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.