The Shah

by Abbas Milani

  After yet another operation, this time to attend to what physicians called his “subdiaphragmatic infection,” after a “liter and a half of pus and necrosed pancreas debris was drained from his body,” and after yet another period of recuperation and newfound hope for recovery, on the night of July 26, the Shah went into a coma. Heroic measures by physicians resuscitated him for one last brief visit with his family. At 9:45 on the morning of the July 27, 1980, sixty-year-old Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, not long before called the “King of Kings, the Light of the Aryans,” passed away.

  The next day, Ardeshir Zahedi and Aslan Afshar worked with Egyptian authorities to map out the details of the funeral. A procession began at the Abdin Palace and ended at the Al-Rifa’i Mosque, where the Shah was buried, not far from where his father had been laid to rest over three decades earlier.

  In spite of his long illness, in spite of having occupied the throne for thirty-seven years, and although he repeatedly claimed in exile that his son would return to power, the Shah left no political will. The Queen decided to draft such a will on his behalf. In her own words, “As I was there and witnessed the King’s deepest thoughts during his last days, I considered it my duty to put together” what was claimed to be his last will. The alleged will ended with these words: “I trust the young Crown Prince to Almighty God and to the great people of Iran.”91 Some of the Shah’s confidantes, particularly Ardeshir Zahedi, objected to the posthumous drafting of the will.

  A few months after the death of the Shah, Stanley Escudero, an American official who had served in Tehran for a while offered his analysis of “What Went Wrong in Iran.” Why, he asked, did the United States “not see this coming”? He argued that, “rather simplistically stated, the Shah’s system of rule depended upon a firm hand at the top, supported by a ruthless security mechanism, and the financial capacity to reduce dissatisfaction through development programs, outright subsidy, and the co-option of those who might have otherwise opposed the regime.” He goes on to say that “years of repression, corruption, mismanagement, sycophancy, hollow promises, and just general inefficiency,” made for popular discontent. Moreover, in his view, many Iranians are “cynical and distrustful of their government,” and thus overlooked or doubted “the many significant accomplishments of imperial rule. Rapid modernization and burgeoning educational opportunities also helped set the stage for the Pahlavi collapse.” The American diplomat concluded that the reason the United States failed to see the storm was that, from the late 1960s, “it had become the unspoken policy of the [State] Department and the Embassy . . . to curtail reports critical of the Shah.”92

  In other words, the Shah’s desire for rapid modernization, combined with his increased authoritarianism, helped create the tragedy of his reign—a period of increasing, albeit unequal, prosperity, ending with the rule of a de-modernizing clerical regime.

  On a personal level too, the Shah was, in the classical sense of the word, a tragic figure—a hare pretending to roar like a lion. At the end, he was both a victim and a figment of his own imagination, haunted by personal and historical demons and dreads, believing in his own anointed grandeur, yet ruling over a nation that simply refused to play the docile role he imagined for it. What Othello said of himself can well be said of the Shah: he had “done the state some service,” and he had loved Iran, not wisely but too well. “Perplexed in the extreme,” he indeed “threw a pearl away / Richer than all his tribe.”

  EPILOGUE

  There is no history . . . only biography.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Why did the Shah fall in 1979? Why would a country undergoing one of the world’s fastest modernization projects, a country experiencing 20 percent annual increases in its GNP, suddenly opt for a revolution, and choose as its leader a cleric who dismissed modernity and modernization as pernicious colonial ploys? Why would a revolution, led in fact by the middle class, and taking place at the crest of what has been called the Third Wave of democratization, bring about not a democracy but clerical despotism? What role did the “resource curse”—the disruptive impact of petrodollars—play in begetting these cataclysmic tumults? Finally, are there any lessons to be learned in the rise and fall of the Shah that can guide today’s policy makers in dealing with Iran’s clerical regime? The Shah is an attempt to offer some answers to these critical questions.

  During the Shah’s thirty-seven-year rule, Iran experimented with everything from “guided democracy” and “authoritarian modernization” to pseudo-totalitarian and military rule. During this period, there were four competing paradigms of modernization (and modernity). Secular nationalists wanted democracy, rule of law, an empowered civil society, and a market economy; religious advocates of modernization wanted a modicum of democracy, within a reformed Shiism that would provide the society’s moral fiber along with a market economy. Supporters of these two paradigms vacillated between advocating for a non-aligned Iran or for one allied with America but independent. The third paradigm was promoted by radical Marxists, who wanted modernization forced on society by the absolute power of a state controlled by their “vanguard party,” a planned economy, and a Russian tilt in Iran’s foreign policy. The Shah offered his own eclectic paradigm of modernization. A separate paradigm, critical of modernization and modernity and rejecting the desirability of both, came most notably in the ideas of Ayatollah Khomeini. The paradox of the fall of the Shah lies in the strange reality that nearly all advocates of modernity formed an alliance against the Shah and chose as their leader the biggest foe of modernity. The roots of this paradox, as The Shah argues, lie in the Shah’s eclectic paradigm of modernization, combined with the inconsistencies of U.S. policy.

  The Shah’s vision of modernization was based on several axioms: Change in Iran required a concentration of authoritarian power in his own hands; democracy was an impediment to this change; in the battle for change, his biggest foes were the communists and the secular nationalist democrats. His most strategic ideological allies, he believed, were the moderate Shiite clergy.

  The Shah believed in the urgent need to end feudalism and create a market economy, linked to Western capital markets. But he also had a pseudo-socialist vision, wherein the state would dominate key sectors of the economy and use all tools, including the military, to control prices and inflation. Even wages were, in his vision, to be decided more by his regime’s political exigencies than the laws of the free market or measures of productivity.

  By the mid-seventies, the unintended consequences of the Shah’s vision began to appear. Not only the members of the bazaar—the traditional heart of trade in Iran and a source of support for democratic change—but even members of the modern industrialist class who had greatly benefited from the Shah’s modernization plans were either too disgruntled with his regime or too politically impotent to help him. The unwritten covenant between the Shah and the modern industrialists had stipulated that they eschew engagement in politics in return for his pro-business policies. By 1977, this covenant came back to haunt them. Those who had most benefited from the Shah’s modernization project were ill-organized and unable to rescue him in his hour of need.

  The political economy of oil also had a complicated, even contradictory, influence on the Shah’s eclectic model of modernization. As the price of oil rose, the pace of economic development also increased. A larger and more educated middle class was created, and land reform, begun in early 1961, gave millions of peasants a piece of land. But the failure of the state to provide sufficient financial and technological support to this class made it increasingly difficult for them to remain in the villages and sustain themselves economically. By the late-sixties, the rise in Iran’s oil revenues turned the cities, particularly Tehran, into a magnet for these villagers. The massive internal migration that took place changed the demographic profile of Iran from a feudal, village-based economy to a rapidly industrializing, increasingly urban, capitalist system. Sharp economic inequality, the inability or refusal of the regime to provi
de services to the shanty towns that had mushroomed around Tehran, and finally, the traditional cultural conservatism of these peasants-turned-urbanites created a chasm at the heart of Iran’s big cities. Tehran was the exemplar of the cultural and economic disharmony and tension that arose between the rich northern neighborhoods, steeped in cosmopolitan mores and manners, and the southern neighborhoods and shanty towns, over-populated by disgruntled citizens who resented both the affluence and Western cultural affectations of the rich.

  Land reform and the other elements of the Shah’s modernization project were intended to create for him a new and more durable coalition of support—composed of peasants freed from the shackles of feudalism, newly enfranchised women, a middle and technocratic class, and the new entrepreneurial industrialists, all enjoying the fruits of the Shah’s pro-business, petro-fueled policies. The moderate clergy, according to this plan, would provide the moral cement and the much-needed anti-communist ideology of this coalition, while the security and stability of the coalition, and thus of the Shah’s regime, would be provided by the might of the military and SAVAK.

  In reality, the Shah’s modernizing push in the sixties and seventies not only lost him his traditional base of support amongst the landed gentry and clergy, but his envisioned coalition never coalesced: the peasants who stayed in their villages played no role in politics, even during the months before the 1979 revolution; the middle and technocratic classes, unable to take an active role in politics, became increasingly dissatisfied with the Shah’s authoritarianism. The two-party system the Shah launched in the late fifties during his experiment with “guided democracy” was never more than a hollow shell.

  In the early seventies, however, the Shah temporarily toyed with the idea of allowing the emergence of at least one genuine political party. It would be needed, he said, to help maintain stability during the trauma of transition after his death. But then the price of oil jumped again, and the Shah not only lost interest in this party, but created instead a pseudo-totalitarian one-party system. The economic prosperity made possible by the new oil revenues, he believed, would be more than enough to satisfy the political aspirations of the people, particularly the middle classes. Long before the “China Model” (affording people affluence in lieu of their democratic rights) became of interest to political scientists, the Shah tried and failed to make such a covenant with the people of Iran. Not only did the middle class demand their democratic rights as soon as they saw a chance, but support from other parts of the Shah’s imagined coalition proved no less chimerical.

  Most of the newly landed peasants who converged on the cities joined the ranks of the Shah’s opponents. An example of this pattern can be found in the life of the Ahmadinejad family, coming to Tehran in the early sixties and bringing with them their pieties and religious conservatism. The Shah not only made no effort to socialize this vast multitude, but—by making promises about improved standards of living—increased their expectations. Their estrangement from even the rudiments of modern culture, the Shah’s virtual scorched earth policy against moderate democrats and the Left, his support for the growth of religion as an antidote to Marxism, and the glaring economic chasm yawning in the big cities pushed much of this urban population, and eventually the bulk of the working class, into the ranks of the opposition, making them perfect prey for the ideological claws of the clergy, who promised them a return to their “authentic selves” in this world and salvation in the other. When the Shah’s regime went into a crisis in 1977—brought about by stagnant oil prices, his declining health, and Jimmy Carter’s human rights policies—the vast, nimble network of religious organizations came to dominate the democratic movement, and that network itself was easily dominated by Ayatollah Khomeini’s radical, well-organized supporters.

  In those months, Khomeini pragmatically assumed the mantle of a democrat. The fact that his books had been banned by the Shah in Iran for two decades made it difficult for people to understand the true nature of his ideology. He had in his early days made no effort to hide his undemocratic ideas. But in the months before the revolution, he made no mention of his past opposition to land reform and to women’s right to vote; he never once talked of Velayat-e Faqih, the core concept of his vision, wherein the only legitimate rule is that of a cleric (faqih), whose legitimacy depends not on the will of the people but on divine rights.

  Khomeini’s studied silence, and his success in pitching his ideas in a language consanguine with “progressive anti-colonial discourse,” allowed for his strange marriage of convenience with moderate democrats and radical Marxists.

  In trying to explain the fall of the Shah over the last three decades, a whole array of modernization theorists have argued the mantra that the Shah fell because his Westernized economic development was too rapid. The clerical regime in Tehran has offered a slightly revised iteration of the same theory: It was, they say, the Shah’s secularism, his Westernizing disposition, his departure from the ways and values of Islam, his preference for modernity’s “disenchanted” world instead of the cherished enchantments of Islam that begot his fall. The Shah offers an alternative explanation of not just why the Shah fell but also why the clerics won. Surely there were the normal instabilities found in the transition from a traditional to a modernizing monarchy and society. But it was also the Shah’s attempt to use religion as an antidote to Marxism—his decision to allow, indeed encourage, the expansion of mosques and other religious centers while forcefully disallowing all other forms of civic organization—that in fact crowned the clergy as the victors after his fall in 1978.

  The inconsistencies and miscalculations in the Shah’s modernization model were compounded by strategic inconsistencies in America’s Iran policy. Moreover, these policy decisions were invariably made in reaction to the specter of the Cold War. More than once, proposals to pressure the Shah to democratize were tabled or tempered for fear that they might benefit the Soviets. In the last two critical decades of the Shah’s rule, the United States drastically changed its policy on Iran three times, each time with far-reaching consequences.

  In 1961, the Kennedy administration strongly urged the Shah to make the kind of changes in Iran that would have transformed the social demographic fabric of the society into a more modern polity. The necessary corollary of this policy would have been the gradual assumption by the Shah of the role of a constitutional monarch. The assassination of Kennedy disrupted his administration’s policies on Iran. Within six years of his death, the United States drastically changed its policy. Economic success, made possible by rising oil revenues, increased the Shah’s appetite for more power; in America, the realities of economic pressures and the agonies of Vietnam forced a radical rethinking of U.S. policy, not just in South East Asia but in Iran.

  In the early seventies, just as the Shah’s modernization plans were bearing fruit and Iran was experiencing rapid industrial growth, just as American pressure for democratic change was most needed, the Nixon Doctrine ended all pressures on the Shah to democratize. Moreover, the same surge of oil income not only allowed the Shah more independence from the United States, but encouraged him to make grandiose promises to Iranians about the country’s rising standards of living—fueling the dangerous phenomenon that people’s expectations were rising faster than his government’s ability to satisfy them.

  But in a few years, as these expectations continued to rise and as Tehran and other cities were overflowing with peasants in search of their share of petro-dollars, American policy changed yet again. In 1977 the Carter administration decided to resume pressures on the Shah to democratize. By then the Iranian economy had nose-dived because of a sudden fall in the price of oil, the Shah was suffering from cancer, and the opposition was buoyed by Carter’s election and renewed talk of democratization.

  As the crisis deepened, the once defiant, even belligerent Shah suddenly became indecisive and desperate for signs of support from the United States. The United States’ experience with the Shah in 1953 s
hould have clearly warned them that he was likely to vacillate again in the face of a crisis—and how much in such moments he needed clear signs of support. But such support was not forthcoming. Carter was preoccupied with negotiations between Egypt and Israel for the Camp David Accord, and there were profound differences of opinion among the White House, the National Security Council, and the State Department on what to do in Iran. National Security Advisor Brzezinski wanted the United States to support the Shah and help him establish law and order; the State Department insisted on the continuation of the liberalization policy; and for months the CIA refused to see the seriousness of the threat to the Shah. In the chaos of these discordant views and of the Shah’s emotional paralysis, the American ambassador, William Sullivan, found an unusual opportunity to follow his own maverick policies. The Shah, caught between these differing forces, suffering from cancer, and undergoing chemotherapy, went from one extreme to another. The democratic concessions he made under duress during these months only fanned the flames of revolution. Had he made those concessions earlier, when he was at the height of his power; had he abdicated in 1974 when he first realized he had cancer; and finally, had Iran’s democrats followed a different policy, it is possible to imagine a different trajectory for Iran.

  The failure to foresee the fall of the Shah was easily one of the most important intelligence failures of the twentieth century. U.S. agencies were presciently predicting a revolution in 1965, but thirteen years later, on the eve of the revolution, they insisted that Iran was not even in a pre-revolutionary stage. In the fifties and early sixties, the United States had extensive contacts with members of the opposition, and their points of view helped America better understand the dynamics of Iranian society. From the mid-sixties, under pressure from the Shah—worried about the conspiracies his American allies might be hatching behind his back—these contacts were all but ended; the result was the colossal intelligence failure of 1978.