The bastard played his role well. Meanwhile the late Dr Shariati's books were printed inside and outside of the country. Since Shariati had written in his book that he was a follower of Khomeini we thought Khomeini's version of Islam is the new version. The European and American reports were relaying those talking points which pointed to getting rid of the Shah and having a new constitution like France. Khomeini denied any desire to be the leader of Iran or let any of the clergy to do that. Iran was supposed to be ruled by friends and followers of late Prime Minister Mosaddegh *(28).
Due to Khomeini's past rebellion against the shah all Moslems, radical Moslems, nationalists and even the communist groups lined up behind Khomeini. *(29)
Looking at the events of 1979, one can easily see that as a nation we were glorious winners of an honorable revolution, but in the final analysis we were the terrible losers who got duped by an elderly clergyman. Ironically, the winning and the losing are both connected to Khomeini's pathological personality.
Why did we follow him?
At that time, we simply had had enough of our government, and our leader was a king who let absolute power get to his head. He was breaking the laws; he was trying to do everything on his own. He was controlling and paranoid. The political prisons were filled up. Corruption was rampant and there was an underlying fear of the Secret Service in everybody's heart. Nobody would trust anybody. You had to be careful of every word you said because it could be used against you and could cause you to get beat-up in a political prison. Anything and everything required bribery. The police had too much power and were intimidating. The brutal force of the SAVAK crushed any voice of dissent.
The Shah had been sitting on his throne for 37 years. He had gotten into power by the actions of the British during the Second World War but he became the absolute monarch in 1953 by a MI6-CIA coup. The Shah was considered a puppet, imposed by the US. Americans were associated with the British and the British had plundered the Middle East for 200 years. The Americans let the British lead them in Asian affairs. And although that was helpful in the beginning, it ended with the Americans having a bad reputation. They became a well-known replacement for British colonialists. The British did the stealing and the American got the bad name. The American politicians simply didn't get it, and still don't.
The American embassy in Tehran was the center for espionage for all of the Middle East. The American ambassador was Mr. Helms, who used to be the director of the CIA for many years. The Shah was a puppet of the Americans; he ruled the country with an Iron fist. He was quite neurotic. Deep inside he was a coward. He would run away from the country when things would get hot. It was pathetic to see a king running away from his own country. After all, the kings are supposed to be like the captains of the ship and sink with the ship. He had managed to destroy all opposition in Iran. Anyone with any kind of a brain was either dead or intimidated.
During the early 1970's there were a couple of urban guerrilla organizations that started the armed struggle against the Shah. They divided into two groups - the Communists and the Muslims. Both of them were destroyed by SAVAK (Iranian secret service). However, this created a lot of sympathy for the kids who got killed. Meanwhile, the Shah gave more authority to the secret service and to the police to use brute force and do whatever it took to break the back of the opposition. A part of this brutality was the use of torture and deliberate exaggeration of the secret service's power and brutality. Consequently, although the total number of people who worked for SAVAK wasn't more than a few thousand, we were under the impression that millions of people worked for them. Although the total number of prisoners wasn't more than 5,000, we thought there were more than 80,000. Although the total number of communist that had been killed wasn't more than a couple of hundred, we believed the Shah was responsible for thousands of dead and hundreds of thousands of prisoners who were innocent and were being tortured as in medieval times.
The king was living in his own bubble. Some of the things he did were good for the country. He was a nationalist. With the increase in the price of oil he had the money to do whatever he needed. There was actually a high surplus of the money. There is only so much you can spend to build the infrastructure of the country. If you go faster than what is needed you run into inflation. He also poured a lot of money into the army. He was a close friend of President Nixon and he got his approval to buy whatever he wanted for the armed forces. Americans were busy with Vietnam and the British were broke. They needed a policeman for the Persian Gulf and nobody was more trustworthy than the Shah. The Shah ordered several hundred F14s F15s, F16s, and F18s; He also got the approval to build the atomic bomb. Iran was buying Boeing 707s, 727s, and 747s. There were orders for tens of cruisers, destroyers, hovercrafts, air defense systems, and short-range missiles. Among the orders: thousands of American M60 Tanks, 1500 British chieftain tanks, zillions of Russian jeeps and trucks, millions of rifles from France, and small arms from the US.
The relationship with US was very similar to the current US relations with Saudi Arabia and Israel. There were thousands of Iranian cadets in Miramar and other naval stations. American universities were filled with more than 100,000 Iranian students (including yours truly) studying engineering (except yours truly). There were tens of thousands of Iranian students in other countries, from Sweden to Philippines. As if his majesty's manic state had got to us too, we were stuck on building roads, factories, hospitals, and then there were the imports - so many imports that the ships had to stay in the line for months to get unloaded in Iranian ports, and once unloaded there were not enough trucks to get the goods to Tehran and then, there were not enough truck drivers to drive the 6000 extra trucks that the shah had bought. *20 Iran was a huge gold mine that everyone had gone crazy on. In my last year of college (1974) I was making more money than anybody in the family except my father, who had managed to become a multimillionaire in less than ten years, and the uncle who was a multimillionaire to begin with. When we would go to resort areas of the Caspian Sea, the rice paddy peasants had become rich, renting their extra rooms. There was freedom of everything: to eat, drink, screw, party, do drugs, but you had to only remember a simple caveat: do not mess with his majesty.
There were so many jobs that they had to import unskilled labor from Afghanistan and house servants from the Philippines. When I was in London in 1975, the large stores on High Street, Kensington (the shopping district) had signs in Persian announcing that they had Iranian salespeople for our convenience. Ironically, on the street pavements and on the walls of every corner were the signs, which said "Death to the Shah." So much change in such a short time required political change. There was a real middle class, and the needs of the middle class are different. Unfortunately, nobody dared tell the Shah the truth. Consequently, he was living in his fantasyland, thinking that he was the undisputed king and we were his loyal subjects, and that our relationship with him is an old divine relationship, which could not be broken. He was working many hours a day and he had only one goal, and that was to get Iran to where it was 2,500 years ago. In his fantasy he wanted to be called Mohammad Reza Shah the Great.
He had become so cocky he was calling Europeans "lazy." He would put women down in front of his wife on 60 Minutes. He would brag about ordering the execution of dozens of people for being Marxist- Leninist. It never dawned on him that we loved those kids that he was killing more than we loved him. This was the time for a couple of good political moves; however, his majesty did the opposite.
His Majesty's Massive, Irreversible, Colossal Errors:
Home wrecking error#1:
In 1973, his majesty made the most significant, home wrecking error. He closed all of the superficial parties and turned the country to a one-party system. That was diametrically different to what he needed to do. We were fed up with the police state; there was no need for a police state. The Shah needed to do something similar to what King Carlos did in Spain. He needed to take advantage of his total control and gradually permit new nationalist parties to gain power and delegate the power so that he would go into history as the son who finished what the father had started. But he was too paranoid to contemplate relinquishing control. His best friends were dead or gone. His Army had the same disease, competent and courageous generals were eliminated, and the Shah would only permit the most incompetent to get the stars. His administration of the civilian sector was even worse. If the assistant secretary of agriculture wanted a week's vacation, he had to summit his request to the king rather than secretary of agriculture.
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