On November 6, 1978, while riots raged throughout Tehran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, addressed the nation in a rhetoric of conciliation. “I have heard the voice of your revolution,” he said. The Shah promised to correct the regime’s mistakes, liberate political prisoners, call parliamentary elections, investigate the corruption in his midst, and ease the crackdown on dissent against a nationwide opposition.
But, as had happened so often in the history of brittle regimes, the dictator’s gesture of conciliation was read as desperation. In a village outside Paris, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini consistently attacked the Shah with derision. The “despotic regime of the Shah” was weak, he had said earlier, and was “drawing its last breaths.” And now, despite the Shah’s speech in Tehran, there could be no compromise.
Two months later, the Shah, suffering from cancer, fled Iran and commenced the indignity of travelling from one country to the next, looking for an acceptable place of exile. He died in July, 1980, in Cairo.
The current leader of the Islamic regime, Khomeini’s successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is eighty-six. He is one of the longest-reigning dictators on the planet. He is keenly aware of the story of the decline and fall of the old regime. And now, with the Islamic Republic facing dramatic demonstrations in dozens of cities across Iran, Khamenei is faced with a dilemma not unlike the Shah’s. With the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and other instruments of force as his bludgeon, Khamenei has chosen bloodshed over conciliation. The regime’s attempt to shut down the internet and other means of communication has dramatically slowed reporting, yet human-rights groups say that Iranian authorities have already killed as many as two hundred demonstrators.
“Unfortunately, if the Ayatollah is taking any lesson from the Shah, it’s that the Shah was weak and caved,” Scott Anderson, the author of “King of Kings,” a history of the revolution published last year, told me. “Brutally speaking, if the Shah had been tougher and had instructed his soldiers to indiscriminately kill people in the streets, he might have been saved. The question now is will the average soldier on the street shed more and more blood. How far will they go?”
The leaders of the regime, various experts told me, derived dark instruction not only from their historical enemy, the Shah, but from subsequent history. In the late nineteen-eighties, the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, tried to modernize his regime by democratizing the political system, ending censorship, easing the Cold War with the United States, and introducing market mechanisms into the economy. His conclusion was that “we cannot live this way any longer”; a regime guided by Communist ideology and confrontation had left the Soviet Union in a state of generalized poverty, isolation, and confrontation. And yet, although many conditions improved through Gorbachev’s liberal policies, he also risked the existence of a fragile system. Finally, he could not control the forces he had unleashed, and, by the end of 1991, the Soviet Union had collapsed and Gorbachev was forced from office.
Khamenei came to power in 1989, at the peak of “Gorbymania.” The spectacle of the fall of the Soviet Union led him and the Iranian regime to grow more suspicious of the West and of any sign of internal reform. “I have now reached the conclusion that the United States has devised a comprehensive plan to subvert the system of the Islamic Republic,” Khamenei said in a speech to government officials, in July, 2000. “This plan is an imitation of the one that led to the collapse of the former Soviet Union. U.S. officials intend to carry out the same in Iran, and there are plentiful clues [evidencing this] in their selfish, often hasty remarks made during the past few years.”
David Remnick
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