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Review: IRAN: A Theory of Revolution From Accounts of the RevolutionAuthor(s): Marvin ZonisSource: World Politics, Vol. 35, No. 4 (Jul., 1983), pp. 586-606Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2010391 .Accessed: 14/05/2011 18:11

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Review Articles IRAN:

A Theory of Revolution From Accounts of the Revolution By MARVIN ZONIS*

Yonah Alexander and Allan Nanes, eds., The United States and Iran: A Documentary History. Frederick, Md.: University Publications of America, 1980, 524 pp., $8.oo.

William H. Forbis, Fall of the Peacock Throne: The Story of Iran. New York: McGraw-Hill, ig8i, 309 pp., $6.95.

Mohamed Heikal, The Return of the Ayatollah. London: Andre Deutsch Ltd., i98i, 217 pp., ?9.95.

Farhad Kazemi, Poverty and Revolution in Iran. New York: New York University Press, i980, i8o pp., $17.50.

Michael Ledeen and William Lewis, Debacle: The American Failure in Iran. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, i98i, 247 pp., $14.95.

Princess Ashraf Pahlavi, Faces in a Mirror: Memoirs from Exile. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, i980, 238 pp., $12.95.

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Iran, Answer to History [cited as Shah]. New York: Stein & Day, i980, 204 pp., $12.95.

Amin Saikal, The Rise and Fall of the Shah. Princeton: Princeton University Press, i980, 279 pp., $14.50.

John D. Stempel, Inside the Iranian Revolution. Bloomington: Indiana Uni- versity Press, i98i, 336 pp., $17.50.

William H. Sullivan, Mission to Iran. New York: W.W. Norton, i98i, 296 pp., $14.95.

S HORTLY after the election of President John F. Kennedy in No- vember i960, and following a period of political unrest and economic

turmoil in Iran, the State Department began a searching reappraisal of U.S. policy toward that country. The Deputy Director of the Office of Greek, Turkish, and Iranian Affairs, John W. Bowling, prepared a series of reports for the new President, assessing Iranian political stability and Iran's future ties to the United States. The prescience of his reports is striking. In early i96i, Bowling identified many of the principal groups and processes which would result in the tumultuous success of the Iranian revolution of I978, the overthrow of the Shah, and the shocking loss of the United States' position in the entire Persian Gulf:

* Special thanks for research and other assistance toward the completion of this essay to Daniel Brumberg and Jill Swenson, graduate students at the University of Chicago.

IRAN: A THEORY OF REVOLUTION 587

Under the Shah, Iran has made considerable progress in economic de- velopment, in social welfare, and in internal security and administrative efficiency. The progress has, however, taken place without participation in the government by the main opposition groups. To some extent, the Shah's isolation from these groups has been due to his unwillingness to ride demagogic issues appealing to the lower popular passions.... To an equal extent, however, it has been due to his unwillingness to listen to critical advice, to his unwillingness to share power, and to his near- obsession with military affairs.

With the confidence and support of the Mossadeqists, the Shah could easily control his rightist opposition. The converse, however, is not true. The force and power of the urban semi-Westernized elements continue to grow at the expense of other elements of society. Unless and until the Shah can come to terms with them and bring them, or part of them, into the process of policymaking, he faces a remorseless and slowly increasing pressure, which will become sharper and more dangerous to the West as moderate leadership elements are displaced by the radicals. It seems un- likely, however, that the Shah can capture the loyalty of this element without abandoning the military as his internal political base, without giving up much of his power, without abandoning his openly pro-West foreign alignment, and without taking steps inimical to internal security and to practical economic development. He is unlikely to be willing to pay such a price.

... The Shah, though highly intelligent, is emotionally insecure, and shares with other Iranians a deep suspicion that the West may abandon him in the course of a detente with the U.S.S.R. or by supporting his internal opposition. The recent change of administration in Washington has heightened his anxieties. ...

Bowling went on to suggest how difficult it would be for the United States to influence the Shah who regarded "even heavy-handed hints" by the U.S. as "an intolerable interference." After reviewing a number of policy options, ranging from greater support for the Shah to support for a coup by conservative military elements, Bowling offered a last possibility:

The most forthright and extreme suggestion involves Western support to a hypothetical Mossadeqist-oriented coup, with support from junior of- ficers. While the resulting regime would not be strongly anti-United States and would have popular urban support, it would entail the following probable awesome disadvantages, which would accrue at an early date should such a regime remain in power: (a) The breakup of CENTO, (b) The withdrawal of the United States military mission from Iran, (c) The abandonment of the current economic stabilization program, (d) Undetermined moves to extract more money from the Oil Consortium, (e) A great blow to the global prestige of the United States, (f) Opportunity for communist infiltration into the regime, (g) The loss of Iran's friendly United Nations vote,

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(h) Neutralism as a positive policy, probably midway between the Nehru and Kassem models,

(i) The acceptance of Soviet economic, and possibly of military, aid. These probably short-range costs would have to be balanced against

the long-range advantages of a more popularly based regime in Iran. The cost does not appear to be worth the advantages. ...

It would appear preferable that the United States would be best advised to continue its present policy of reassurance to the Shah of United States sympathy and support, along with persistent but delicate inferences by our Ambassador to the effect that the Shah should devote his attention to his internal political problems rather than to foreign and military affairs. ... (Bowling in Alexander and Nanes, 315-21).

What Bowling foresaw with such acute trepidation has come to pass- with a vengeance. Not only has the United States lost its dominant position in Iran, but so have the "Mossadeqists," the Westernized seg- ments of Iranian society. Iran's economy is a shambles, its political system still wracked by devisiveness and violence. Civil war, territorial disin- tegration, and Soviet penetration are constant possibilities.

What virtually every one of the studies under review suggests is that President Carter seems to have resurrected parts of Bowling's analysis and recommendations of i96i and applied them in I977. But Iran and its imperial regime had changed fundamentally in the intervening years. Six key elements in the transformation can be identified:

(i) the political and personal capacities of the Shah and his regime; (2) the massive bitterness and rage toward the Shah by virtually the

entire Iranian population; (3) the rise of the Islamic Shi'ite hierarchy and its followers as a key

locus of leadership and organization for opposition activities; (4) the emergence of political/terrorist groups, the Fidayin-i Khalq

and Mujahedin-i Khalq, which radicalized large numbers of the youth;

(5) the political collapse of the Mossadeqists, the largely middle-class, liberal followers of that earlier hero of Iranian nationalism, Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq; and

(6) the dramatically heightened role of the United States in Iranian society, politics, and economics, as well as the altered Iranian perceptions of that role.

As a result, the changes, analyses, and policies which may have been appropriate for the i96os proved to be formulas for the disaster of I978.

The works under review here, and a few others,' provide a detailed

A number of other books on Iran have recently been published; they suffer from most of the weaknesses of the studies under review here. See, for example, Farah, Shahbanou of

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account of the players and the events of the revolution (Stempel, Heikal, McFadden and others), a view of the antecedents of and the U.S. role in the revolution (Ledeen and Lewis, Sullivan, Alexander and Nanes), and an account of the actions and thinking of the Shah (Shah, Pahlavi, and Farah). The Shah's foreign policy and its interaction with his do- mestic policy (Saikal), the nature of the training and ideology of the religious hierarchy (Fischer), urban migrants and their plight (Kazemi), and the account of the seizure of American diplomats and the "inside" story of the attempts to gain their release (Salinger, McFadden) are covered in admirable detail.

What is missing from these accounts is an illumination of four factors crucial to the outcome of this revolution and to students of revolution in general. Those four central areas are the role of opposition leaders, in particular Ayatollah Khomeini; the nature of opposition organization as the regime was challenged; the potential for revolutionary mobili- zation of the city dwellers of Iran; and the nature of the regime's response-especially the leadership of the Shah-in coping with bur- geoning revolutionary activities.2 An elucidation of these four areas and their interaction is fundamental to understanding the Iranian revolution and to the construction of a general theory of revolution.

There is regrettably little here on the leaders of the first stage of the revolution, marked by the Shah's flight from Iran on January i6, I979. While Stempel offers up more analysis than the others, and Heikal- for all his considerable failings here-the most insight, we are left with the sense that important issues of revolutionary leadership have eluded our grasp. Of prime significance is the need to understand the changing role of Ayatollah Khomeini. On two occasions in Iranian history, I963 and 1978, his charismatic appeal resulted in nationwide political explo- sions. In i963, on two consecutive Islamic holy days, he delivered several sermons which railed against political tyranny and the oppression of Muslims by their rulers.3 Within hours, he was arrested. A few hours

Iran, My Thousand and One Days, trans. from the French by Felice Harcourt (London: W. H. Allen, I978); Michael J. Fischer, Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution (Cam- bridge: Harvard University Press, i980); Nikki R. Keddie, Roots ofRevolution: An Interpretive History of Modern Iran (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, i98i); Robert D. McFadden, Joseph B. Treaster, and Maurice Carroll, eds., No Hiding Place: Inside Report on the Hostage Crisis (New York: New York Times Books, i98i); Pierre Salinger, America Held Hostage: The Secret Negotiations (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, i98i); and Sepehr Zabih, The Mossadegh Era, Roots of the Iranian Revolution (Chicago: Lake View Press, i982).

2 It is gratifying to see the careful work now being done on the opposition. See, for example, James A. Bill, "Power and Religion in Revolutionary Iran," in Middle East Journal 36 (No. I, I982), 22-47.

3 For more detailed accounts of the events of i963, see Marvin Zonis, The Political Elite of Iran (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), I5Iff., and Hamid Algar, "The Op- positional Role of the Ulama in Twentieth Century Iran," in Nikki R. Keddie, ed., Scholars,

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later yet, thousands of sympathizers gathered in the streets of major Iranian cities. Calm was restored only after three days of bloody repres- sion by the military. And not until Khomeini was exiled, eventually to settle in a Shi'ite holy city in Iraq, did it appear that he had been removed as a source of antiregime leadership.

Thirteen years after going into exile, however, Khomeini again played a central role. His son had died in Iran in late I977. Rumors circulated that he had been killed by the regime; a national outpouring of sympathy resulted. In an apparent effort to deflate Khomeini's growing reputation, the Ministry of Court had an article published in Tehran's leading daily defaming Khomeini's character and branding him as anti-Islamic. It backfired when demonstrations supporting the Ayatollah broke out in the religious city of Qum. Several clerics and students were killed by security forces, and there followed a cycle of mourning ceremonies for the dead, more deaths, and further mourning ceremonies. That cycle continued throughout I978, becoming more fervent, more widespread, and occurring with greater frequency. In I978, it culminated in two days of marches in Tehran on December i i and I 2, the two holiest days of the Shi'ite calendar; over one million people marched each day, uncontested by the security forces.

These marches were dramatic evidence that the revolutionaries had triumphed. But it is by no means clear just when Ayatollah Khomeini and his advisers began to play their key role in organizing the opposition and in fomenting the anti-Shah activity rather than merely condoning it. The Iranian government had requested Iraq to expel the Ayatollah in late September, I978, hoping to cut him off from his supporters in Iran. (The latter could easily cross into Iraq as a result of the open border that had been established by the Shah's agreement with Saddam Hussein in Algiers in I975.)

On October 22, Mahdi Bazargan, the secular leader of the Liberation Movement and a civil-rights activist (who was to be Khomeini's first Prime Minister) had gone to Paris to announce full support for the Ayatollah. In early November, Karim Sanjabi, the leader of the Mos- sadeqists, followed; and at the end of that month, Ayatollah Kazem Shariatmadari, the most eminent of the clerics, declared that "our de- mands are the same" (Ledeen and Lewis, I53). Whether these pro- nouncements of support marked the actual organizational and tactical unification of the opposition or only an attempt by opposition leaders to share in Khomeini's already unassailable leadership position is not clear.

Saints and Sufis-Muslim Religious Institutions in the Middle East Since I500 (Berkeley: University of California Press, I972), 23I-55.

IRAN: A THEORY OF REVOLUTION 591

Nor is the nature of Khomeini's own leadership clarified. The extent to which he played a commanding tactical role during the revolution rather than serving as an alternative focus to the Shah is uncertain. There are numerous accounts of the Ayatollah's setting broad constraints on the direction of the revolution.

For example, when Karim Sanjabi went to Paris, he fully expected to extract moderate concessions from the Ayatollah. But, faced with the cleric's implacable and unalterable commitment to the overthrow of the Shah, it was Sanjabi who backed down and formally accepted Kho- meini's position for the National Front (Stempel, I29).

Again, after Iranian students had seized the United States Embassy and the American diplomats, the Ayatollah was urged to impose dis- cipline on the students. But, characteristically, he responded,

Why do you want discipline and order? ... If we insist on discipline and order, that means using the Army and the police, and that shouldn't be done in a revolution. Our people have been in prison for more than thirty years. Nobody can stop them from breaking the bars of that prison and getting out and doing whatever they want. The people in the streets with their ferment, are a guarantee of the continuation of the revolution.4

One inference to be drawn is that the Ayatollah established broad limitations on the course of the revolution, and later on his revolutionary regime. He definitely made clear what would not be tolerated-e.g., compromise with the Pahlavi ruler. But there is little indication of any additional leadership role for him. How his directives were translated into policy, and by whom, is never clarified. In fact, there are alternative models of the Ayatollah, ranging from an active, directing leader to one who was merely serving as the repository of deeply cherished Iranian values.

At least until the ouster of the Shah, Khomeini was widely believed to embody many of the central values of Iranian culture, values which the Shah was seen as having desecrated. Khomeini stood for authority, sacrifice, aesceticism, and dignity. With his promise of a return to Islam, he offered community and authenticity as well. The Shah was never able to champion such values. But how Khomeini's claims were trans- lated into a leadership role, and the precise nature of that role, is not clarified in these studies.

Another major shortcoming in our ability to understand the leadership of the "winners" is the role of the moderate, liberal opposition to the Shah. Mention has been made of Bazargan and Sanjabi making their separate pilgrimages of obeisance to Khomeini in Paris. But none of the

4 Salinger (fn. i), I02.

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studies under review reveals what role these men or their followers actually played in the revolution. Bazargan in particular, by siding with Khomeini, helped to allay the anxieties of "urban dwellers and bazaar merchants that a government without the Shah would ... go to ex- tremes" (Stempel, 50). His participation was especially significant in this regard because he was also a leading human-rights activist bitterly op- posed to violations of due process and civil liberties. But the significance of his and Sanjabi's role in the success of the revolution is an entirely different matter.

Their pacts with the Ayatollah cannot be understood in terms of their delivering any "troops." It is not at all clear that they had any troops to deliver, for their organizations had largely atrophied during the years of Pahlavi repression. What they were able to offer were mainly "ce- lebrity endorsements." But, in view of the momentum of the revolution and the paralysis of the Shah, it is likely that such endorsements did not make much difference to the outcome. The demise of the Pahlavis was perhaps accepted with greater calm, or even elation, because the endorsements reduced anxieties. But control, or even major influence, over significant events seems to have passed out of their hands well before the revolution.

A second area crucial to understanding the collapse of the Shah and his imperial system, as well as a more general theory of revolution, is the organization of the opposition. The works under review provide little information-beyond the conventional wisdom-as to how revo- lutionary activity was organized and financed. The conventional view has it that, at least until the early fall of 1978, revolutionary activity was conducted rather haphazardly, with each of the large number of rev- olutionary forces pursuing its own goal in a more or less spontaneous fashion. As these activities burgeoned-especially after the Cinema Rex fire in Abadan in August I978, in which over four hundred moviegoers were burned to death in a theater whose doors had been locked-greater coordination became apparent. By the time of the key leaders' obeisance to Khomeini in November, the nationwide network of clerics operating out of neighborhood mosques, and financed by disgruntled businessmen, seems to have served as the organizational source of revolutionary ac- tivity.

Many visitors to the Ayatollah in Paris-including this reviewer- reported that his aides had constructed a sophisticated communications system whereby his tape-recorded speeches were transmitted virtually instantaneously by international telephone system to Tehran, where they

IRAN: A THEORY OF REVOLUTION 593

were re-recorded. Cassette reproduction machines then made thousands of copies of the Ayatollah's harangues. They were delivered throughout the country, played to gatherings in mosques, and sold on the streets (described by eager vendors as "used" tapes).

But these accounts do not go beyond the conventional wisdom. How, for example, was coordination effected among major opposition groups? How were the parades of hundreds of thousands of marchers organized? Who acted as their marshals, imposing discipline on the participants? Did the terrorist groups serve continually as the paramilitary force for the clerics? When and how did they begin to cooperate?

Knowledge about the financing of the revolution has been equally general. In the fall of I978, for example, large numbers of bank accounts were established to support a wide variety of revolutionary activities. Representatives of diverse political groups would urge their followers- even through advertisements in the then largely uncontrolled press-to make deposits to those accounts. Many were labeled "strike funds," allegedly to support the thousands of government employees whose refusal to work increasingly paralyzed the regime. But it is also known that for much of this period the government continued to pay its em- ployees whether they worked or not, and put immense pressure on the private sector to do likewise, believing that failure to do so would lead to even greater disorder (Stempel, 121). For what, then, were the funds in those bank accounts spent? How much was collected? What alter- native sources of funds were available? The works under review do not provide any information.

The Shah, of course, along with everyone else, had his own theories about the organization of the opposition. He began to share these views with U.S. Ambassador William H. Sullivan in September. By then, the revolution had taken a qualitatively different turn. The Cinema Rex fire had raised revolutionary consciousness and was followed by the first mass demonstrations held in all major Iranian cities; they were organized through the collaboration of the principal opposition factions. At these demonstrations, the first "public calls for government action" were made: a strict enforcement of the i906 constitution, the release of political prisoners, the ending of corruption, and the holding of free elections (Stempel, I I4). No calls were yet heard for the deposition of the Shah. He had promised to meet such demands as recently as Iranian Consti- tution Day in August, and his newly installed Prime Minister, Engineer Sharif-Emami, was working to carry out those promises; that, however, seemed irrelevant.

Only a few days after these demonstrations, during the night of

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September 7-8, the government declared martial law and forbade further demonstrations. But early on the morning of September 8-which came to be known as "Black Friday"-thousands of demonstrators, possibly unaware of the martial law declaration, gathered in Tehran's Jhaleh Square.5 The troops opened fire-apparently with at least tacit approval for the use of force from the United States officials.6 By the end of the day, a large number of marchers had been killed-86 according to the Shah, thousands according to the opposition; the actual figure seems to have been closer to the smaller number.

Black Friday clearly was a decisive turning point. The Shah's and Sharif-Emami's efforts to placate the opposition even to the point of appeasement were belied by the imposition of martial law. The shreds of royal credibility that the middle-class city dwellers had still retained were destroyed with the lives of the demonstrators. Clearly, the promises of the Shah were now worthless. Even more damaging to the imperial system was the collapse of the Shah's own resolve, which followed quickly upon the killings. Opposition leaders who had been rounded up throughout Tehran on September 8 were abruptly released within 24 hours. It became apparent that the Shah could be trusted neither to liberalize nor to repress. His indecisiveness and clear lack of any stable sense of how to manage his political fate chilled even his most ardent supporters.

The Ayatollah and the opposition, on the other hand, manifested a distinct vision of how to press for their goals, and the continuing courage to carry their objective through to its inevitable conclusion. Few people are as ready to succumb to decisive authority as the Iranians; it was now clear where such authority was to be found.

The Shah's private response to these developments was to focus on the question of the organization of the opposition. By then, Ambassador Sullivan was seeing the Shah on a regular basis; along with the Empress, Sullivan and later the Iranian Ambassador to the United States, Ardeshir Zahedi, were the only persons with whom the Shah could have frank discussions (Sullivan, I58). All through September, the Shah railed against the opposition. He believed that the demonstrations

It is of great symbolic significance to the revolution that Jhaleh Square, an undistin- guished public place in a lower-class neighborhood of south Tehran, served as the focus of so much of the revolution. During the turmoil of the Mossadeq period, Baharestan Square played that role. Baharestan was not only surrounded by Tehran's middle classes, but was bordered by the building that housed the Parliament, for whose centrality to Iranian politics Mossadeq's supporters were struggling.

6 See one of a recent series of articles in the Washington Post, by Scott Armstrong, February 3, i982, p. IO. Ironically, it was John D. Stempel, then the highest-ranking Persian-speaking American diplomat, who transmitted that tacit approval to the Iranians.

IRAN: A THEORY OF REVOLUTION 595

gave evidence of sophisticated planning and [were] not the work of spon- taneous oppositionists. He then turned to me and in an almost supplicant tone said he had thought this over at great length and had concluded that the actions he had just outlined represented the work of foreign intrigue. What bothered him, he said, was that this intrigue went beyond the capabilities of the Soviet KGB and must therefore also involve the British, and American CIA. He said he could understand the British intrigue to some extent because there were those in the United Kingdom who had never forgiven him for nationalizing the oil industry. ...

What bothered him the most, he continued, was the role of the CIA. Why was the CIA suddenly turning against him? What had he done to deserve this sort of action from the United States? ... had we and the Soviets reached some grand design in which we had decided to divide up Iran between ourselves as part of an overall division of power throughout the entire world? (Sullivan, 156-57).

Thus the Shah, as stupefied by the exploding revolution as virtually everyone else, fell back on the old Iranian formula of seeing Iranian politics as some kind of vibration elicited by foreign players-a vision complementary to Ayatollah Khomeini's branding the United States as the "Great Satan."

But finding the villain in foreign plots was as much a flight from cogent political analysis for the Shah as it has been for the Ayatollah. It obviates the need to understand the Iranian players, their motivations, and their organization. Unfortunately, the works at hand do not assist students of revolution and of Iran in the task of understanding the organization of the revolutionaries.

A third factor essential to comprehending the Iranian revolution, in addition to those of leadership and organization, is that of revolutionary energy-the propensity for revolutionary participation by the vast ma- jority of city dwellers in Iran. There are still diehard monarchists who think of the events of I978 as afetneh, a disturbance, perhaps even an uprising, but still not a revolution. One of the most striking aspects of I978, however, is the extent to which the Iranian people as a whole- including the very sectors of Iranian society that benefited most from the Shah's rule-were not only willing to see the dismantling of the entire Pahlavi system but were, in fact, eager participants in its demise.

Three different explanations for the propensity for revolution by the Iranian people are offered; a fourth needs to be constructed from rich evidence in the present accounts. The first explanation is an economic theory of revolutionary behavior. The merchants and industrialists who benefited most from the economic boom that began in i969 and devel- oped into a hyper-boom following the OPEC-induced oil price rises of

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I973 and I974 had become disenchanted and angry at the constant harassment of state bureaucracies.

Two examples from the I970s illustrate their dismay. By mid-I975 it was clear to virtually everyone that the Iranian economy was not merely overheated, but was in danger of flying apart. The economic and social development plan had been doubled in size in I974, following the jump in oil revenues. Less than one year later, actual expenditures were running ahead of planned levels, partially due to the Shah's forced draft expansion of the military. The results were obvious: inflation, shortages of manpower at virtually every level of skill, horrendous trans- portation bottlenecks with clogged ports and jammed warehouses at one end of the production process and shortages of materials at the other, frequent electricity outages-in short, near-chaos.

One response by the bureaucracy was to counter inflation by ending what it identified as the profiteering of businessmen. Students were mobilized throughout the country to fight such practices; they surveyed both retailers and wholesalers to check that their prices were within the government's guidelines. As a result, thousands of businessmen were dragged into hastily convened antiprofiteering courts. Fines were levied; worse, certain big businessmen were sentenced to various terms of "in- ternal exile." The most prominent of these were not Shi'ite Muslims, but Baha'is and Jews. Businessmen everywhere were chagrined and outraged, and the Baha'i and Jewish communities sensed the specter of persecution.

Another campaign that emanated from the state bureaucracy sought to tie workers to the system by making it possible for them to own shares in their employers' corporations. In fact, the government forced large corporations to sell up to 49 percent of their firms to the workers. It made low-cost government loans available for the purchases. No matter how well-intentioned the program may have been, however, both the industrialists and the workers felt worse off after it was enforced. It was never clear, for example, whether or not the original owners merely printed new shares to sell to their employees, or how the price of the shares had been established, or whether the workers saw any value in owning shares. The workers believed the government was forcing them to transfer their hard-earned rials to already wealthy in- dustrialists for paper shares that they might never be able to sell. Both the industrialists and the workers considered themselves subject to some form of forced confiscation; and both groups felt put upon by the gov- ernment.

But the most serious source of economically based dissatisfaction

IRAN: A THEORY OF REVOLUTION 597

stemmed not from price controls or workers' shareholding, but from the politicization of income inequality. Although income inequality had burgeoned along with oil revenue, it had not initially seemed significant: Iranians at all social levels felt that the boom would be endless, and that their chances for wealth would come in time. When it became obvious in mid-I975 that the boom was slowing down, there was panic over what were seen as disappearing opportunities for riches, and bitter envy directed at those who had already succeeded.7 Stempel, and Ledeen and Lewis, capture the consequences of such panic and envy. The latter note:

The discontent with worsening economic conditions was centered, as always, in the bazaar. And the worse the bazaaris' balance sheets, the greater the anger against the shah. "Following years of prosperity and rising expectations, the mood in the bazaar was now one of disenchant- ment. This made it easier for religious leaders to call for business strikes to which the bazaar ... responded impressively" (Ledeen and Lewis, I37).8

The most comprehensive analysis of the economic difficulties of the mid-I970s is to be found in the Cambridge Journal of Economics, in which Thomas Walton demonstrates impressive parallels between the early i960s and the late I970s.9 In the former, the overheated economy of the late I950S had been cooled through an IMF stabilization program which preceded the political unrest of i960-i962. Walton argues that the oil- induced boom of the early I970s, followed by a decline in oil revenues beginning in I975, and coupled with the government's efforts to slow the economy through constricting credit and other steps, led to the Revolution of I978. Citing Hirschman, he attributes the political turmoil in each period to the fact that

expectations of ever-rising material wealth were becoming increasingly frustated and the people's tolerance for the continually rising social and economic inequities which had been in process ever since the abortive protests of i963, was becoming rapidly exhausted. People may be prepared to tolerate what they perceive as inequities so long as they expect the

7 Farhad Mehran, "Income Distribution in Iran, The Statistics of Inequality," Working Paper, Income Distribution and Employment Programme (Geneva: ILO, October 1975); M. H. Pesaran, "Income Distribution and Its Major Determinants in Iran," in Jane Jacqz, ed., Iran: Past, Present, Future (New York: Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, 1976); Jiri Skolka and Michael Garzuel, "Changes in Economic Distribution, Employment and Struc- ture of the Economy: A Case Study of Iran," Working Paper, Income Distribution and Employment Programme (Geneva: ILO, 1976); George E. Wright, "Regional Inequality in the Economic Development of Iran," Ph.D. diss. (University of Michigan, 1977).

8 Quoted by Ledeen and Lewis from David Menashri, "Iran," in Colin Legum and Haim Shakhed, eds., Middle East Contemporary Survey, III, I978-i979 (New York: Holmes & Meier, i980).

9 Walton, "Economic Development and Revolutionary Upheavals in Iran," Cambridge Journal of Economics 4 (i98o), 271-92, at 286.

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existing disparities and injustices to diminish eventually. But if this does not happen, the inevitable result under autocratic regimes will be social tension, political protests and potentially revolutionary upheavals.'0

In short, by I977 the regime of the Shah had lost the confidence of the major industrialists through its antiprofiteering and share distri- bution schemes. Smaller businessmen and bazaaris-never great sup- porters of the Shah to begin with-became dismayed with the system when they saw their chances for wealth disappear as a consequence of credit constrictions and the declining oil revenues.

Another source of the revolutionary spirit of the time can be found in political processes that are counterparts of the massive expansion of opportunities for economic betterment-opportunities that raised ex- pectations and heightened aspirations, only to be thwarted by economic contraction. As the Shah himself explains it:

On March 4, I974 [actually, I975], the Resurgence Party was formed. I believed that representatives of all social levels and all opinions could be gathered together in one party. I thought that through eliminating an opposition party, I could solicit the aid of all capable political personalities without concern for party politics. For the future I saw this organization as a great political and ideological school....

However, experience was to show the creation of this party was an error ... it did not become the conduit of ideas, needs and wishes between the nation and the government (Shah, I24).

Initially, the Resurgence or Rastakhiz Party was greeted with the profound cynicism so characteristic of Iranians. But, to the amazement of increasing numbers of the politically ambitious, the Shah appeared to be treating Rastakhiz differently from the Iran Noveen Party or others before it. To be sure, it developed into a nationwide patronage organ- ization delivering jobs and services in return for party work, and es- pecially for parliamentary electoral politics. But in I975, Rastakhiz began to change in a more significant direction-it began to offer the possibility for communication, not merely from the top down, but also from the less to the more powerful. "Wings" of the party were created-both led by loyalists, but offering slightly different and legitimate perspectives. Increasing numbers of the politically literate began to believe that the formation of these wings offered, finally, hope for political democrati- zation (Ledeen and Lewis, 29).

By late I976, democratization had gone too far-for the Shah. He stepped in to ban direct competition between the wings in the parliament,

10 Albert 0. Hirschman, "The Changing Tolerance for Income Inequality in the Course of Economic Development," Quarterly Journal of Economics 87 (1973), 544-66.

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defining very clearly the political limits he would tolerate. His imposition of those limits left the party activists who had struggled to build polit- ically significant factions with a sense of having been betrayed. Still, many-especially the technocrats who were thoroughly immersed in the system-stayed with the party, hoping to keep it positioned for another period of liberalization (Stempel, 34-38).

But the liberalization of I977 was not extended to the party. When its Secretary General criticized the government for the killing of several squatters in a slum eradication campaign in August I977, the end had come (Kazemi, 85-88). The Secretary General was fired and "the Shah announced that active membership ... was neither a way to get ahead in a government job ... nor was the party to act as a pressure group on behalf of specific policies. Members were to be merely watchdogs" (Stempel, 42).

By the end of I977, then-just when revolutionary fervor elsewhere in the society was being translated into revolutionary action-the only national organization capable of providing political support for the re- gime was undone. Its members-even the diehard technocrats seeking to justify their role in the system-realized the extent to which they had been betrayed and their political aspirations thwarted.

The economic and political processes which resulted in feelings of betrayal and frustration were significant sources of the revolutionary energy that culminated in the overthrow of the Shah. Moreover, they are compatible with numerous theories of revolution.sI But they are inadequate explanations for at least two reasons. First, these economic and political processes affected primarily the middle sectors of Iranian urban society. They do not seem to account for the particularly wide- spread participation of the urban masses who were the troops of the revolution. Second, betrayal and frustration are affects of defeat, of disappointment, and of failure-but not of action.

What must be added here is a process that adds feelings of injury and humiliation to those of frustration and betrayal-not just for the middle sectors, but for virtually the entire people of Iran. These added affects produced a rage so implacable that neither the ouster of the Shah nor the later humiliation of the United States for 444 days would calm it completely. Put simply, as the I970S passed and the oil revenues slowed,

I] See, for example, Crane Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, I965); James C. Davies, "Toward a Theory of Revolution," in C. T. Paynton and R. Blackey, eds., Why Revolution? (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1971); James C. Davies, ed., When Men Revolt-and Why (New York: Macmillan, 197i); Ted Robert Gurr, Why Men Rebel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970).

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the behavior of the Shah increasingly came to be experienced as an insult-a narcissistic injury to his own people.12

Suffice it here to give but three from a list of nearly infinite examples of the Shah's behavior that was so offensive and insulting to Iranians. In the fullness of his grandiosity in I976, the Shah had never seemed to tire of repeating such boasts as "I want the standard of living in Iran in ten years' time to be exactly on a level with that in Europe today. In twenty years' time we shall be ahead of the United States" (Heikal, io9). In his eagerness to reach those goals, he frequently communicated im- plicitly that the people of Iran were the greatest obstacle to the realization of his objectives. "If our nation wished to remain in the circle of dynamic, progressive and free nations of the world, it had no alternative but to completely alter the archaic order of society and to structure its future on a new order compatible with the visions and needs of the day" (Shah, ioi). But "the visions and needs of the day" were his visions and his needs. He imposed his set of reforms from above-the "White Revo- lution," which included land reform, rights for women, the nationali- zation of forests and water, profit sharing, universal literacy, and the like. He made no attempt to assess his people's visions and needs, and made little effort to explain why his visions and needs were appropriate. He showed the Iranians no compassion and no empathy.

A second example of his behavior, which served as a constant hu- miliation to his own people, was his predilection for foreign (in particular American) ways and approval, at the expense of indigenous Iranian ways and Iranian approval. Answer to History was published in French and English (as was his first book, Mission for My Country), not in Persian; it is laced with quotations from speeches by foreign leaders-especially the eight American Presidents he knew personally. To be sure, the Shah was attempting to recover some shred of his own esteem following the massive rejection he had experienced from his own people. But the book is symbolic of his failure even to appreciate, let alone alter, the widespread Iranian perception that the most important reference group for him was that parade of American Presidents rather than the Iranian people. A report from the U.S. National Security Council noted as early as i963 that "it must not be forgotten that the Shah's greatest single liability

-- For a basic statement of the issues of narcissistic injury and narcissistic rage, see Heinz Kohut, The Analysis of the Self (New York: International Universities Press, 1971), and Kohut, The Restoration of the Self (New York: International Universities Press, 1978). For applications of these ideas, see Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, Committee on International Relations, Self-Involvement in the Middle East Conflict io (November 1978), and Marvin Zonis, "Self-Objects, Self-Representation, and Sense Making Crises: Political Instability in the i980's," forthcoming.

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may well be his vulnerability to charges by both reactionary and radical opposition elements that he is a foreign puppet" (Alexander and Nanes, 357).

A third example of the Shah's failure to deal emphatically and with compassion toward his people, and their resulting sense of insult, centers on the role of SAVAK, the Iranian secret police. Political passions still make it impossible to assess objectively the extent of torture and political repression meted out by SAVAK.'3 What is clear is that by the outbreak of the revolution, the Iranian people had come to believe in the worst of its excesses. One result was a general feeling of intimidation, certainly a principal goal of the imperial regime in fostering the sense of SAVAK's omniscience. But another result was the defamation of the Shah: it was widely believed that only a ruler with so little regard for his people would subject them to such treatment.

To put it differently, many have recognized the father-child relation between the Shah and the Iranian people (A. Pahlavi, i5o, i88; Forbis, 69). SAVAK, or rather the myth of SAVAK, was a tangible reminder of the disdain of the father for his children.14

Again, an infinite number of actions suggested to the Iranian people that the rule of the Shah was an insult to them. Suffice it to note that any attempt to generate a theory of revolution must take account of revolutionary rage, and-as will universally be the case-of the people's sense of humiliation and insult that produced this rage.'5 The present works on Iran fail to develop any coherent or systematic view of this process.

We have argued above that, in order to understand the Iranian rev- olution-and by extension, any revolution-one must understand the propensity for revolutionary action on the part of the people, and the leadership and organization of the opposition that can mobilize this potential on their behalf against the existing political order. The fourth area necessary for completing the revolutionary equation is the response

'3 For an effort to evaluate the role of SAVAK in Pahlavi Iran, see Marvin Zonis, "The Shah of Iran-An Assessment," Boston Globe, August 3, i980, pp. Ai-A3.

4 For a highly elaborate essay on the father-child/ruler-ruled parallel in Iranian history, see Reza Baraheni's provocative essay, "Masculine History," in The Croumed Cannibals, Writings on Repression in Iran (New York: Vintage Books, 1977).

15Kohut (fn. 12), develops the psychoanalytic theory which demonstrates that narcissistic injury is the necessary precursor of rage. Studies that link such rage to political processes include Marvin Zonis, "Some Possible Contributions of the Psychology of the Self to the Study of the Arab Middle East," in Arnold Goldberg, ed., Advances in Self Psychology (New York: International Universities Press, i980), 439-46, Zonis (fn. 12), and Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry (fn. 12).

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of the political system, the strategies and tactics of the ruler, and his system for dealing with the first three factors. As in the case of the other elements necessary to produce a theory of this (and by extension, any) revolution, the books under review provide no coherent analysis of the Shah's actions, although two come close to it (Stempel, Saikal). But virtually every one of them provides abundant raw material for doing so.

The studies show that there was nothing inevitable about the outcome of the Iranian revolution-neither its timing nor the fall of the Shah. As late as November 6, I978, for example, the Shah instituted a military government under the direction of General Gholam Reza Azhari, who had been chief of the Supreme Commander's Staff. For the next several days, a degree of stability and order was restored, as if the opposition, afraid of the armed forces, had paused to take the measure of the new government. When it became clear that the military government would be no more forcefully repressive than the armed forces under martial law had been for the preceding two months, it was back to revolution as usual. The breathtaking speed of the final denouement caught not merely the Shah and the Americans off-guard; Ayatollah Khomeini himself had no idea of the speed with which the Pahlavi system would collapse in those final weeks. Heikal relates that, when he visited Kho- meini in Paris in December I978, one of the Ayatollah's advisers, Dr. Ibrahim Yazdi, and the Ayatollah's son-in-law, Hojjat-ul Islam Eshraqi, asked for his help in finding another residence for the Ayatollah when his French visa expired in April of I979. They did not foresee that the Ayatollah would return to Iran in triumph-as early as February i, I979.

Ultimately, the responsibility for the timing and outcome of the rev- olution rests with the Shah. He had 37 years of experience in ruling the country. He commanded one of the world's most powerful armed forces. Billions of dollars of oil revenues were spent annually at his discretion. Every significant foreign state supported him virtually to the end- including not just the United States and Britain, but also the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China. (Indeed, the last official state visit over which the Shah presided was that of Hua Kuo-Feng of the PRC.) That he could have lost his throne to the revolution while com- manding those assets seems staggering-implausible in the face of it. Basically, he was overthrown because he never demonstrated the firm and tenacious leadership necessary to communicate an unambiguous and sustained commitment to maintaining his regime, and was unable to act in ways appropriate to such a commitment.

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The works under review are replete with examples of those failures. It was typical of the entire process of the revolution that the Shah continually gave out mixed signals: liberalization-cum-appeasement and, simultaneously, repression. On November 6, I978, the Shah went before his people via television to present the new military government. His audience was taken aback by his humility, his apologetics, and his prom- ise of greater liberalization-all the while announcing the imposition of military rule. Moreover, he referred to himself as padeshah or king- a term used in Iran for such imposing figures as thepadeshah of Thailand- rather than as shahanshah or king of kings, his usual title. How the Iranian people, acutely conscious of the fine nuances of language, were to integrate the different levels of meaning communicated in that speech is not clear. It must have led them to assume that the ruler was hopelessly lost. And, as that fact became more widely understood, they realized that power was available, to be taken, at minimal cost.

Four factors seem to be at work in accounting for the Shah's failure of leadership. For one, despite his 37-year reign, he consistently failed to demonstrate any personal capacity to deal with challenges. In August I94I, while he was still crown prince, the Soviet Union and Britain simultaneously invaded his country. His twin sister reports his response to that crisis:

"My brother was concerned not only about the consequences of the war, but also about the threat to the monarchy.... He doubted that the Iranian army would be able to hold the palace in the event of an Allied attack. Later that afternoon he brought me a gun and said: "Ashraf, keep this gun with you, and if troops enter Teheran and try to take us, fire a few shots and then take your own life. I'll do the same" (A. Pahlavi, 40).

In August I953, the Iranian armed forces, in conjunction with U.S. and U.K. intelligence services, launched a coup against Prime Minister Mossadeq.'6 When the coup failed, the Shah fled to Baghdad, and then to Rome. There he heard that the crowds in Tehran were tearing down his statues. According to Forbis, Queen Soraya, who was then his wife, "says in her memoirs that she asked him 'Where would you like to go?' and he replied, 'Probably America,' and suggested that he would like to buy a farm there" (p. 6i). Here, too, the Shah succumbed to a collapse of will and demonstrated an absence of leadership.

Ten years later, the Shah was again confronted by a serious chal-

x6 A recently published study minimizes the role of the CIA and British intelligence in the 1953 cOup; see Zabih (fn. i). For another recent work (which maximizes the role of the CIA), see Kermit Roosevelt, Countercoup, The Struggle for the Control of Iran (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979).

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lenge-the rioting that followed the arrest of Khomeini. In this case, the Shah appeared to respond with firmness, even brutality. Troops were ordered to clear the streets-by firing, if necessary; and fire they did, with great loss of life. What actually happened was that Prime Minister Alam, the Shah's boyhood friend and later Minister of Court, called the military commanders to his office and ordered them to fire to clear the streets. When they balked at accepting orders from Alam rather than from the Shah, and especially such orders, Alam telephoned the mon- arch. A heated argument ensued; finally, the Shah told Alam to do whatever he wanted as long as Alam took full responsibility for the consequences. He made it clear that he was washing his hands of the whole affair. Alam returned to the officers-who had been allowed to overhear the entire conversation-and repeated his orders. They were carried out.'7

The Shah's failures in I977 and I978 were therefore completely con- sistent with the character he had displayed in previous crises. Two things were, however, different. First, his forceful and trusted counselor, As- sadollah Alam had died of cancer in the fall of I977. Since no other individual was allowed by the Shah to play the same role, he had no one else whose political judgment he trusted and who could act at decisive moments of the revolution. Second, the nature of the challenge to his rule, for the reasons suggested above, was far more serious than any he had confronted previously. In the face of this challenge, he reverted to his earlier style and withdrew. As Ledeen and Lewis put it, "the fundamental fact remains that the decisive person to withdraw his commitment to the state was the Shah himself. Once the Shah lost the will to fight, the state crumbled from within and out of its own mo- mentum ..." (p. I40). As I have tried to make clear, the Shah never did have the "will to fight."

A third factor that must be understood in unraveling the Shah's leadership failure stems from the difference in his relationship with the United States. During the I950S and i96os, the United States -either through direct suggestion or judicious innuendo-could influence the Shah's behavior and make him carry out American-inspired policies in Iran (Saikal, 57-58). By the early I970s, the relationship appears to have changed dramatically. Iran "now had 'reverse leverage' with Washington and the Shah could magnify his role on the world stage-something the United States would not only be compelled by the erosion of its position in the Mediterranean area to applaud, but to support materially and diplomatically as well" (Ledeen and Lewis, 52). This perception of

'7 I obtained this account of the events of June I963 in several recent interviews with some of the participants.

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a drastic alteration was based, as well, on an apparent new toughness on the part of the Shah. Thus, "by I976 Ambassador Richard Helms, a strong personality himself, could reply to suggestions that the United States 'tell' Iran's monarch to liberalize his system with the comment, 'The first time I try to tell the Shah what to do on such matters will be the last time I see him' " (Stempel, 2i). The last U.S. Ambassador, William Sullivan, initially expressed puzzlement at being posted to Teh- ran, because he "had never lived in the Islamic world and knew little about its culture or its ethos." But in their first meeting after Sullivan was appointed, Secretary of State Vance informed the Ambassador that it had been decided to send a professional who had considerable ex-

perience in dealing with authoritarian governments and with leaders who were forceful personalities" (Sullivan, I2-I3, i6).

As was to become clear by I978, these assessments of both the Shah's personality and the altered nature of his country's relationship with the United States were fatally wrong. The Shah could be a "forceful per- sonality" when no significant force was opposing him. And Iran could act with a degree of independence from the United States because the regime had "committed itself to a formal alliance with the West and tied not only Iran's foreign policy but also the country's socioeconomic development to the interests of the capitalistic world" (Saikal, 46).18

Just how fundamental the Shah's psychological dependence on the United States remained, despite trappings to the contrary, is best revealed in his memoirs. In surveying his last months in power, he comments,

For the balance of the year I received numerous messages from various people in and out of the Carter administration pledging U.S support. Whenever I met Sullivan and asked him to confirm these official state- ments, he promised he would. But a day or two later he would return, gravely shake his head and say that he had received 'no instructions' and therefore could not comment. Sullivan appeared to me always polite, always grave, always concerned. He came to see me several times a week. He seemed to take seriously everything I said to him. But his answer was always the same: I have received no instructions. Is it any wonder that I felt increasingly isolated and cut off from my Western friends? What were they really thinking, what did they want-for Iran and of me. I was never told. I never knew (Shah, i6i).

Just why Ambassador Sullivan had no instructions is the primary theme of his book, as it is of that by Ledeen and Lewis; in any case, the effects on the Shah were devastating. Being so emotionally dependent on the United States, he understood the Ambassador to mean he had

i8 Saikal's quote actually refers to the post-Mossadeq period, but the point remained applicable throughout the Shah's rule.

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been abandoned and rejected by Washington. Consequently, his already limited capacity to act was constrained even further.

One final factor helped to seal the Shah's doom-his cancer. He had detected a lump in his abdomen while on a skiing trip in I974. Two French cancer specialists diagnosed the Shah's illness and put him on a regimen of chemotherapy. From then until his exile, his illness was apparently known to only a tiny circle of court intimates, not even including his twin sister Ashraf (A. Pahlavi, 2I4). It was widely known in Iran that the Shah was constantly on medication, but almost no one knew why. Rumors were plentiful, but facts were few.

It is likely that his illness affected the Shah in a number of debilitating ways. For one, he had witnessed the wasting death from leukemia of his one intimate, Alam, in I977. In identifying with him, the Shah must have felt personally threatened and depressed. Further, the chemo- therapy in conjunction with his other medications, including sleeping pills, may have altered the Shah's cognitive capacities and reduced his intellectual powers. And finally, his illness made the Shah all the more acutely aware of the need to prepare for the ultimate transition of the monarchy to his son-an awareness that strengthened his own predi- lection to avoid the use of force in an attempt to mollify the opposition to Pahlavi rule.

The actual consequences of the Shah's illness have yet to be satisfac- torily elaborated, but his failure of leadership was sufficiently conditioned by other factors to lessen the cancer's significance. The history of his rule, his dependency on the United States, and his character structure made it virtually unthinkable that he could have extricated himself from the frenzy of the revolution. He had spent so many years of his rule eliminating all possible challengers to his domination of the political system that in the process he had eliminated potential allies and coun- selors as well. At the end, he had only his wife and his former son-in- law, Ardeshir Zahedi, neither of whose political judgments he respected; fundamentally, he was alone.

The works under review provide abundant information on a variety of key aspects of the revolution. None articulates a coherent and sys- tematic theoretical treatment. To do so would require an elaboration of four areas central to revolution: revolutionary leadership and organi- zation, mass participation, and system response. Until we understand the interplay of those factors and their dynamic with revolutionary action, we will lack a satisfactory theory of revolution.