The Modern Middle East (27 page)

There was a change in the collective psychology of the Middle East, especially among the Israelis and among the Arabs with whom they had fought. The 1967 War had instilled an attitude of defeat among the Arabs and of victory among the Israelis. But this had been no ordinary war. For the Arabs it was a defeat of historic proportions, a big “step backward” (
naksa
) that shook their belief in themselves and their abilities. For the Israelis, the conquest of so much additional territory could only mean the further validation of the Zionist cause and what Israel and its people stood for. The contrast could not have been more stark. On one side stood a righteous conqueror, claiming support from history and the Old Testament, while on the other side stood a defeated, bewildered force, its energies sapped by false promises and structural atrophy.

The 1973 War changed all this. The war itself was inconclusive and without any clear winners or losers. But it resulted in an important psychological victory for the Arabs by reversing the defeatism that had become so rampant after June 1967. In the immediate aftermath of the October War, the prevailing psychology of the Arab-Israeli conflict was one of mutual fear and mistrust, a begrudging respect for the opponent on both sides based on the realization that the enemy was indeed capable of inflicting serious wounds in any future conflicts. The ensuing military stalemate gave rise to a war of nerves, with the Israelis tightening their grip on the Occupied Territories, the Syrians refusing to recognize Israel as long as the Golan Heights were occupied, and the Egyptians going it alone and getting the Sinai back through negotiations. The Palestinians, desperate and alone, sought solace in violence. And Lebanon, under the weight of its own fragile political system and the added stress of Fedayeen attacks, imploded into civil war. In these precarious circumstances the 1970s were ending, but not before the eruption of yet another drama of historic proportions, this time the Iranian revolution of 1978–79.

5
The Iranian Revolution

Few words in the language of politics are as overused and abused as
revolution.
The Third Worldism of the 1950s and the national liberation movements of the 1960s gave special currency to the word, with self-declared revolutionaries promising liberation from the forces of global oppression and evil at home and abroad. In many ways, the historic developments in China, in Cuba, and throughout Africa in the 1950s and 1960s were indeed revolutionary. Old political orders were destroyed, new ones were built in their place, and existing relationships between the state and society were profoundly altered. But the use of the term broadened and gained potency as more and more politicians discovered the domestic and international benefits of calling themselves “revolutionaries,” especially before jubilant followers.

Despite what the Nassers and the Qaddafis of the world want their followers to believe, a revolution is more than delivering moving speeches. It is more than clenching fists or wagging fingers at more powerful and dominant adversaries. Theatrics, of course, are as much a part of revolutions as they are of other political forms; indeed, revolutions tend to be theatrical and require careful attention to imagery, symbols, and rhetoric. But as historical developments—monumental political explosions set off by the hopes and actions of the masses that extend to the social, cultural, and economic domains as well—revolutions are relatively rare occurrences. They involve ingredients not always easy to come by: millions of people for whom pursuing a cause has become more pressing than the chores of daily life; the collapse of state institutions and their replacement by new ones; and the reconstitution of a political order radically different from the old order. These changes resonate not only domestically but also regionally and globally, affecting balance-of-power equations, alliances, and international
economics. For these reasons, the Iranian revolution of 1978–79 merits detailed analysis.

First, however, a few conceptual points regarding revolutions and revolutionary movements need to be clarified. Let us begin with a definition of revolutions. As a phenomenon, a revolution entails a fundamental change in the institutions, agendas, and overall nature of the state and its relations with society.
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Revolutions, therefore, are more profoundly transformative than coups and other forms of state takeover. Coups often consist merely of changes in officeholders and, at most, their policies. A revolution, however, entails structural changes in the basic composition and operations of the state and thus in the way the state relates to society.

At the broadest level, it is possible to distinguish four ideal types of revolutions: planned, spontaneous, negotiated, and instigated from above. Planned revolutions, which have historically taken the form of successful guerrilla movements, start out as premeditated, preplanned movements by a select group of self-declared “revolutionaries” whose specific purpose is to capture political power. The Chinese and Cuban revolutions were perhaps the best examples of planned revolutions, although the revolutions of Algeria, Vietnam, and Nicaragua also involved considerable advanced planning by revolutionary fighters. By contrast, spontaneous revolutions, of which the French and Iranian revolutions are prime examples, entail little advance planning and start out as haphazard, largely unorganized acts of protest. Encouraged by the steady weakening of the state, the rebellions soon snowball into a full-blown revolution. In the process, the movement becomes increasingly more radical, valorizes the protesting masses, and gives rise to an emerging cadre of leaders, some of whom are themselves caught by surprise and are later pushed aside in the unfolding drama.

Negotiated revolutions ensue when the state has become weak and is vulnerable to pressure from society but is not weak enough to be overthrown, and when society has become politically emboldened and empowered but is not powerful enough to take over the state. The only solution to the political stalemate is for representatives of the state and society to negotiate, as they did in much of eastern Europe in the late 1980s, resulting in a largely peaceful, often democratic, transfer of power. Finally, some revolutions come from above, led by the new inheritors of the state, often its former army commanders who have now assumed political control and wish to mold society to their own liking. Atatürk and Nasser viewed their missions in such a way, and so did Qaddafi for much of his reign. Despite their greater frequency as compared to other types of revolutions, revolutions from above tend to have fewer lasting effects in the long run, since
they are dictated by state leaders rather than being a product of impulses from within society.

The Iranian revolution was a product of a series of spontaneous, largely unorganized strikes and demonstrations that erupted throughout the country beginning in late 1976 and early 1977. Mounting frustration with rising unemployment and the bursting of the oil bubble beginning in 1975 only heightened the country’s general feelings of anxiety. The middle classes directed their economic frustrations at political targets and demanded government accountability, an end to corruption, and, increasingly, deeper and deeper political changes. The state, long isolated from society and buffered by sycophants and yes-men, was incapable of responding to what was rapidly becoming a crisis and instead drifted from one panicked reaction to another. Within the opposition, the clergy, whose religious position brought them popular respect and influence, had the upper hand. Among them, a certain Ayatollah Khomeini was best positioned to become the movement’s—soon the “revolution’s”—leader. Panic only expedited the monarchy’s collapse. The end came in January 1979, and shortly thereafter Khomeini triumphantly returned from exile. The task of postrevolutionary consolidation was facilitated by a long hostage drama involving American diplomats and by an even longer, bloody war with Iraq, lasting eight years.
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Both suited Khomeini’s purposes in ensuring his hold on power. With the death of the ayatollah in 1989 a Second Republic was inaugurated, quite unofficially, and then the Third Republic started in 1997 with the surprise election of a dark-horse, reformist candidate to the presidency.

More than three decades after the revolution’s success, the Pahlavi state is for most Iranians—a majority of whom were born after the revolution—an abstract, historical footnote.
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But the revolution would not have even begun, and would not have had a chance to succeed, had it not been for the internal decay and inherent fragility of the Pahlavi state. After all, a revolution’s occurrence depends primarily on the incumbent state’s susceptibility to pressures from below. It is, therefore, important to look at Iran’s prerevolutionary state to better understand the seeds of its demise.

The history of the Pahlavi state can be divided into four general phases. The first phase began with the formal establishment of the Pahlavi dynasty in 1925 by Reza Shah and lasted until his forced abdication in 1941. As chapter 2 demonstrated, during this period the Iranian monarchy laid the foundations of a new state, one that was heavily dependent on the person of the
king. The monarch was in turn supported by an expanding army and a small, though steadily growing, bureaucracy. There was also a theoretically functioning parliament (the Majles), and therefore a prime minister, though neither the Majles nor the prime minister was allowed to play a meaningful role in the country’s political process. Throughout Reza Shah’s rule, the parliament remained a rubber stamp, set up to provide the appearance of democracy, and the prime minister’s tenure in office depended solely on the whim of the shah.

Despite some chronic weaknesses, the state managed to institute an unprecedented level of political centralization. Tribal challenges to the central government were quashed, although occasional instances of banditry and scattered armed opposition to government soldiers continued to occur.
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Additionally, the clergy, whose cultural influence had long pervaded all layers of society, were effectively suppressed, and their opposition to the state’s modernizing agendas was largely neutralized.
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By the end of his reign, the state that Reza Shah had established had acquired a number of pronounced features. The shah’s primary goal was to turn Iran into a “modern” country, an endeavor he saw as synonymous with secularization. The state was not only authoritarian but highly personalist, with the person of the shah dominating all of the state’s other institutions (e.g., the Majles, the bureaucracy, political parties). Personal dominance and control should not be confused with legitimacy and staying power. The personalization of the system undermined its long-term consolidation in relation to society, and the regime continued to be relatively fragile. When the British removed Reza Shah from his throne in 1941, it was only under their initial protection that his twenty-two-year-old son could stay in power.

The second phase in the history of the Pahlavi state began with the reign of Muhammad Reza Shah in 1941 and lasted until 1953. This was a time of profound political instability, with none of the country’s political institutions or actors able to deal effectively with the various crises that at the time engulfed Iran. Reza Shah’s removal unleashed the various centrifugal forces that he had once suppressed. The British justified their removal of Reza Shah on the grounds of his pro-German sympathies. While the charge was to some extent true, the real reason for the shah’s removal had more to do with Britain’s desire to move war supplies to its ally, the Soviet Union, through Iran with little or no Iranian resistance. In August 1941, Britain and the Soviet Union divided Iran into two spheres of influence, as they had done once earlier during the time of the Constitutional Revolutions (1905–11). The country, beset by famine, drought, and plague, drifted through
the war years. Tribes now reasserted their autonomy, in some parts of the country even forcing government soldiers out of the areas they had previously lost.

After World War II, the British relinquished their sphere of influence in the south, but the Soviets refused to follow suit in the north. Instead, they supported two popular uprisings that had erupted in the Kurdish-and Azeri-speaking areas of the northeast. They refused to let central government forces quell the rebellions and instead set up two puppet Soviet republics in Iranian Kurdistan and Azerbaijan, respectively. The Soviets finally departed as a result of what turned out to be the first success of the newly established United Nations, and the two rebellions collapsed.
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Nevertheless, the central government remained generally incapable of asserting full control or effecting meaningful changes in the country.

A primary reason for the state’s weakness in relation to society was its internal divisions into various contending centers of power. These included the person of the shah, the bureaucratic-military establishment, and the Majles. The British, Soviet, and, increasingly, American embassies in Tehran were also highly influential, but they never functioned as quasi state institutions in Iran, as they did in several other developing countries at the time. Reza Shah’s abdication proved especially beneficial for parliamentary politics, as it led to the increasing ascendancy of the Majles. Throughout the 1940s, a string of elections to the Majles brought in different cabinets and resulted in what for many Iranians resembled a democratic political process. But the Majles was riddled with factionalism and filled with careerist politicians. Moreover, with a constitutionally mandated term of only two years, it could not embark on long-term planning or foster political stability. The young shah’s deep-seated hostility toward the Majles and his constant attempts to manipulate and undermine it did not help the cause of political stability. Cabinet turnovers and reshuffles were one indicator of the extent of Iran’s political instability at the time. From 1941 to 1953, the country had twelve prime ministers, who formed seventeen cabinets, which underwent twenty-three major reshuffles. The average age of each cabinet was eight months, only three months if the reshuffles are taken into account.
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