1979
Ayatullah Khomeini
The dour old man of 79 shuffles in his heel-less slippers to the rooftop
and waves apathetically to crowds that surround his modest home in the holy
city of Qum. The hooded eyes that glare out so balefully from beneath his black
turban are often turned upward, as if seeking inspiration from on high—which,
as a religious mystic, he indeed is. To Iran's Shi'ite Muslim laity, he is the
Imam, an ascetic spiritual leader whose teachings are unquestioned. To hundreds
of millions of others, he is a fanatic whose judgments are harsh, reasoning
bizarre and conclusions surreal. He is learned in the ways of Shari'a (Islamic
law) and Platonic philosophy, yet astonishingly ignorant of and indifferent to
non-Muslim culture. Rarely has so improbable a leader shaken the world.
Yet in 1979 the lean figure of the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini towered
malignly over the globe. As the leader of Iran's revolution he gave the 20th
century world a frightening lesson in the shattering power of irrationality, of
the ease with which terrorism can be adopted as government policy. As the new
year neared, 50 of the American hostages seized on Nov. 4 by a mob of students
were still inside the captured U.S. embassy in Tehran, facing the prospect of
being tried as spies by Khomeini's revolutionary courts. The Ayatullah, who
gave his blessing to the capture, has made impossible and even insulting
demands for the hostages' release: that the U.S. return deposed Shah Mohammed
Reza Pahlavi to Iran for trial and no doubt execution, even though the Shah is
now in Panama; that America submit to a trial of its "crimes" against Iran
before an international "grand jury" picked by Khomeini's aides. He claimed
that Iran had every legal and moral right to try America's hostage diplomats,
an action that would defy a decision of the World Court, a vote of the U.N.
Security Council and one of the most basic rules of accommodation between
civilized nations. The Ayatullah even insisted, in an extraordinary interview
with TIME, that if Americans wish to have good relations with Iran they must
vote Jimmy Carter out of office and elect instead a President that Khomeini
would find "suitable."
Unifying a nation behind such extremist positions is a remarkable
achievement for an austere theologian who little more than a year ago was
totally unknown in the West he now menaces. But Khomeini's carefully cultivated
air of mystic detachment cloaks an iron will, an inflexible devotion to simple
ideas that he has preached for decades, and a finely tuned instinct of
articulating the passions and rages of his people. Khomeini is no politician in
the Western sense, yet he possesses the most awesome—an ominous—of political
gifts: the ability to rouse millions to both adulation and fury.
Khomeini's importance far transcends the nightmare of the embassy seizure,
transcends indeed the overthrow of the Shah of Iran. The revolution that he led
to triumph threatens to upset the world balance of power more than any
political event since Hitler's conquest of Europe. It was unique in several
respects: a successful, mostly nonviolent revolt against a seemingly entrenched
dictator, it owed nothing to outside help or even to any Western ideology. The
danger exists that the Iranian revolution could become a model for future
uprisings throughout the Third World—and not only its Islamic portion.
Non-Muslim nations too are likely to be attracted by the spectacle of a
rebellion aimed at expelling all foreign influence in the name of xenophobic
nationalism.
Already the flames of anti-Western fanaticism that Khomeini fanned in Iran
threaten to spread through the volatile Soviet Union, from the Indian
subcontinent to Turkey and southward through the Arabian Peninsula to the Horn
of Africa. Most particularly, the revolution that turned Iran into an Islamic
republic whose supreme law is the Koran is undermining the stability of the
Middle East, a region that supplies more than half of the Western world's
imported oil, a region that stands at the strategic crossroads of super-power
competition.
As an immediate result, the U.S., Western Europe and Japan face continuing
inflation and rising unemployment, brought on, in part, by a disruption of the
oil trade. Beyond that looms the danger of U.S.-Soviet confrontation.
Washington policymakers, uncertain about the leftist impulses of Iran's
ubiquitous "students"—and perhaps some members of Iran's ruling Revolutionary
Council—fear that the country may become a new target of opportunity for
Soviet adventurism. The Kremlin leaders in turn must contend with the danger
that the U.S.S.R.'s 50 million Muslims could be aroused by Khomeini's
incendiary Islamic nationalism. Yet if the Soviets chose to take advantage of
the turmoil in Iran as they have intervened in neighboring Afghanistan, the
U.S. would have to find some way of countering such aggression.
Khomeini thus poses to the U.S. a supreme test of both will and strategy.
So far his hostage blackmail has produced a result he certainly did not intend:
a surge of patriotism that has made the American people more united than they
have been on any issue in two decades. The shock of seeing the U.S. flag burned
on the streets of Tehran, or misused by embassy attackers to carry trash, has
jolted the nation out of its self-doubting "Viet Nam syndrome." Worries about
America's ability to influence events abroad are giving way to anger about
impotence; the country now seems willing to exert its power. But how can that
power be brought to bear against an opponent immune to the usual forms of
diplomatic, economic and even military pressure, and how can it be refined to
deal with others in the Third World who might rise to follow Khomeini's
example? That may be the central problem for U.S. foreign policy throughout the
1980s.
The outcome of the present turmoil on Iran is almost totally
unpredictable. It is unclear how much authority Khomeini, or Iran's ever
changing government, exerts over day- to-day events. Much as Khomeini has
capitalized on it, the seizure of the U.S. embassy tilted the balance in Iran's
murky revolutionary politics from relative moderates to extremists who
sometimes seem to listen to no one; the militants at the embassy openly sneer
at government ministers, who regularly contradict one another. The death of
Khomeini, who has no obvious successor, could plunge the country into anarchy.
But one thing is certain: the world will not again look quite the way it
did before Feb. 1, 1979, the day on which Khomeini flew back to a tumultuous
welcome in Tehran after 15 years in exile. He thus joins a handful of other
world figures whose deeds are debatable—or worse—but who nonetheless branded
a year as their own. In 1979 the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini met TIME's
definition of Man of the Year: he was the one who "has done the most to change
the news, for better or for worse."
Apart from Iran and its fallout, 1979 was a year of turmoil highlighted by
an occasional upbeat note: hopeful stirrings that offset to a degree the
continuing victories of the forces of disruption. On a spectacular visit to his
homeland of Poland and the U.S., Ireland and Mexico, Pope John Paul II
demonstrated that he was a man whose warmth, dignity and radiant humanity
deeply affected even those who did not share his Roman Catholic faith. Despite
his rigidly orthodox approach to doctrinal issues, the Pope's message of peace,
love, justice and concern for the poor stirred unprecedented feelings of
brotherhood.
The election of Conservative Party Leader Margaret Thatcher as Prime
Minister of Britain was perhaps the most notable sign that many voters in
Europe were disillusioned with statist solutions and wanted a return to more
conservative policies. At year's end her government could claim one notable
diplomatic success. Under the skillful guidance of Thatcher's Foreign
Secretary, Lord Carrington, leaders of both the interim Salisbury government
and the Patriotic Front guerrillas signed an agreement that
promised—precariously—to end a seven- year-old civil war and provide a
peaceful transition to genuine majority rule in Zimbabwe Rhodesia. There were
other indications of growing rationality in Africa, as three noxious dictators
who had transformed their nations into slaughterhouses fell from power: Idi
Amin was ousted from Uganda, Jean Bedal Bokassa from the Central African Empire
(now Republic), and Francisco Macias Nguema from Equatorial Guinea.
Southeast Asia, though, as it has for so long, endured a year of war,
cruelty and famine. Peking and Moscow jockeyed for influence in the area. China
briefly invaded Viet Nam and then withdrew, achieving nothing but proving once
again that Communists have their own explosive quarrels. Hanoi's Soviet- backed
rulers expelled hundreds of thousands of its ethnic Chinese citizens, many of
whom drowned at sea; survivors landed on the shores of nations that could not
handle such onslaughts of refugees. In Cambodia, the Vietnamese-backed regime
of Heng Samrin was proving little better than the maniacal Chinese- supported
dictatorship of Pol Pot that it had deposed. Hundreds of thousands of
Cambodians still faced death by starvation or disease as the year ended,
despite huge relief efforts organized by the outside world.
In the U.S., 1979 was a year of indecision and frustration. Inflation
galloped to an annual rate of 13% and stayed there, all but impervious to
attacks by the Carter Administration. The burden of containing inflation
eventually fell on the shoulders of new Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker.
His tough fiscal measures, including higher interest rates and a clampdown on
the money supply, do promise to restrain price boosts—but only after a
distressing time lag, and at the cost of making more severe a recession that
the U.S. seemed headed for anyway in 1980. President Carter's energy program at
last began staggering through Congress, but a near disaster at Three Mile
Island in Pennsylvania raised legitimate questions—as well as much unnecessary
hysteria—about how safe and useful nuclear power will be as a partial
substitute for the imported oil that the eruption in Iran will help make ever
more costly. The conclusion of a SALT II agreement wit the Soviet Union—more
modest in scope than many Americans had urged, but basically useful to the
U.S.—led to congressional wrangling that raised doubts about whether the
Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty will even be ratified in 1980. The SALT debate
put a substantial strain on U.S.-Soviet relations, which were deteriorating for
lots of other reasons as well.
For much of the year, Carter appeared so ineffective a leader that his
seeming weakness touched off an unprecedentedly early and crowded scramble to
succeed him. Ten Republicans announced as candidates for the party's 1980
presidential nomination; at year's end, however, the clear favorite was the man
who had done or said hardly anything, Ronald Reagan. On the Democratic side,
Senator Edward Kennedy overcame his reservations and declared his candidacy,
but early grass-roots enthusiasm about his "leadership qualities" dissipated in
the face of his lackluster campaigning, his astonishing incoherence, and his
failure to stake out convincingly different positions on the issues. At year's
end Carter was looking much stronger, primarily because his firm yet restrained
response to Iran's seizure of hostages led to a classic popular reaction: Let's
rally round the President in a crisis.
None of these trends could match in power and drama, or in menacing
implications for the future, the eruption in Iran. A year ago, in its cover
story on 1978's Man of the Year, Chinese Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping, TIME noted
that "the Shah of Iran's 37-year reign was shaken by week upon week of riots."
Shortly thereafter, the Shah fell in one of the greatest political upheavals of
the post-World War II era, one that raised troubling questions about the
ability of the U.S. to guide or even understand the seething passions of the
Third World.
Almost to the very end, the conventional wisdom of Western diplomats and
journalists was that the Shah would survive; after all, he had come through
earlier troubles seemingly strengthened. In 1953 the Shah had actually fled the
country. But he was restored to power by a CIA-inspired coup that ousted
Mohammed Mossadegh, the nationalist Prime Minister who had been TIME's Man of
the Year for 1951 because he had "oiled the wheels of chaos." In 1963 Iran had
been swept by riots stirred up by the powerful Islamic clergy against the
Shah's White Revolution. Among other things, this well-meant reform abolished
the feudal landlord-peasant system. Two consequences: the reform broke up
properties administered by the Shi'ite clergy and reduced their income, some of
which consisted of donations from large landholders. The White Revolution also
gave the vote to women. The Shah suppressed those disturbances without outside
help, in part by jailing one of the instigators—an ascetic theologian named
Ruhollah Khomeini, who had recently attained the title of Ayatullah and drawn
crowds to fiery sermons in which he denounced the land reform as a fraud and
the Shah as a traitor to Islam. (An appellation that means "sign of God." There
is no formal procedure for bestowing it; a religious leader is called ayatullah
by a large number of reverent followers and is accepted as such by the rest of
the Iranian clergy. At present, Iran has perhaps 50 to 60 mullahs generally
regarded as ayatullahs.) In 1964 Khomeini was arrested and exiled, first to
Turkey, then to Iraq, where he continued to preach against the idolatrous Shah
and to promulgate his vision of Iran as an "Islamic republic."
The preachments seemed to have little effect, as the Shah set about
building the most thoroughly Westernized nation in all of the Muslim world. The
progress achieved in a deeply backward country was stunning. Petroleum revenues
built steel mills, nuclear power plants, telecommunication systems and a
formidable military machine, complete with U.S. supersonic fighters and
missiles. Dissent was ruthlessly suppressed, in part by the use of torture in
the dungeons of SAVAK, the secret police. It is still not clear how widespread
the tortures and political executions were; but the Shah did not heed U.S.
advice to liberalize his regime, and repression inflamed rather than quieted
dissent.
By 1978 the Shah had alienated almost all elements of Iranian society.
Westernized intellectuals were infuriated by rampant corruption and repression;
workers and peasants by the selective prosperity that raised glittering
apartments for the rich while the poor remained in mud hovels; bazaar merchants
by the Shah-supported businessmen who monopolized bank credits, supply
contracts and imports; the clergy and their pious Muslim followers by the
gambling casinos, bars and discotheques that seemed the most visible result of
Westernization. (One of the Shah's last prime ministers also stopped annual
government subsidies to the mullahs.) Almost everybody hated the police terror
and sneered in private at the Shah's Ozymandian megalomania, symbolized by a
$100 million fete he staged at Persepolis in 1971 to celebrate the 2,500 years
of the Persian Empire. In fact, the Shah's father was a colonel in the army
when he overthrew the Qajar dynasty in 1925, and as Khomeini pointed out
angrily from exile at the time of the Persepolis festival, famine was raging in
that part of the country.
But the U.S. saw the Shah as a stable and valuable ally. Washington was
annoyed by the Shah's insistence on raising oil prices at every OPEC meeting,
yet that irritation was outweighed by the fact that the Shah was staunchly
anti-Communist and a valuable balance wheel in Middle East politics. Eager to
build up Iran as a "regional influential" that could act as America's surrogate
policeman of the Persian Gulf, the U.S. lent the Shah its all-out support.
President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger allowed him to
buy all the modern weapons he wanted. Washington also gave its blessing to a
flood of American business investment in Iran and dispatched an army of
technocrats there.
The depth of its commitment to the Shah apparently blinded Washington to
the growing discontent. U.S. policymakers wanted to believe that their
investment was buying stability and friendship; they trusted what they heard
from the monarch, who dismissed all opposition as "the blah-blahs of armchair
critics." Even after the revolution began, U.S. officials were convinced that
"there is no alternative to the Shah." Carter took time out from the Camp David
summit in September 1978 to phone the Iranian monarch and assure him of
Washington's continued support.
By then it was too late. Demonstrations and protest marches that started
as a genuine popular outbreak grew by a kind of spontaneous combustion. The
first parades drew fire from the Shah's troops, who killed scores and started a
deadly cycle: marches to mourn the victims of the first riot, more shooting,
more martyrs, crowds swelling into the hundreds of thousands and eventually
millions in Tehran. Khomeini at this point was primarily a symbol of the
revolution, which at the outset had no visible leaders. But even in exile the
Ayatullah was well known inside Iran for his uncompromising insistence that the
Shah must go. When demonstrators began waving the Ayatullah's picture, the
frightened Shah pressured Iraq to boot Khomeini out. It was a fatal blunder; in
October 1978 the Ayatullah settled in Neauphle-le-Chateau, outside Paris, where
he gathered a circle of exiles and for the first time publicized his views
through the Western press.
Khomeini now became the active head of the revolution. Cassettes of his
anti-Shah sermons sold like pop records in the bazaars and were played in
crowded mosques throughout the country. When he called for strikes, his
followers shut down the banks, the postal service, the factories, the food
stores and, most important, the oil wells, bringing the country close to
paralysis. The Shah imposed martial law, but to no avail. On Jan. 16, after
weeks of daily protest parades, the Shah and his Empress flew off to exile,
leaving a "regency council" that included Prime Minister Shahpour Bakhtiar, a
moderate who had spent time in the Shah's prisons. But Khomeini announced that
no one ruling in the Shah's name would be acceptable, and Iran was torn by the
largest riots of the entire revolution. The Ayatullah returned from Paris to a
tumultuous welcome and Bakhtiar fled. "The holy one has come!" the crowds
greeting Khomeini shouted triumphantly. "He is the light of our lives!" The
crush stalled the Ayatullah's motorcade, so that he had to be lifted out of the
crowds, over the heads of his adulators, by helicopter. He was flown to a
cemetery, where he prayed at the graves of those who had died during the
revolution.
Khomeini withdrew to the holy city of Qum, appointed a government headed
by Mehdi Bazargan, an engineer by training and veteran of Mossadegh's Cabinet,
and announced that he would confine his own role during "the one or two years
left to me" to making sure that Iran followed "in the image of Muhammad." It
quickly became apparent that real power resided in the revolutionary komitehs
that sprang up all over the country, and the komitehs took orders only from the
15-man Revolutionary Council headed by Khomeini (the names of its other members
were long kept secret). Bazargan and his Cabinet had to trek to Qum for weekly
lunches with Khomeini to find out what the Ayatullah would or would not allow.
Some observers distinguish two stages in the entire upheaval: the first a
popular revolt that overthrew the Shah, then a "Khomeini coup" that
concentrated all power in the clergy. The Ayatullah's main instrument was a
stream of elamiehs (directives) from Qum, many issued without consulting
Bazargan's nominal government. Banks and heavy industry were nationalized and
turned over to government managers. Many of the elamiehs were concerned with
imposing a strict Islamic way of life on all Iranians. Alcohol was forbidden.
Women were segregated from men in schools below the university level, at
swimming pools, beaches and other public facilities. Khomeini even banned most
music from radio and TV. Marches were acceptable, he told Italian Journalist
Oriana Fallaci, but other Western music "dulls the mind, because it involves
pleasure and ecstasy, similar to drugs." Fallaci: "Even the music of Bach,
Beethoven, Verdi?" Khomeini: "I do not know those names."
In power, Khomeini and his followers displayed a retaliatory streak.
Islamic revolutionary courts condemned more than 650 Iranians to death, after
trials at which defense lawyers were rarely, if ever, present, and spectators
stepped forward to add their own accusations to those of the prosecutors; death
sentences were generally carried out immediately by firing squad. An unknown
but apparently large number of other Iranians were sentenced to life
imprisonment. Khomeini preaches the mercy of God but showed little of his own
to those executed, who were, he said, torturers and killers of the Shah's who
got what they deserved. Some were, including the generals and highest-ranking
politicians, but the victims also included at least seven prostitutes, 15 men
accused of homosexual rape, and a Jewish businessman alleged to be spying for
Israel. Defenders of Khomeini's regime argue with some justification that far
fewer people were condemned by the revolutionary courts than were tortured to
death by the Shah's SAVAK, and that the swift trials were necessary to defuse
public anger against the minions of the deposed monarch.
As usually happens in revolutions, the forces of dissolution, once let
loose, are not so easily tamed. Iran's economy suffered deeply, and unrest in
at least three ethnic areas—those of the Kurds, the Azerbaijanis and the
Baluchis—presented continuing threats to Tehran's, or Qum's, control. Many
Western experts believe Khomeini shrewdly seized upon the students' attack on
the U.S. embassy, which he applauded but claims he did not order, as a way of
directing popular attention away from the country's increasing problems. It
gave him once again a means of presenting all difficulties as having been
caused by the U.S., to brand all his opponents—believers in parliamentary
government, ethnic separatists, Muslims who questioned his interpretations of
Islamic law—tools of the CIA. When the United Nations and the World Court
condemned the seizure, he labeled these bodies stooges of the enemy. It was
Iran against the world—indeed, all Islam against the "infidels."
When Bazargan resigned to protest the capture of the hostages, the
Ayatullah made the Revolutionary Council the government in name as well as
fact. Then, during the holy month known as Muharram, with popular emotion at a
frenzied height as a result of the confrontation with the U.S., Khomeini
expertly managed a vote on a new constitution that turned Iran into a
theocracy. Approved overwhelmingly in a Dec. 2-3 referendum, the constitution
provided for an elected President and parliament, but placed above them a
"guardian council" of devout Muslims to make sure that nothing the elected
bodies do violates Islamic law. Atop the structure is a faqih (literally,
jurisprudent), the leading theologian of Iran, who must approve of the
President, holds veto power over virtually every act of government, and even
commands the armed forces. Though the constitution does not name him, when it
goes fully into effect after elections this month and in February, Khomeini
obviously will become the faqih.
How did the Ayatullah capture a revolution that started out as a
leaderless explosion of resentment and hate? Primarily by playing adroitly to,
and in part embodying, some of the psychological elements that made the revolt
possible. There was, for example, a widespread egalitarian yearning to end the
extremes of wealth and poverty that existed under the Shah—and the rich could
easily be tarred as clients of the "U.S. imperialists." Partly because of the
long history of Soviet, British and then American meddling in their affairs,
Iranians were and are basically xenophobic, and thus susceptible to the
Ayatullah's charges that the U.S. (and, of course, the CIA) was responsible for
the country's ills. Iranians could also easily accept that kind of falsehood
since they had grown used to living off gossip and rumor mills during the reign
of the Shah, when the heavily censored press played down even nonpolitical bad
news about Iran. When Khomeini declared that the Americans and Israelis were
responsible for the November attack by Muslim fanatics in Mecca's Sacred
Mosque, this deliberate lie was given instant credence by multitudes of
Iranians.
By far the most powerful influence that cemented Khomeini's hold on his
country is the spirit of Shi'ism—the branch of Islam to which 93% of Iran's
35.2 million people belong. In contrast to the dominant Sunni wing of Islam,
Shi'ism emphasizes martyrdom; thus many Iranians are receptive to Khomeini's
speeches about what a "joy" and "honor" it would be to die in a war with the
U.S. Beyond that, Shi'ism allows for the presence of an intermediary between
God and man. Originally, the mediators were twelve imams, who Shi'ites believe
were the rightful successors of the Prophet Muhammad; the twelfth disappeared
in A.D. 940. He supposedly is in hiding, but will return some day to purify the
religion and institute God's reign of justice on earth. This belief gives
Shi'ism a strong messianic cast, to which Khomeini appeals when he promises to
expel Western influence and to turn Iran into a pure Islamic society. The
Ayatullah has never claimed the title of Imam for himself, but he has done
nothing to discourage its use by his followers, a fact that annoys some of his
peers among the Iranian clergy. Ayatullah Seyed Kazem Sharietmadari, Khomeini's
most potent rival for popular reverence, has acidly observed that the Hidden
Imam will indeed return, "but not in a Boeing 747"—a reference to the plane
that carried Khomeini from France to Iran.
Iran and Iraq are the main Muslim states where the majority of the
population is Shi'ite; but there are substantial Shi'ite minorities in the Gulf
states, Lebanon, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Khomeini's followers have been
sending these Shi'ites messages urging them to join in an uprising against
Western influence. The power of Khomeini's appeal for a "struggle between Islam
and the infidels" must not be underestimated. In these and many other Islamic
countries, Western technology and education have strained the social structure
and brought with them trends that seem like paganism to devout Muslims. In
addition, Muslims have bitter memories of a century or more of Western
colonialism that kept most Islamic countries in servitude until a generation
ago, and they tend to see U.S. support of Israel as a continuation of this
"imperialist" tradition.
With Khomeini's encouragement, Muslims—not all of them Shi'ites—have
staged anti-American riots in Libya, India and Bangladesh. In Islamabad, the
capital of Pakistan, a mob burned the U.S embassy and killed two U.S.
servicemen; the Ayatullah's reaction was "great joy." In Saudi Arabia,
possessor of the world's largest oil reserves, the vulnerability of the royal
family was made starkly apparent when a band of 200 to 300 well- armed raiders
in November seized the Sacred Mosque in Mecca, the holiest of all Islamic
shrines, which is under the protection of King Khalid. The raiders appeared to
have mixed religious and political motives: they seemingly were armed and
trained in Marxist South Yemen, but were fundamentalists opposed to all
modernism, led by a zealot who had proclaimed the revolution in Iran to be a
"new dawn" for Islam. It took the Saudi army more than a week to root them out
from the catacomb-like basements of the mosque, and 156 died in the
fighting—82 raiders and 74 Saudi troopers. In addition, demonstrators waving
Khomeini's picture last month paraded in the oil towns of Saudi Arabia's
Eastern Province. Saudi troops apparently opened fire on the protestors and at
least 15 people are said to have died.
Such rumblings have deeply shaken the nerves, if not yet undermined the
stability, of governments throughout the Middle East. Leaders of the House of
Saud regard Khomeini as an outright menace. Egypt's President Anwar Sadat
denounced Khomeini as a man who is trying to play God and whose actions are a
"crime against Islam [and] and insult to humanity." Nonetheless, the
Ayatullah's appeal to Muslims, Sunni as well as Shi'ite, is so strong the even
pro-Western Islamic leaders have been reluctant to give the U.S. more than
minimal support in the hostage crisis. They have explicitly warned Washington
that any U.S. military strike on Iran, even one undertaken in retaliation for
the killing of the hostages, would so enrage their people as to threaten the
security of every government in the area.
The appeal of Khomeini's Islamic fundamentalism to non- Muslim nations in
the Third World is limited. Not so the wave of nationalism he unleashed in
Iran. Warns William Quandt, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution: "People
in the Third World were promised great gains upon independence [from
colonialism], and yet they still find their lives and societies in a mess."
Historically, such unfulfilled expectations prepare the ground for revolution,
and the outbreak in Iran offers an example of an uprising that embodies a kind
of nose-thumbing national pride.
Selig Harrison, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, says the overthrow of Iran's Shah "is appealing to the
Third World as a nationalist revolution that has stood up to superpower
influence. At the rational level, Third World people know that you cannot
behave like Khomeini and they do not condone violation of diplomatic immunity.
But at the emotional level, mass public opinion in many Third World countries
is not unfriendly to what Khomeini has done. There is an undercurrent of
satisfaction in seeing a country stand up to superpower influence."
The Iranian revolution has also had a dramatic impact in Western
economies. 1979 was the year in which the world economy moved from an era of
recurrent oil surpluses into an age of chronic shortages. Indeed, it was a year
in which the frequent warnings of pessimists that the industrial nations had
made themselves dangerously dependent on crude oil imported from highly
unstable countries came true with a vengeance. For more than three centuries
the industrial West had prospered thanks partly to resources from colonies or
quasi-colonies. Now a great historical reversal was at hand.
"If there had been no revolution in Iran," says John Lichtblau, executive
director of the Petroleum Industry Research Foundation, "1979 would have been a
normal year." The strikes that accompanied the revolution shut off Iranian
production completely early in the year. Through output resumed in March, it
ran most of the time at no more than 3.5 million bbl. a day—little more than
half the level under the Shah. Khomeini made it clear that no more could be
expected. In fact, Iranian output has dropped again in recent months, to around
3.1 million bbl. a day. Oil Minister Ali Akbar Moinfar says it will go down
further because "at the new price levels, Iran will be able to produce and
export less and still cover its revenue needs."
The cutback in Iran reduced supplies to the non-Communist world by about
4%. That was enough to produce a precarious balance between world supply and
demand. Spot shortages cropped up, and the industrial West went through a kind
of buyers' panic; governments and companies scrambled to purchase every drop
available, to keep houses warm and the wheels of industry turning, and to build
stockpiles to guard against the all-too- real prospect of another shutdown in
Iran or a supply disruption somewhere else.
The lid came off prices with a bang. OPEC raised prices during 1979 by an
average of 94.7%, to $25 a bbl.—vs. $12.84 a year ago and a mere $2 in 1970.
Moreover, oil-exporting nations shifted a growing proportion of their output to
the spot market, where oil not tied up under contract is sold for whatever
price buyers will pay. Before the Iranian revolution, the spot market accounted
for only 5% of the oil moving in world trade, and prices differed little from
OPEC's official ones. During 1979, anywhere from 10% to 33% of internationally
traded crude bought by the industrial countries went through the spot market,
and prices shot as high as $45 a bbl.
The runaway price rises will fan inflation in the U.S., Western Europe and
Japan. Affected are not only the price of gasoline and heating oil but also the
cost of thousands of products made from petrochemicals—goods ranging from
fertilizers and laundry detergents to panty hose and phonograph records. Oil
price hikes will bear on apartment rents and the price of food brought to
stores by gasoline-burning trucks. The price boosts act as a kind of gigantic
tax, siphoning from the pockets of consumers money that would otherwise be used
to buy non-oil goods and services, thus depressing production and employment.
In the U.S., which imports about half its oil, a 1980 recession that would
increase unemployment might happen anyway; the oil price increases have made it
all but inevitable.
At year's end OPEC had almost come apart; at their December meeting in
Caracas its members could not agree on any unified pricing structure at all. So
long as supply barely equals demand, there will be leapfrogging price boosts;
four countries announced 10% to 15% price hikes last Friday. In the longer run,
the disunity could lead to price-cutting competition, but only if the
industrial countries, and especially the U.S., take more drastic steps to
conserve energy and reduce imports than any they have instituted yet—and even
then OPEC might come back together. It is presumably not in the cartel's
economic or political self-interest to bankrupt its major customers, especially
since many of OPEC's member states have invested their excess profits in the
West. Yet even moderate nations like Saudi Arabia, which have fought to keep
price boosts to a minimum, argue that inflation price hikes will be necessary
as long as oil prices are tied to a declining dollar.
A still greater danger is that the producers may not pump enough oil to
permit much or any economic growth in either the industrial or underdeveloped
worlds. The producers have learned that prices rise most rapidly when supply is
kept barely equal to, or a bit below, demand; they have good reason to think
that oil kept in the ground will appreciate more than any other asset, and the
Iranian explosion has demonstrated that all-out production, and the
forced-draft industrialization and Westernization that it finances, can lead
not to stability but to social strains so intense that they end in revolution.
The result of a production hold-down could be a decade or so of serious
economic stagnation. Oil Consultant Walter Levy sees these potential gloomy
consequences for the West: "A lower standard of living, a reduction in gross
national product, large balance of payments drains, loss of value in
currencies, high unemployment."
Warns Mobil Chairman Rawleigh Warner: "The West can no longer assume that
oil-exporting countries, and specifically those in the Middle East, will be
willing to tailor production to demand. The safer assumptions is that the
consuming countries will increasingly have to tailor their demand to
production. And the factors that determine the ceiling in production are more
likely to be political than economic or technical."
The West will be lucky if oil shortages are the worst result of Khomeini's
revolution. An even more menacing prospect is a shift in the world balance of
power toward the Soviet Union.
The Ayatullah is no friend of the Soviets. Far from it: while in his mind
"America is the great Satan," he knows, and has often said, that Communism is
incompatible with Islam. Tehran mobs have occasionally chanted "Communism will
die!" as well as "Death to Carter!"
Indeed, Islamic fundamentalism could become a domestic worry to the
Kremlin. Its estimated 50 million Muslims make the Soviet Union the world's
fifth largest Muslim state. (After Indonesia (123.2 million), India (80
million), Pakistan (72.3 million) and Bangladesh (70.8 million).) For the
Kremlin, Muslims represent a demographic time bomb. By the year 2000, there
will be an estimated 100 million Soviet Muslims, vs. about 150 million ethnic
Russians. Most of the Muslims live in areas of Central Asia, bordering on Iran,
that were subjugated by czarist armies only a little more than a century
ago—Samarakand, for example, fell in 1868. The Soviets have soft- pedaled
antireligious propaganda and allowed the Muslims to maintain mosques and
theological schools. Consequently, the Azerbaijanis, Turkmen and other Muslim
minorities in the U.S.S.R. could eventually become targets for Khomeini's
advocacy of an Islamic rebellion against all foreign domination of Muslims.
Yet Moscow can hardly ignore the opportunity presented by Khomeini's rise.
An Iran sliding into anarchy, and a Middle East shaken by the furies of
Khomeini's followers, would offer the Soviets a chance to substitute their own
influence for the Western presence that the Ayatullah's admirers vow to expel.
And the Middle East is an unparalleled geopolitical prize.
Whoever controls the Middle East's oil, or the area's Strait of Hormuz (40
miles wide at its narrowest) between Iran and the Sultanate of Oman through
which most of it passes, acquires a stranglehold on the world's economy. The
U.S.S.R. today is self-sufficient in oil, but it could well become a major net
importer in the 1980s—and thus be in direct competition with the West for the
crude pumped out of the desert sands. The warm-water ports so ardently desired
by the Czars since the 18th century retain almost as much importance today.
Soviet missile-firing submarines, for example, now have to leave the ice-locked
areas around Murmansk and Archangel through narrow channels where they can
easily be tracked by U.S. antisubmarine forces. They would be much harder to
detect if they could slip out of ports on the Arabian Sea.
The conflagration in Iran, and the threat of renewed instability
throughout the region, could open an entirely new chapter in the story of
Soviet efforts to infiltrate the Middle East. So far, the Soviet leaders have
played a double game in the hostage crisis. Representatives of the U.S.S.R.
voted in the United Nations and World Court to free the hostages. At the same
time, to Washington's intense annoyance, the Soviets have proclaimed sympathy
for Iran's anger against the U.S. The Kremlin apparently wants to keep lines
open to Khomeini's followers, if not to the Ayatullah himself, while it awaits
its chance.
Meanwhile, Moscow has been acting more brazenly throughout the entire
region of crisis. Around Christmas, the U.S.S.R. began airlifting combat troops
into Afghanistan, reinforcing an already strong Soviet presence. Last week the
Soviet soldiers participated in a coup ousting a pro-Moscow regime that had
proved hopelessly ineffective in trying to put down an insurrection by
anti-Communist Muslim tribesmen. At week's end, Washington charged that Soviet
troops had crossed the border in Afghanistan in what appeared to be an outright
invasion.
Who or what follows Khomeini is already a popular guessing game in Tehran,
Washington and doubtless Moscow. Few of the potential scenarios seem especially
favorable to U.S. interests. One possibility is a military coup, led by
officers once loyal to the Shah and now anxious to restore order. That might
seem unlikely in view of the disorganized state of the army and the popular
hatred of the old regime, but the danger apparently seems significant to
Khomeini; he is enthusiastically expanding the Pasdaran militia as a
counterweight to the official armed forces. A military coup might conceivably
win the backing of the urban intelligentsia, which resents the theocracy and
Washington analysts think that even some mullahs might accommodate themselves
to it if they see no other way of blocking a leftist takeover. Whether such an
uneasy coalition could fashion a stable regime is questionable.
Another potential outcome is a takeover, swift or gradual, by younger
clergymen in alliance with such Western-educated leaders as Foreign Minister
Sadegh Ghotbzadeh. A government composed of those forces would be less
fanatical than the Ayatullah but still very hard-line anti-U.S. Another
possibility, considered by some analysts to be the most likely, would be an
eventual confrontation between Khomeini's religious establishment and members
of the urban upper and middle classes, who applaud the nationalistic goals of
the revolution but chafe under rigid enforcement of Islamic law—and have the
brains to mount an effective opposition.
A leftist takeover is the most worrisome prospect to Washington
policymakers. The Mujahedin (Islamic socialist) and Fedayan (Marxist) movements
maintain guerilla forces armed with weapons seized from the Shah's garrisons
during the revolution. Both groups disclaim any ties with the U.S.S.R., and
some Iranian exiles believe a dialogue between them and moderate forces would
be possible. However, they are very anti-Western. A third contender is the
Tudeh (Communist) Party, which has a reputation of loyally following Moscow's
line. It is currently voicing all-out support of Khomeini because, its leaders
disingenuously explain, any foe of America's imperialism is a friend of theirs.
In gratitude, the Ayatullah has permitted them to operate openly.
Any of these potential scenarios might draw support from Iran's ethnic
minorities, whose demands for cultural and political autonomy—local languages
in schools, local governing councils—have been rebuffed so brusquely by
Khomeini's government as to trigger armed rebellion. Iran, a country three
times the size of France, was officially designated an empire by the Shah, and
in one sense it is; its 35.2 millon people are divided into many ethnic strains
and speak as many as 20 languages, not counting the dialects of remote tribes.
The 4 million Kurds, superb guerilla fighters who live in the western
mountains, have at times dreamed of an independent Kurdistan, and today have
set up what amounts to an autonomous region. The Baluchis, a nomadic tribe of
Sunni Muslims, boycotted the referendum on the Iranian constitution, which they
viewed as an attempt to impose Shi'ism on them. The 13 million Azerbaijanis, a
Turkic people, also boycotted the constitutional referendum and in recent weeks
have come close to an open revolt that could tear Iran apart.
Some Washington policy planners have toyed with the idea of encouraging
separatism, seeking the breakup of Iran as a kind of ultimate sanction against
Khomeini. But the hazards of doing this far outweigh the advantages; true civil
war in Iran would be the quickest way of destroying whatever stability remains
in the Middle East. The lands of the Azerbaijanis stretch into Turkey and the
Soviet Union, those of the Kurds into Turkey and Iraq, those of the Baluchis
into Afghanistan and Pakistan. Successful secessionist movements could tear
away parts of some of those countries as well as of Iran, leaving a number of
weak new countries—the kind that usually tumble into social and economic
chaos—and dismembered older ones. All might be subject to Soviet penetration.
Anarchy in Iran could also trigger a conflict with its uneasy neighbor, Iraq,
which shelled border areas of Iran three weeks ago. The geopolitical stakes
there would be so great that the superpowers would be sorely tempted to
intervene.
The options for U.S. policy toward Iran are limited. So long as the
hostages are in captivity, Washington must use every possible form of
diplomatic and economic pressure to get them released. The Carter
Administration has all but said that military action may well be necessary if
the hostages are killed. But if they are released unharmed, many foreign policy
experts think that the U.S. would be well advised not to retaliate for the
seizure but simply to cut all ties with Iran and ignore the country for
awhile—unless, of course, the Soviets move in. Primarily because of the
intimate U.S. involvement with the Shah, Iran has turned so anti-American that
just about any Washington attempt to influence events there is likely to
backfire; certainly none of Iran's contending factions can afford to be thought
of as pro-U.S. Iran needs a demonstration that the U.S. has not the slightest
wish to dominate the country.
The U.S. must try to contain the spread of Khomeini-inspired
anti-Americanism in the Middle East. The best way to do that would be to
mediate successfully the Egyptian-Israeli peace negotiations, to ensure that
they will lead to genuine autonomy for the Palestinians of the West Bank and
Gaza. The degree to which the Palestinians problem has inflamed passions even
among Arabs who consider themselves pro-U.S. is not at all understood by
Americans. Says Faisal Alhegelan, Saudi Ambassador to the U.S.: "All you have
to do is grant the right of Palestinian self-determination, and you will find
how quickly the entire Arab world will stack up behind Washington."
There are also some lessons the U.S. can learn that might help keep future
Third World revolutions from taking an anti- American turn. First, suggests
Stanley Hoffmann, Harvard professor of government, the U.S. should stop
focusing exclusively on the struggle between the U.S. and Communism and pay
more attention to the aspiration of nations that have no desire for alliance
with either side. Says Hoffmann: "To me, the biggest meaning of Iran is that it
is the first major international crisis that is not an East-West crisis, and
for that very reason we find ourselves much less able to react. There is very
little attention given to the problems of revolutionary instability and
internal discontent. Americans don't study any of this, and when such events
happen, we are caught by surprise."
A corollary thought is that the U.S. must avoid getting tied too closely
to anti-Communist "strongmen" who are detested by their own people. Says Selig
Harrison: "We should not be so committed that we become hostage to political
fortune. We should have contact will all the forces in these countries, and we
should not regard any of them as beyond the pale, even many Communist movements
that would like to offset their dependence on Moscow and Peking." Such a
policy, of course, is easier proclaimed than executed. In some volatile Third
World countries, the only choice may be between a tyrant in power and several
would-be tyrants in opposition. But when the U.S. does find itself allied with
a dictator, it can at least press him to liberalize his regime and at the same
time stay in touch with other elements in the society.
Finally, Khomeini has blown apart the comfortable myth that as the Third
World industrializes, it will adopt Western values, and the success of his
revolution ought to force the U.S. to look for ways to foster material
prosperity in Third World countries without alienating their cultures. Says
Richard Bulliet, a Columbia University historian who specializes in the Middle
East: "We have to realize that there are other ways of looking at the future
than regarding us as being the future. It is possible that the world is not
going to be homogenized along American-European lines."
It is, unfortunately, almost surely too late for any such U.S. strategies
to influence Ayatullah Khomeini, whose hostility to anything American is
bitter, stubborn, zealous—and total. But he may have taught the U.S. a
useful—even vital—lesson for the 1980s. He has shown that the challenges to
the West are certain to get more and more complex, and that the U.S. will
ignore this fact at its peril. He has made it plain that every effort must be
made to avoid the rise of other Khomeinis. Even if he should hold power only
briefly, the Ayatullah is a figure of historic importance. Not only was 1979
his year; the forces of disintegration that he let loose in one country could
threaten many others in the years ahead.
