The Shah

by Abbas Milani

  Nevertheless, beginning in late 1972, Samii met regularly with the Shah for almost five months, discussing and setting out the parameters of the new party’s actions. Fortunately, Samii took copious notes every time he met with the Shah. These notes indicate that the Shah wanted a new kind of loyal opposition party, a centrist party with hints of social democratic ideas in its proposed platform. Of course, the Shah could still not fathom a truly independent loyal opposition, one that could in fact attract “those elements which would not join” the existing parties. The Shah told Samii he would “be looked after salary-wise.” At the same time, the Shah emphasized that “he was against a one-party system,” as it would invariably entail a distasteful dictatorship.38 The Shah insisted that the principles of “his revolution” could not of course be subjected to criticism. Samii gingerly answered that “in order to create the institution (His Imperial Majesty underlined the term institution), and to build up reliable public men, there had to be debate and criticism.” The Shah agreed, but added unequivocally that such criticism could not take the form of “Kani calling my government reactionary” or doubting the legitimacy of elections.

  The minutes of these meetings clearly show that the Shah knew what his regime needed, but was unwilling, or afraid, to allow it to develop. The Shah gave an example of what his envisioned loyal opposition could do. He suggested that the police, for example, had recently “found that the dynamite used by saboteurs was sold to them by people of our railroad administration. We would give the tip to [the new party] to attack the government.” In other words, he envisioned himself as the master puppeteer who could determine when and where the opposition would “attack.” He claimed that he wanted “democracy” but insisted it be “the real, not the fake, not the American type,” adding, “I have to have some choice.”

  In the course of these meetings, the Shah lamented the nature of politics—“dirty, one has to tell lies and enter into all kinds of deals with all kinds of people”—and “the spiritual and moral corruption everywhere.” For reasons that are not clear, the only country the Shah excluded from his harsh judgment was Austria! One can surmise that his love of the country might have been rooted in the fact that his physician for many years had been Austrian. He emphasized that his goal was “building up self-confidence and self-respect in the people, a belief in our own power and ability . . . to fight the tendency of the people, especially the youth, to deny, to denigrate, to reject.”

  In their third meeting, Samii indicated that if he was to build an institution that could “in crisis, when time comes for succession, be helpful in maintaining the Constitution, then he would need some concessions”; there would need to be “serious dialogue with students and youth in general,” he said. The Shah curtly dismissed the idea, adding that he did not “think they had very much to say.”

  The most heated debate took place over the question of what to do about the clergy. Samii said, with surprising frankness, that at that time “religion seems to provide the only channel of protest” and that Shiism had “become merely a political instrument”; nonetheless, he noted that religious leaders, “even if they were stooges of Communism,” must be listened to.

  The Shah was “skeptical and said that to try to treat with an akhound [cleric] was like going to bed with a madman.” He nevertheless said that he was “concerned that in modern societies, religion was necessary to provide stability.” Eventually, the Shah agreed to allow Samii to establish contact with the clergy, but insisted that no concessions were to be made and added that there was no need to mention the idea of dialogue with the clergy in the party manifesto.

  The Shah’s approach to religion was contradictory: he encouraged the growth of mosques and other religious institutions but, particularly after 1963, was altogether opposed to the idea of “listening to the clergy, much less making concessions to them”—even if they were moderate clergy who were opposed to Khomeini. By the time he changed his mind in 1978 and tried to solicit the support of such clergy, it was far too late. Khomeini was the undoubted leader of the vast network of religious organizations and forces, and moderate clerics did not dare openly criticize or challenge him.

  The Shah and Samii agreed that the party would first bring together ten of the country’s most reputable technocrats, intellectuals, and politicians as its founding members. The number would then increase to sixty. One of the ten was picked by Samii not because of his credentials but for his close ties to the Shah. This way, Samii believed, “the Shah would always know exactly what we were up to, and hopefully this would alleviate his anxieties.”39 The Shah assured Samii that the proposed new party could participate in elections and even negotiate with other opposition forces. Of course, as he repeated more than once, it would be he who “would guide [the party] and give it the cue.” Samii talked of endemic corruption, the need for an independent judiciary, the necessity for suspending military tribunals, civilian control of the military—on none of these issues did he receive satisfactory answers from the Shah. Four years later, under duress, the Shah accepted these changes and many other demands of the opposition. It is difficult not to wonder what might have happened to Iran if the Shah had made some of these concessions to Samii while in a position of strength, rather than to the opposition four years later when he was weak and vulnerable.

  But then one day the founding member Samii had included because of his ties to the Shah suddenly resigned. Samii immediately realized that the Shah had had a change of heart, and with some trepidation, on the last day of the Persian year in 1974, he went to the Court. The Shah began the discussion by lamenting his weight loss of seven kilos in the last week—a sign of his still-secret disease. Then a tearful Samii suggested that he must resign from the task of forming this party. The Shah accepted the resignation all too readily. What had started with a private bang ended with a whimper. The Samii project might have been the Shah’s last chance to create an “institution” that he knew his regime needed if there was to be a peaceful orderly transition, or if his country faced a crisis.

  The fact that the price of oil had suddenly quadrupled appeared to be a key factor in the Shah’s change of mind. Instead of a legitimate party led by Samii, he opted instead for the development of a one-party system. All other parties were dismantled in favor of the new Rastakhiz (Resurgence) Party. The Shah—his two hands jutting from his vest in an attempt to appear authoritative—declared in a nationally broadcast press conference that everyone must join the new party and that those who refused should leave the country.

  The Resurgence Party of 1975 was a stillborn monster and an immediate source of discontent, even ridicule. The key party ideologues were mostly from the ranks of lapsed Stalinists,40 mixing bad ideas with bad politics. Even Hoveyda, the first appointed secretary-general of the party, often ridiculed it in private while in public professing fealty to the idea and to the Shah.41

  How the Shah came up with the idea of a one-party system for Iran is hard to pinpoint. On numerous occasions, including in his first memoir and even as late as his conversations with Samii, he had underscored his opposition to single-party systems, describing them as harbingers of totalitarianism.

  Some believe the idea for the party first came to the Shah from Anwar al-Sadat in Egypt; others point the finger to a group of five mostly American-trained technocrats who were part of the Queen’s “think tank” and who suggested the one-party system based on Samuel Huntington’s prescription for political development in developing countries.42 The Shah initially rejected the group’s proposal, asking in anger, “Haven’t they read my book?” By then, in a gesture reminiscent of leaders like Mao, the Court had produced a handsome edition of the Shah’s Collected Works. The collection is indeed replete with statements against one-party systems. Others think the Shah took his cues on the single-party system from Mexico.

  The Shah had first toyed with the idea of a single party in the early 1960s and had spoken of it intermittently in the subsequent years. In each case,
he had walked away from the idea. But this time, without any consultation with anyone, including the Prime Minister, SAVAK, Alam, or the Queen, he announced the creation of the new one-party system at a press conference. A few days earlier, he had told Abdol-Majid Majidi, director of the Plan Organization, of his decision. The Shah was at the time vacationing in St. Moritz, and Majidi rushed to a public phone in the Suvretta Hotel to inform Hoveyda that the days of his Iran Novin were now numbered.

  During his press conference, the Shah not only announced the creation of a single party, but appointed a clearly surprised Hoveyda as its first secretary. The idea was a disaster. It failed to increase “political participation,” as the Shah and the Queen’s think tank kept promising, but instead became a political albatross that created nothing but discontent. The fierce battle between Hoveyda and Alam to dominate the party led to further paralysis. Each man had by then a number of lapsed Marxists amongst his staff, and each tried to place their “theorists” in places of authority. It mattered little to the Shah or to the men and women who eagerly, albeit cynically, served in the new party that the idea of limiting political activity to one party was against the letter and spirit of the constitution. By then the Shah’s words were the law, and party theorists and activists competed for a chance to develop a party platform and ideology commensurate with the Shah’s desires and designs.

  One of the most incredible of these party theorists was Professor Ahmad Fardid, the man who introduced Martin Heidegger to Iran and developed a sophisticated anti-Semitism narrative that nourished the paranoia of young people like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Soon after the fall of the Shah, the same Fardid became one of the most notorious advocates of the new regime, using Heideggerian mumbo-jumbo to legitimize the despotic rule of the clergy. The Shah had, strangely, ordered the new party ideology to be based on “dialectics,” which opened the door for both lapsed Marxists and Heideggerian anti-Semites to legitimately leave their dialectical mark on the party.

  Not long after the creation of the party, the Carter administration came to power and began to pressure the Shah to democratize and show more respect for human rights. Carter’s choice of William Sullivan as the new ambassador to Iran in June 1977 was, for some of the Shah’s aides, the first hint of trouble. Sullivan had served in South Asia, where he had developed a reputation as a “tamer of dictators.” But he knew nothing about Iran, as he readily admits in his own memoirs. Ardeshir Zahedi, who was Iran’s ambassador to the United States at the time, recommended that the Shah refuse to issue the required agreement for Sullivan’s appointment, but the Shah rejected the idea. We should not, he told Zahedi, pick a fight with Carter so early in his presidency.43 Ironically, so incompetent was Sullivan in the performance of his duties, and so different were his ideas from those of the White House that before two years, Jimmy Carter too wanted “to recall him”; but by then the damage had been done, and Cy Vance, the secretary of state, opposed the idea of a recall.44

  The issue of human rights was not the only sore spot in U.S. relations with Iran. In the last years of the Nixon administration and throughout the Ford administration, the two countries had been fighting an open, often-bitter war of diplomacy on the price of oil and on Iran’s nuclear program. When the Shah refused to use his influence in OPEC to reduce the price of oil, the United States made a covert pact with Saudi Arabia to keep the price of oil stagnant. The Shah claims that this refusal—and not the democratic aspirations of the people—was the real source of his downfall. Some scholars agree that the stagnant oil prices indeed contributed to the fall of the Shah.45 Just as Iran’s revenues were drastically reduced with this drop in the price of oil, the Carter administration resumed pressure on the Shah to democratize and liberalize.

  In one of his earliest meetings with the Shah, Sullivan told him that, according to his preliminary inquiries, Iran’s current rate of rapid economic development could not be maintained. The Shah was visibly shaken and ended the meeting prematurely. For a couple of weeks, he refused to meet with Sullivan again. He saw the comment as a clear indication that the Carter administration was unhappy with Prime Minister Hoveyda. Sullivan claims that he had no such intention. Nevertheless, a few days after this embittered meeting, Hoveyda was dismissed, and Jamshid Amuzegar was appointed prime minister.

  Amuzegar began his tenure with a serious handicap, for he had no choice but to implement an austerity program. He was nevertheless initially remarkably successful in the economic management of the country, reducing internal inflation from over 30 percent a year to about 10 percent. He injected a “measure of realism in the people’s expectations.”46 But in the political domain, he was deemed a failure—a “loner” who “never established an easy working relationship with the Shah.” He was bereft of charisma and incapable of “engendering any popularity.” Finally, his “handling, or lack of handling, of the religious leadership and their followers was little short of disastrous.” He either ignored them or at best made “perfunctory appearances” at religious ceremonies.47

  In the eyes of some royalists, Amuzegar’s “austerity” program included cutting the stipends the government secretly paid the clergy. It was these stipends that, according to this theory, assured the clergy’s support of the regime. For many, cutting these stipends was the single most important source of the revolution. For almost fifteen years after the revolution, Amuzegar kept silent about this allegation. He finally chose to clear the air in 1994, when he claimed that money had been paid directly to the clergy by the White House since 1953, and that it was Carter, not he, who cut the stipends.48 In reality, stipends to the clergy were minimal and were handled mostly by the Court or by SAVAK. Even more crucially, those who accepted these handouts were usually not amongst Khomeini’s supporters. As Nasir Asar, the long-serving Hoveyda liaison with the clergy, made clear, radical clergy “never deigned to take our money.”49

  More crucial than clerical stipends was the country’s economic reality. By 1978, Iran’s “GNP growth in real terms dropped to 2.8 percent.” This economic slowdown was exacerbated by unusually high inflation rates. Like much of the West, Iran faced the strange hybrid phenomenon of “stagflation.” Some in the U.S. Congress began to worry about Iran’s budgetary priorities (and the fact that, in line with the Shah’s views, precedence was given to military matters over social needs). These anxieties led to the concept of “link[ing] Iran’s human rights performance with arms transfer.”50

  Politically, too, Amuzegar was fighting an uphill battle. In 1977, the dismissal of Hoveyda as prime minister—a post he had held for almost fourteen years, longer than any other minister in Iran’s constitutional period—signaled to the opposition the end of an era. Some saw it as the beginning of the end of the Shah.* As Carter’s human rights policy went into effect, the opposition began to constantly test the waters with the regime and push for more and more freedom.

  Even this inauspicious constellation of the stars was not enough to end the Shah’s regime. In the last two years of his rule, at each critical moment, the Shah arguably made the worst possible choice. He showed weakness when he needed to show strength, and he feigned power when he had none. The reasons for this remarkable series of errors were personal and political, and they were rooted not only in the Shah’s storied vacillations, but also in his view that the whole movement was a conspiracy of outside forces against him. He changed his mind about who masterminded the conspiracy, but he never wavered in his belief that conspiracy was the causal root of the democratic movement.

  In his last book, Answer to History, written in exile long after he had been “un-kinged,” the Shah still argued, with disturbing certainty, that it was a conspiracy of Western and Communist forces that overthrew him. He argued that to “understand the upheaval in Iran . . . one must understand the politics of oil.” He went on to claim that as soon as he began to insist on a fair share of oil wealth for Iran, “a systematic campaign of denigration was begun concerning my government and my person . . . it was at this
time that I became a despot, an oppressor, a tyrant.”51 What the Shah failed to understand was that it was in fact the democratic aspirations of the Iranian people that begot the movement against him and that, ironically, his own social and economic policies of the 1960s and 1970s helped create the very social forces—particularly the middle class and the new technocratic class—that united to overthrow him. Even if Western or Communist powers were indeed conspiring against him, their plans worked only because there was fertile domestic ground for them.

  Even when the Shah looked for domestic causes of the revolution, he was under an illusion. He concluded that he should have exercised more authoritarianism, not less. “Today, I have come to realize that the events of 1978–9 [were] attributable in part to the fact that I moved too rapidly in opening the doors of the universities, without imposing more severe preliminary selection. The entrance exams were too easy.”52 He called the students “spoiled children” who helped wreak havoc on Iran. In another passage, he contemplated the idea of having agreed to the military’s proposed bloodletting. The blood that had been shed since the revolution, he said, has been incomparably greater than the most egregious plans of his military.

  The Shah dismissed nearly every form of opposition to his rule as a tool of Western governments to bring pressure on him.53 In 1977, as the democratic movement was picking up momentum, he ordered some of his top oil negotiators to meet with Western oil companies and “give them what they want.”54 In the months leading up to the revolution, he was desperately trying to understand what the United States and Britain “wanted of him.” He called to Court political figures he knew had close ties to the two governments. He asked Ahmad Goreishi (a scion of an aristocratic family and a close friend of Richard Helms)and Homayoun Sanatizadeh (also reportedly close to the U.S. government) as much in anxiety as in anger—“What do these Americans want of us?”55