites in Iraq, resurrected Iran-Iraq border disputes, which have poisoned their relations ever since the creation of Iraq by Britain in 1920–2. In September 1980, reports that most of Iran’s senior officers had been murdered or fled, and that its armed forces, especially its once formidable air force, were in disarray, tempted Iraq’s Baathist dictator, Saddam Hussein, to launch a full-scale invasion of Iran, beginning with air attacks on the world’s largest oil refinery at Abadan. He hoped to secure control of the Shatt-al-Arab, the main sea-outlet of the Tigris-Euphrates, and possibly Iran’s oilfields. In fact the war, instead of being a quick Iraqi triumph, lasted eight years, and cost (on both sides) over a million dead. Saddam ended up with very little: a few miles of unimportant territory, which he quickly relinquished in 1990 when he found himself in trouble with the West.
During the war itself, however, the West, though neutral, tended to assist Iraq. It was well aware of the cruelty and gangsterism of Saddam’s regime. But it was still more hostile to Khomeini’s Iran, which had invaded the American embassy and held hostage its staff (releasing them only in return for a ransom), as well as financing and arming various anti-Western terrorist groups.

So Western warships patrolled the Gulf, clearing Iranian mines from the sea-lanes used by tankers exporting Arab oil, while doing nothing to impede Iraqi air attacks on Iranian tankers. Indeed, when Iraqi jets, on 27 May 1987, mistakenly fired Exocet missiles at the American frigate
Stark
, killing thirty-seven of its crew, Washington’s protest was muted; and American readiness to attack Iranian targets deemed hostile was demonstrated on 3 July 1988, when the US Navy Warship
Vincennes
mistakenly shot down an Iranian civil airliner, killing 290 people, in the belief that it was a warplane. Most serious of all, however, was the complacency with which the West, while denying arms to Iran, sold them to Saddam, who was also receiving huge supplies, particularly of modern tanks, artillery, armoured troop carriers and aircraft, from the Soviet Union.

The Iran-Iraq war came to an inconclusive end on 8 August 1988. But Saddam, far from disarming, actually increased the size of his armed forces, which by 1990 were the fourth-largest in the world. With Western agreement, he had been subsidized militarily during the war by the Sunni-dominated Gulf oil states, in addition to Iraq’s own enormous oil revenues (by the end of the 1980s it was the second largest oil producer, after Saudi Arabia, in the Middle East); virtually all these huge sums, amounting during the 1980s to something approaching $100 billion, went on creating a war machine. The Israelis did not share the West’s indifference to Iraq’s growing military power, especially when their intelligence sources revealed that a French-built nuclear reactor, near Baghdad, was being used to produce material for nuclear bombs. On 7 June 1981 Israeli aircraft destroyed the reactor. But Saddam continued to scour the world for weapons of mass destruction and the means to make them; by the end of the 1980s he had acquired both a chemical and a biological warfare capability, and indeed in 1989 he killed over 5,000 Kurds, alleged to be rebels, by dropping chemical bombs on their villages.

Saddam was well-known to Western governments as a man of exceptional depravity, from a clan of professional brigands.
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He had acquired his first gun at the age of ten (and committed his first murder, it was claimed, two years later). As head of the secret police from 1968, and as president from 1979, his career had been punctuated
both by the slaughter of his colleagues and rivals, often by his own hand, and by atrocities on the largest possible scale, not least mass public hangings of Jews. A tract he published testified to his ambition to extend Iraq’s borders on the model of the ancient Babylonian empire. Nonetheless, while American and British military assistance tapered off in the 1980s, France continued to supply modern weapons, West Germany provided hi-tech military expertise (some of it illegally), and the Russians not only poured in arms but kept over a thousand military experts in Iraq to train Saddam’s armed forces in their use, and in tactics and strategy.