The Bloody Lesson the Ayatollah Took from the Shah
On November 6, 1978, as riots raged throughout Tehran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, addressed the nation in a conciliatory speech. “I have heard the voice of your revolution,” he said. The Shah promised to correct the regime’s mistakes, release political prisoners, call parliamentary elections, investigate corruption among him and ease the crackdown on dissent against a domestic opposition.
But, as has happened so often in the history of fragile regimes, the dictator’s gesture of conciliation was interpreted as desperation. In a village near Paris, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini constantly attacked the Shah with derision. The “despotic regime of the Shah” was weak, he had said earlier, and “drawing its last breath.” And today, despite the Shah’s speech in Tehran, there can be no compromise.
Two months later, the Shah, suffering from cancer, fled Iran and began traveling from country to country, searching for an acceptable place of exile. He died in July 1980 in Cairo.
The current head of the Islamic regime, Khomeini’s successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is eighty-six years old. He is one of the longest-reigning dictators on the planet. He is fully aware of the history of the decline and fall of the old regime. And now, as the Islamic Republic faces dramatic protests in dozens of cities across Iran, Khamenei faces a dilemma not unlike that of the Shah. With the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and other instruments of force as his bludgeon, Khamenei chose bloodshed over conciliation. The regime’s attempt to cut off the Internet and other means of communication has significantly slowed reporting, but human rights groups say Iranian authorities have already killed up to two hundred protesters.
“Unfortunately, if the Ayatollah takes one lesson from the Shah, it is that the Shah was weak and gave in,” Scott Anderson, the author of “King of Kings,” a history of the revolution published last year, told me. “Brutally speaking, if the Shah had been tougher and ordered his soldiers to indiscriminately kill people in the streets, he could have been saved. The question now is whether the average soldier in the streets will shed more and more blood. How far will he go?”
The regime’s leaders, various experts told me, drew dark instructions not only from their historical enemy, the Shah, but also from later history. In the late 1980s, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev attempted to modernize his regime by democratizing the political system, ending censorship, easing the Cold War with the United States, and introducing market mechanisms into the economy. His conclusion was that “we can no longer live like this”; a regime guided by communist ideology and confrontation had left the Soviet Union in a state of widespread poverty, isolation and confrontation. And yet, although many conditions improved thanks to Gorbachev’s liberal policies, he also risked the existence of a fragile system. Ultimately he failed to control the forces he had unleashed, and by the end of 1991 the Soviet Union had collapsed and Gorbachev was forced from office.
Khamenei came to power in 1989, at the height of “Gorbymania”. The spectacle of the fall of the Soviet Union led him and the Iranian regime to become more wary of the West and any signs of internal reform. “I have now come to the conclusion that the United States has designed a comprehensive plan to overthrow the system of the Islamic Republic,” Khamenei said in a speech to government officials in July 2000. “This plan is an imitation of the one that led to the collapse of the former Soviet Union. American officials intend to implement the same thing in Iran, and there are many clues. [evidencing this] in their selfish and often hasty remarks made over the past few years.
