Perhaps a just criticism might be levelled at Kapuściński here: How can he say that The Emperor is 'not about Ethiopia or Haile Selassie'? If this is true, and not just a flippant overstatement used to make a point in an interview, it would suggest that Kapuściński belongs among those Poles who are always, obsessively, talking about Poland, even when they are not talking about Poland. It would imply Kapuściński were cursed by an inability to focus on the subject matter at hand and give it the undivided attention it deserves, because his priorities lie elsewhere and continually reterritorialize his writing back onto the body of the homeland.

With this claim that the 'real' subject of the book is the hidden parallel, Kapuściński is contradicting the principle of total immersion in other cultures that is a prerequisite for his writing process. His writing is done at the expense of, and causes him to neglect, Poland. Decades of travelling and the vast amount of reading that his writing necessitates have entailed that, as he admits himself, he is in fact rather ignorant about contemporary Poland. Throughout his more explicit Lapidarium series, he is frequently at great pains to convince us that the world over our garden fence needs to be engaged with in an open manner.

With a dose of charity, Kapuściński's formulation of Aesopian writing here could be seen as a humble acknowledgement that a writer cannot entirely avoid looking through lenses fashioned by their culture, that writers can't help bringing their baggage with them and drawing parallels. However, Kapuściński's insistence that the only way out is through genuine dialogue with 'the other' rings hollow if Aesopian writing prioritizes the hidden meaning above the overt, or if the parallel of home is weighted with greater import than the matter at hand before the reporter's eyes. Shah of Shahs is far more interesting if it is about both Iran and Poland, not just 'really' about Poland.

Ultimately, parallels have to break down. Initially there are close similarities between the Shah’s attempt to build the ‘Great Civilisation’ with petrodollars and the centrally-planned Great Leaps Forward favoured by various communist tyrants:

For the moment... the Shah shuts himself in his palace, from where he issues hundreds of decrees which will shake Iran and, five years later, bring about the collapse of his own reign. He orders expenditure in investment to be doubled, begins to import technology on a huge scale and demands the creation of an army which will be number three in the world in terms of technological development. He orders that the most modern devices be brought, quickly installed and got running. Modern machines produce modern modern products: Iran will flood the world with the best goods. He resolves to build nuclear power plants, electronic goods production plants, steelworks and all kinds of factories...

Although the mismanagement of this development echoes communist foolishness, the similarities only go so far. The Shah had very specific incompetences all of his own.

c) Bungled Imports, Imported Insults

... the Shah spent billions on shopping all over the world and ships filled with goods sailed from all continents to Iran. But when they got to the Persian Gulf it turned out that Iran had no ports (a fact which had escaped the Shah). Actually, there were ports, but they were old and small, incapable of taking such huge shipments. A few hundred ships waited in the sea for their turn, often half a year. Iran paid the shipping community billions of dollars yearly for these stoppages. Bit by bit, some ships were somehow unloaded, but then it turned out that Iran had no storehouses (another fact which had escaped the Shah). In the open air, in the desert, in nightmarish tropical heat lay millions of tonnes of all kinds of goods, half of which had to be thrown away, because amidst the shipments were perishable goods – food and chemical products. All the imported goods needed to be transported into the heart of the country, but then it transpired that Iran didn't have any goods transport (yet another fact which had escaped the Shah). Of course there were a few cars and vans, but a fraction of what was needed. So two thousand trucks are brought from Europe, but then it turns out that Iran didn't have any drivers (...a fact which had escaped the Shah). After a lot of conferences, airplanes carrying South Korean drivers from Seoul arrive...

... So the time came for beginning the assembly. But then it turned out that Iran didn’t have engineers or technicians (a fact which had escaped the Shah). The logical thing for someone who is building a Great Civilisation would be to start from the people, so as to prepare a team of professionals, in order to create your own intelligentsia. But that kind of thinking was absolutely unacceptable! Open new universities, open technical colleges? Every such university is a hornet’s nest. Every student is a rebel, a troublemaker, a free-thinker. Is it at all surprising that the Shah did not want to arm his opponents? The monarch had a better way – keep the majority of students far away from Iran. The country was unique in this regard. Over one hundred thousand young people studied in Europe and America. This cost Iran far more than it would have to open its own universities. But in this way the regime assured itself some relative peace and security... (66-70)

Favouring imported expertise and mistrusting his own population was perhaps the Shah's greatest mistake: it confirmed and shaped the people's perception of the Shah as an agent of foreign powers bent on imposing an alien cuture and values on the country.

The average Iranian quickly understood what was on the Shah's mind - 'You lot sit in the shade of your mosques and tend to your flocks. A century will pass before anything good comes of you, so I've got to build an empire - in ten years - with the Americans and Germans'. Thus the Iranians saw the Great Civilisation above all as a great humiliation...The greatest shock was caused by the salaries of the Americans invited by the Shah. They frequently earned one hundred and fifty or two hundred thousand dollars a year. After a four-year stay in Iran, an officer could leave with half a million dollars in his pocket. Engineers were paid considerably less, but the Iranian idea of a foreigne'rs earnings was shaped by this American upper limit. You can imagine how the average Iranian felt - he who adores the Shah and the Great Civilisation, but yet finds himself struggling to make ends meet; how he feels when he is continually pushed aside, ticked off and ridiculed by many of these strange foreigners who, even if they don't show it, are convinced of their own superiority. (72-73)

If this preference for foreigners' technical skills and scorn for the local population poured fuel on the flames of resentment, the Shah's disdain for and repression of the Iranian intelligentsia meant that at the same time there were very limited cultural and political options:

The Shah's regime presented people with a choice between Savak and the mullahs. And, of course, they chose the mullahs. (71)

In some respects, the Shah was a genuine progessive. His 'White Revolution' did bring about improvements in literacy and the health service. His introduction of women's suffage should be commendable to all but the most rabid cultural relatavists. But the supposed economic progress brought about by the revolution was also divisive and superficial, with neglect and mismanagement of the countryside leaving the vast majority of the population in poverty, and rampant corruption filling the pockets of yes-men.

Any positive aspects of the Shah's effort to build a 'Great Civilisation' were overshadowed by his crass attempt to mould the Iranian peoples into something they were not. The Iranian peoples were deemed to be blank slate putty with no worthwhile values, culture or traditions of their own, to be fed at breakneck speed onto the Western consumer conveyor belt. Though not as brutal in his suppression of the Shi'a religion as his father - who had burnt mosques, laid waste to entire villages, torn off chadors, shaved off beards and nailed Pahlavi caps to heads* - the Shah treated the 'feudalistic' mullahs with contempt, torturing them when 'necessary', but also vastly underestimating their power and their ability to organise, plan and act.

* see the BBC documentary 'The Last Shah'

2. Reap What You Sow

a) Operation Ajax

These days it seems to be a generally accepted fact that the British and the CIA conspired to overthrow Iran’s democratically elected government in 1953. The controversy is not over whether they did conspire and sow chaos, but to what extent their machinations actually brought about the coup.

There are two camps: one which sees the removal of Mossadegh as being entirely the result of MI5 and CIA covert operations, and one which sees the overthrow as a popular, pro-royalist uprising.

Those who adhere to the former view are more numerous, and form a motley alliance, comprising: proud CIA operatives who wanted to take complete credit for the regime change; neocons who argue that the ‘elegant coup’ brought stability to the region and staved off the threat of communism; liberal Western journalists who express outrage at Britain and America’s abuse of democracy; hard left socialists who see the coup as the epitome of British & US oil-imperialism; and Islamic Fundamentalists who see the operation as evidence that the Shah was a puppet of Satan.

Those who see Operation Ajax as a basically bungled operation and the overthrow as an expression of popular support for the Shah are fewer in number, being limited to the pro-royalist émigré community and some Iranian patriots who wonder why the Iranian people cannot even be given credit for their own coup.

Kapuściński refrains from commenting directly on the overthrow of Mossadegh. Instead he simply cites three sources.

The first is a section from “The Invisible Government” (1965) by David Wise and Thomas B. Ross, which states that “There is no doubt whatsoever that the CIA organised and orchestrated the coup,” and describes the coup as a very close-run battle between supporters of the Shah and the communists: “In Tehran the communists had control of the streets. They celebrated the Shah’s absence by destroying his monuments.” Roosevelt is portrayed as a James Bond-like character who manages to recruit the necessary muscle necessary for regaining control of the streets.

Kermit Roosevelt

The second source is a book by two French reporters, Claire Briere and Pierre Blanchet, entitled ‘Iran: revolution in the name of God’ (1979), which also emphasises the role of the mobs in Roosevelt’s pay: “On 19 August small groups of Iranians [recruited by Roosevelt] pull out banknotes and shout “Call out ‘Long live the Shah!’” Those who chant this get ten rials...”

Tehran, August 1953

The third source is an anonymous cassette recording of an Iranian who focuses on the significance of Mossadegh to Iran:

Mossy [the nickname the British gave to Mossadegh] said that the land we walk upon is ours, and everything found in that land is ours. Nobody before him had said things like that in this country. He also said ‘Let everyone say what they want to say, let them have a voice, I want to hear what you think.’ You have to understand that after two and a half thousand years of servile degradation he treated us as, and made us feel like, thinking beings. No ruler had ever done that! The things that Mossy told us were remembered, they were lodged in people’s heads and still live there today. The best remembered words are always those that make us look at the world anew. And such were his words. (43)

Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh

It can be assumed that there is one simple reason why Kapuściński refrains from making his own unequivocal comment on Operation Ajax and the overthrow of Mossadegh: he was not there himself, and one of the hallmarks of Kapuściński’s writing is his being there and providing his own brand of first-hand account.

There was also a dearth of information on the topic at the time he was writing. Operation Ajax reared its head again in April 2000, when James Risen, a New York Times journalist, disclosed a long-missing report written in 1953 by Douglas Wilber, a CIA operative who had been involved in planning the operation. At the time of the disclosure, the report was still classified by the CIA, who had repeatedly broken promises to declassify documentation relating to the operation. The National Security Archive describes the report as “one of the last major pieces of the puzzle.”

The next public showing for the coup came in the form of Steven Kinzer’s All the Shah’s Men in 2003, which traces anti-American sentiment back to Operation Ajax, and goes as far as to suggest: “[it] is not far-fetched to draw a line from Operation Ajax through the Shah's repressive regime and the Islamic Revolution to the fireballs that engulfed the World Trade Centre in New York." Though Kinzer’s book is criticized by neo-conservatives, who see both the coup and the 2003 invasion of Iraq as worthy, stability-inducing endeavours, the CIA’s own historians seem to be making an effort to learn lessons from Kinzer’s arguments.

The puzzle is still, however, incomplete, and will remain so until the CIA finally declassifies all the documents relating to Operation Ajax.

While Kapuściński prefers to let others do the talking when it comes to the coup, his enthusiasm for the chief victim, Mossadegh, is unmistakable.

In the unique space of Kapuściński’s writing, Mossadegh takes his place alongside the likes of other homegrown anti-colonialist leaders, such as Patrice Lumumba, Ben Bella and Kwame Nkrumah. The process of decolonialisation and the consequent rapid marginalisation of Europe forms a constant theme and refrain throughout Kapuściński’s oeuvre.

By nationalising Iran’s oil industry, which had previously been controlled and maximally exploited by Britain, Mossadegh struck at the blood supply of the waning British Empire. At first the British retaliated with economic warfare, in the form of boycott and blockade, and when this failed they planned and instigated Mossadegh’s overthrow, proving that oil was far more of a priority than were democracy, freedom and sovereignty, idealistic notions for which World War II had supposedly been fought.

This is what is particularly disgraceful about Churchill and Atlee’s parts in their dealings with Mossadegh. Baying for the overthrow of a democratically elected leader because he threatened their access to cheap oil reveals a shocking degree of cynical hypocrisy and unashamed parasitism. Historically is it has to be seen as an incontrovertible betrayal of the values which had shored up Britain’s claims to righteousness in the 1930s and 40s.

For the British, Iran was purely about oil, whereas the Americans who perceive the coup as an elegant success can fall back somewhat more honourably on the claim that there was a strategic threat. Largely thanks to British cunning, the Americans swallowed the idea that Iran was ripe for communist revolution:

The British embassy in Tehran noted in August 1952 that, in proposing the overthrow of Musaddiq to the Americans, 'we could say that, although we naturally wish to reach an oil settlement eventually, we appreciate that the first and most important objective is to prevent Persia going communist'. The MI6 officer believed 'the Americans would be more likely to work with us if they saw the problem as one of containing communism rather than restoring the position of the AIOC'

The coup did take place at a time of great tension, with the Korean War barely finished, China a new enemy and with the Soviet Union on the borders of Iran, there was reason to worry about the communist threat to democracies in the region. However, the CIA being given the green light to overthrow Mossadegh, a democratically elected president and staunch enemy of the communists, is simply bizarre.

Kapuściński:

Eisenhower suspected him of communism, even though Mossadegh was an independent patriot and enemy of the communists. But nobody wanted to hear his explanations, since in the eyes of the mighty of this world patriots from weaker countries look suspicious. (34)

There were communists operating in Iran in 1953, in the form of the Tudeh Party, but the evidence suggests they were far from being an organisation poised to take power, even according to US assessments made in 1953:

In March 1953, a few months before the coup, the US EMBASSY stated that 'there was little evidence that in recent months the Tudeh had gained in popular strength, although its steady infiltration of the Iranian government and other institutions [has] continued'...The seizure of power by means of a coup was not part of Tudeh strategy, and it was also unlikely that the Russians... would endorse such a move. In any case, the state.....and the army....not to mention the religious establishment, were still capable of countering a Tudeh coup'. Musaddiq himself did not fear a communist coup 'but rather a right-wing royalist coup', like that which did occur, with important Anglo-American sponsorship.

With either extreme cynicism or an absolute lack of a sense of irony, the CIA paid people to masquerade as communists and, as part of an operation that was supposed to bring stability to the region, they actually went about sowing instability:

Steven Kinzer:

Kermit Roosevelt set about trying to create chaos in Iran. He was able to do that very quickly by a series of means. The first thing he did was, he started bribing members of parliament and leaders of small political parties that were a part of Mossadegh 's political coalition. Pretty soon the public started to see the Mossadegh ’s coalition splitting apart and people denouncing him on the floor of parliament. The next thing Roosevelt did was start bribing newspaper editors, owners and columnists and reporters. Within a couple of weeks, he had 80% of the newspapers in Tehran on his payroll and they were grinding out every kind of lie attacking Mossadegh . The next thing Roosevelt did was start bribing religious leaders. Soon, at Friday prayers, the Mullahs were denouncing Mossadegh as an atheist enemy of Islam. Roosevelt also bribed members of police units and low-ranking military officers to be ready with their units on the crucial day. In what I think was really his master stroke, he hired the leaders of a bunch of street gangs in Tehran, and he used them to help create the impression that the rule of law had totally disintegrated in Iran. He actually at one point hired a gang to run through the streets of Tehran, beating up any pedestrian they found, breaking shop windows, firing their guns into mosques, and yelling -- "We love Mossadegh and communism." This would naturally turn any decent citizen against him.

James Risen, New york Times:

In early August, the C.I.A. stepped up the pressure. Iranian operatives pretending to be Communists threatened Muslim leaders with "savage punishment if they opposed Mossadegh," seeking to stir anti-Communist sentiment in the religious community.

In addition, the secret history says, the house of at least one prominent Muslim was bombed by C.I.A. agents posing as Communists. It does not say whether anyone was hurt in this attack.

It is worth remembering that the controversy is not about whether or not the CIA actually did these things, but how instrumental these things were in bringing down Mossadegh.

The fact the CIA felt confident enough to get people dressed up as rampaging communists is also significant:

The deliberate funding of demonstrators posing as Tudeh supporters also gives the game away as to the degree of seriousness with which the communist threat was actually feared.

Soldiers surround the Parliament building in Tehran on August 19, 1953.

b) Perception Rules

Whether the communist threat was great or small, or whether the overthrow was entirely orchestrated by the CIA or the result of a spontaneous, popular uprising, the truth of the matter is now somewhat irrelevant. It’s the perception that counts and does the damage.

The clear picture that emerges from Kapuściński’s text is that after August 1953 the Iranian people who would eventually be responsible for the revolution of 1979 - the pro-democratic progressives, the Marxist-Islamist Fedayeen and the hard-line Islamic fundamentalists – all perceived the Shah as a puppet and his brutal authoritarian regime as a the result of foreign interference. By helping set up Savak, and by providing funding, weapons and training, the US was directly instrumental in the torture and murder of Iranians - liberals, socialists and mullahs - who were merely suspected of opposing the Shah's regime.

Kapuściński:

I even saw – and this was the most shocking thing for me – colour postcards sold outside the university showing the mutilated corpses of Savak victims. Everything just like in the time of Tamburlaine: no change in six hundred years, the same pathological cruelty, just maybe somewhat more mechanized. The most common piece of equipment found in every Savak torture chamber was an electrically heated iron table, known as ‘the frying pan’, which victims were put on, with their hands and legs tied. Many people perished on these tables. Frequently, even before a ‘suspect’ was brought into these rooms they were already psychological wrecks, because while waiting their turn they had cracked, unable to bear the screams they heard or the stench of burning flesh. But in this nightmarish world technical refinement did not quite replace the old-fashioned medieval methods. In Isfahan prison people were thrown into large sacks containing ravenously hungry cats or venomous snakes. Tales of these tortures, sometimes consciously disseminated by Savak agents themselves, circulated in the society and were heard with all the greater dread because the fluid and arbitrary definition of ‘enemy’ meant that everyone could imagine finding themselves in such torture chambers. For these people, Savak was not just cruel, but also foreign: it was an occupying force, a local version of the Gestapo.... (64)

One of them looked awful: he had scars from severe burns on his face and hands, he needed a walking stick. He was a law student and during a search some Feyadeen leaflets were found at his place. I remember how he told me that the Savak agents had led him into a big room. One of the walls consisted of white-hot iron. On the floor lay tracks, and on the tracks stood a chair on metal wheels. He was tied to the chair with leather straps. A Savak agent pressed a button and the chair started to edge towards the burning wall. It was a slow, fitful movement, progressing at a rate of three centimetres forward every minute. He estimated that it was going to take two hours to reach the wall would last two hours, but after an hour he couldn’t bear the heat and started to scream that he would admit to anything, although he didn’t have anything to admit to, as he had found the leaflets on the street... (110)

By hosting and supporting the Shah publicly, the US undoubtedly condoned his regime.

President and Mrs. Kennedy pose with the Shah and the Shahbanou of Iran.
April 11, 1962

President Nixon and the Shah of Iran on the reviewing stand, on the south lawn of the White House, 10/21/1969

Rosalynn Carter and Jimmy Carter host welcoming ceremony for the state visit of the Shah of Iran and Shahbanou of Iran., 11/15/1977

Although he frequently waved the human rights ticket, President Carter, far from being a public critic of the Shah's regime, was actually an obsequious flatterer. On a state visit to Tehran in December 1977, he gave a toast which typifies the expedient blindness of the US administration at the time:

Iran, because of the great leadership of the Shah, is an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world... As I drove through the beautiful streets of Tehran today with the Shah, we saw literally thousands of Iranian citizens standing beside the street with a friendly attitude, expressing their welcome to me. And I also saw hundreds, perhaps even thousands of American citizens who stand there welcoming their President in a nation which has taken them to heart and made them feel at home. There are about 30,000 Americans here who work in close harmony with the people of Iran to carve out a better future for you, which also helps to ensure, Your Majesty, a better future for ourselves. We share industrial growth, we share scientific achievements, we share research and development knowledge, and this gives us the stability for the present which is indeed valuable to both our countries... The cause of human rights is one that also is shared deeply by our people and by the leaders of our two nations.

And when it came to the crunch he was willing to help the Shah with suppressing street demonstrations:

On 7 November 1978, the Washington Post reported that the Carter Administration had been prepared to send US Army specialists to train the Shah’s troops in riot control techniques. The offer, which was not implemented. followed delivery of a wide variety of crowd control equipment, including tear gas, riot sticks, helmets and shields, to the Shah’s internal security forces.

Operation Ajax and the consequent public support for a dictatorial regime which had absolutely no regard for human rights reveals just how vacuous America's founding principles - democracy and the concept of inalienable human rights - had become during the Cold War. It is absolutely baffling how the US can be appear to be surprised by the degree of mistrust and resentment it meets in the Middle East.

Tragically, America's dealings with Iran justify a certain amount of anti-American sentiment in the region, provide a factual basis from which conspiracy theorists' can spin out ludicrously paranoid fantasies and give the anti-capitalist left good grounds for seeing the US as a hypocritical machine which mouths moral platitudes while ensuring the steady flow of resources from 'stable' tyrannies. The tragedy here is that those who really believed in democracy and human rights - e.g. the pro-democracy Iranian dissidents - are the ones who lost out and continue to lose out today. As Kapuściński writes, "The Shah's regime presented people with a choice between Savak and the mullahs. And, of course, they chose the mullahs," (71) but it was also Operation Ajax and US regime patronage which presented the Iranian people with a choice between Savak and the mullahs. Having wiped out Iran's burgeoning democracy, the British and US laid the foundations for Khomeini's Islamic Republic.

3. Revolution Assessment, Kapuściński-style

Kapuściński describes the rise of Khomeini as having caught his protagonists by surprise - his protagonists being Iranian intellectuals who considered themselves as ‘rational’ and ‘sceptical’, who had not been inside a mosque in years, who did not pray or believe.

Khomeini’s revolution, a regressive movement which vilified the Shah’s attempted modernisation, employed one of the most modern mediums available at the time: cassette tapes. The cassettes were recorded in Najaf, Iraq, where Khomeini spent most of his exile, and smuggled into Iran, where they were distributed to Mosques.

Mahmud, one of Kapuściński’s sources, describes the cassettes and his surpise at finding out about them:

In his appeals Khomeini attacked every speech the Shah made, every move he made. They were short commentaries consisting of a few sentences uttered in clear and simple language, easy to understand and remember. Every appeal started and ended with a call to Allah and the phrase ‘People, Wake up!’ These cassettes were smuggled across the border, often in a roundabout way, via Paris or Rome... They brought them to the mosques and gave them to the mullahs. So in this way the mullahs received instructions about what to say during their sermons and how to proceed. It would be possible to write a huge tome on the role of cassette tapes in the Iranian Revolution. For me all this was a sensation, I had no idea of the reach of the Shi'ite conspiracy and I think that the Shah also failed to grasp the extent of it, even if he received some information about it. That day I suddenly realized that alongside me there exists a different, underground world that I am completely unfamiliar with, and about which I know next to nothing. (120)

In the immediate aftermath of the revolution - after the regime’s provocative anti-Khomeini text, the demonstrations which the Shah took as a personal affront, the firing into the crowds, the Shah’s betrayal of his henchmen and his ignominious flight – Kapuściński returns to his text as his own first-hand source, to a Tehran in which ‘rational’ and ‘sceptical’ democrats are in short supply:

Now I visited the committee headquarters. Committees – that was what the new organs of power called themselves. Bearded people sat behind tables in cramped, littered rooms. It was the first time I had seen their faces. On my way here I had made a mental note of the names of people who had been active in the opposition during the Shah’s reign, or those who had stayed on the sidelines. These people should be taking power now, I reasoned. I asked where I could find them. The committee members didn’t know. In any case they weren’t here. The whole longstanding set up, in which one was in power, the second was in opposition, while the third were busy earning and the fourth criticized from the sidelines, all of this revolutionary construction had come down like a house of cards. For those unshaven beanpoles, barely able to read or write, the people about whom I had asked had not the slightest significance. What did they care if a few years ago Hafez Farman criticized the Shah and lost his position while Kulsum Kitab behaved like an unscrupulous bastard and made a career for himself? That was the past, that world no longer existed. The revolution brought to power completely new people who had previously been anonymous, unknown to anyone. Day after day the bearded committee members sat and debated. Debated over what? They debated over this – what to do. Yes, because a committee ought to do something... The next day they debated again, as if nothing had happened the day before, as if everything had to start from the beginning... (154-5)

He finds the same ‘helplessness’ here in Tehran that he found in the aftermath of the twenty-six other revolutions (Bolivia, Mozambique, Sudan, Benin...) he had witnessed. When the previous rulers have either fled or been executed there follows a period of general paralysis and incompetence until the wannabe rulers stop discussing what to do and slowly learn the business of administration.

And what happened to the ‘rational’, ‘sceptical’ democrats who had hoped to set up a democracy similar to the ones they had seen in France and Switzerland? Well they were the first losers, the first to go. Kapuściński describes them as ‘intelligent and wise, but weak.’ They made the mistake of trying to appeal to the crowd’s intelligence, rather than their emotions, and were caught in the fundamental paradox of democracy:

... democracy cannot be imposed by force, the majority must be in favour of democracy, and the majority wanted what Khomeini wanted – an Islamic Republic. (160)

However, even if these democrats had been more ruthless, aggressive and prepared to impose a liberal society at the point of a gun, their efforts would have undoubtedly failed because the Shah’s mistrust of Iranian intellectuals and importation of foreign expertise meant that the country lacked an assertive and skilled middle class – the prerequisite of any society that takes individual liberty seriously.

The Shah’s idiotic neglect of the countryside also had its part to play:

The Shah assumed that the key to modernity is the city and industry, but that was erroneous thinking. The key to modernity is the countryside, the village. The Shah was intoxicated with visions of nuclear power plants, automated production lines and a huge petrochemical industry. But in a backward country these are just the trappings of modernity. In such countries the majority of people live in poor villages, from which they escape to the cities. They create a young, energetic labour force, which is unskilled (they are most often unqualified and illiterate), but which is extremely ambitious and ready to fight for everything. In the city they find an old crony system which basically forms the powers that be. So first of all they have a look round, begin to settle in, get their feet under the door and ... begin their attack. In their fight they use the ideology that they brought with them from their village – normally religion. Because they are a labour force that really needs to move up the social ladder, they very often manage it. And so power passes into their hands. But what to do with this power? They start discussing and get into the vicious circle of helplessness. The nation gets by somehow, because it must, while they, in contrast, live increasingly well. After a while they begin to live comfortably. Their successors are still running about the steppes, herding their camels and guarding their flocks of sheep. But as soon as they grow up, they will go to the city and start their own fight. What is the most crucial thing here? The fact that the newcomers bring greater ambition than ability. The result of this is that after every revolution the country goes back to the starting point, starts from zero, because the generation of victors must learn everything from scratch that the conquered generation had so laboriously mastered. Does this mean that those beaten were more able and wise? Not at all. The genesis of the previous generation was identical to that which took its place. What is the way out of this vicious circle of helplessness? Only through the development of the countryside. As long as the village is backward, the country will be similarly backward, even if there are five thousand factories. As long as a city-dwelling son visits his family village as if it were an exotic country, the country will not be modern. (157)

So, as Kapuściński sits alone at night in his hotel room, daunted by the stacks of material he has to turn into a book, Tehran is at the mercy of roaming killers of various denominations, and whether they be ‘Islamic Militia’ or independent ‘hit squads’, “in both cases they are groups of well-armed peasants who are continually pointing pistols at us.” (16)

Just as it does not make much difference what gun-toting maniac is pointing a gun at you, there is isn’t much to tell between the omnipresent terror once wielded by Savak and that by sown by the looming Islamic Republic. Evin prison still in business, under new management.

Suspected Savak Agents Arrested

A despot departs, but no dictatorship comes to a complete end at this point. The condition for the existence of a dictatorship is the ignorance of the crowd, which is why dictators tend this ignorance and continually cultivate it. It takes a whole generation to change this, to bring some enlightenment. Often, before this happens, those who overthrew the dictator unwittingly behave like his heirs, continuing the attitude and way of thinking that characterised his epoch – an epoch which they themselves destroyed. This is so unintentional and unconscious that if you point this out to them they are overcome with righteous indignation. (162)

4. Lessons Not Learned

It is just a tad surprising that, after the ‘loss’ of Iran to theocracy, US conservatives still think about Iran in terms of this kind of intervention:

My military option is primarily led by a stealth force of 64 AC composed B2s, F 22s and F 117s and 400 non-stealth aircraft, plus 500 cruise missiles hitting 1500 aim points with precision weapons. The targets would be the Nuclear Development facilities, Air Defense forces, Air Forces, Naval Forces, Shahab 3 missile forces and Command and Control nodes over a 36–48 hour time frame.

I would then let pre-planned covert forces assist the Iranian people in taking their country back with precision air support as required. This is the model used in Afghanistan and we must be training it now. It will take time but Iran is ripe to have this implemented. We have at most one year until we must take action in my opinion.
...

We should exploit the divergent population of 51% Persian, 34% Azerbaijanis and Kurds, and 2% Arabs plus others. Virtually all the oil is located in the southwest region close to the Persian Gulf and very vulnerable to being isolated and to covert action. Seventy percent of the population is under 30 and the jobless rate hovers near 20 percent. This is a perfect combination for a covert campaign.

Lt. Gen. Tom McInerney, speaking in FrontPage magazine.

While Washington and neocon hawks might have shorter memory spans than goldfish, there is no reason to believe that the Iranian Peoples do.

In his essay on the Shi’ites in Shah of Shahs, Kapuściński emphasizes that the Shi’a denomination is founded on rejection and refusal: “The Shi’ite is above all a fierce oppositionist (opozycjonista)” (86). After tracing the roots of the Shi’ite rejection and breakaway, he makes the following comment:

All of this happened in the second half of the seventh century, but the story is very much alive and passionately remembered. If you talk to a devout Shi’ite about his beliefs he will continually refer back to those distant times and will narrate all the details of the Karbala Massacre, in which Husein had his head cut off. A sceptical, ironic European thinks ‘Good god, does that matter today?’ – but if they say this out loud they will expose themselves to the anger and hatred of the Shi’ite. (87)

If devout Shi’ites still harbour grudges that reach back to the seventh century, it is hard to imagine they will have forgotten their experience of American and British interference in the twentieth century, and there is little reason to expect them to.

It is hard to think of a possible equivalent to Operation Ajax, but it might go something like this: the Iranian intelligence agency would 1) infiltrate the press and plant increasingly psychotic articles calling for a nuclear war to end all wars, 2) use various mind control drugs and memes to get people to pose as Republicans and march around screaming for Bush to bomb Iran, threatening revolution if he doesn’t, 3) then somehow persuade the US military to seize Washington and impose a dictatorial regime on America in order to prevent all-out war, so that 4) the new US government becomes a puppet of the Iranian theocrats. Pure fantasy, of course, but it is not difficult to imagine the kind of resentment and anti-Iranian sentiment this would stir up in the hearts and minds of patriotic, democracy loving Americans.

As the Iranians have already suffered the effects of US interference in the name of ‘regional stability’ it beggars belief that the likes of Lt. Gen. Tom McInerny think the Iranian peoples will welcome a US-orchestrated regime change after their country has been nuked. As it has been amply demonstrated that the US vastly underestimated the explosive effect ethnic and religious divides would have after the Iraqi peoples were ‘liberated’, Lt. Gen. Tom McInerny’s recommendation that ethnic differences be exploited in an Iran reeling from bombardment borders on the surreal.

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