Days of God: The Iranian Revolution and its Consequences.

A Talk by The Hon. James Buchan at The British-Iranian Chamber of Commerce, December 7, 2012

The Hon. James Buchan

Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members, for having me here to talk about my new book, Days of God: The Iranian Revolution and its Consequences. I have had a bee in my bonnet about the Iranian Revolution for years. Actually from before it occurred, when I spent just under a year in Iran as a student of Persian and saw that the Shah's regime was going awry. The revolution was an important event, one of the most important of modern times, and it may be some years before we fully grasp either its causes or its consequences.

The Iranian Revolution unfolded in two phases. The first phase, lasting from approximately January 7, 1978 to February 11, 1979, overthrew Shah Mohammed Reza and sent him into exile. The second phase, which Ayatollah Khomeini called "the second revolution", began with the occupation of the US Embassy in Takht-e Jamshid Street in Tehran on November 4, 1979 and lasted until the death of Ayatollah Khomeini in June of 1989. In that second phase, Iran established the ideological and rather successful state which has survived up to the present day.

The first phase was a civilised affair. The preamble to the constitution of the Islamic Republic states that 60,000 people died in that phase and 100,000 were injured. I think that is not intended to be taken literally. Iran would have had to witnessed a Syrian-style civil war for such loss of life, and anyway such a close ratio of injured to dead has not been found since antiquity. The actual number of dead, as far as I have been able to find, was some 2,500 of which by far the largest single group, about 450, died at the hands of the revolutionaries in the burning of the Rex Cinema in Abadan on August 18, 1978.

Why was this first phase so light in bloodshed? Both sides, royalists and anti-royalists, showed restraint. Ayatollah Khomeini, who in the course of 1978 became the undisputed leader of the revolt, never once called for violent uprising. Even on the last day of the ancient regime, that is February 10, 1979, he only threatened holy war -- jihad-e moqaddas-- but did not call for it.

On the other side, Mohammed Reza was desperate, almost frantic, to avoid loss of life. Though the imperials army was on the streets of Iranian cities from February, 1978, its Chieftain tanks carried no ammunition for their main armament and helicopters were not deployed to suppress or disperse crowds. We know from his own memoirs, and those of his second and third wives, Soraya and Farah, that Mohammed Reza believed that he was loved by his people and admired for what Iran had achieved in his long reign. He once said that he had done more for Iran than any of its monarchs for 2,500 years that is including Cyrus the Great. The mass demonstrations that followed the Abadan fire, first at the end of Ramazan and then at Ashura in December, were a shock to his personality that he could not master. He was also, as you know, in declining health.

The second phase of the Revolution was, in contrast, rather bloody. After the surrender of the imperial armed forces on February 11 -- or rather their declaration of neutrality-- approximately 600 royalists, principally army and internal security officers but also some leading civilian officials, were shot after summary trials. By the autumn of that year, the revolutionaries had run out of royalists to shoot. It was the air of crisis that followed takeover of the US Embassy and the outbreak of war with Iraq in September, 1980, that permitted Ayatollah Khomeini and his circle to suppress their internal enemies. In the summer of 1981, and then at the end of the war in 1988, the Islamic Republic executed somewhere in the region of 10,000 Iranians, principally Islamic Leftists of the People's Mojahedin. In addition, approximately 200,000 Iranians perished in the war and over half a million went into exile. The second phase was thus a catastrophe for the like of which you would have go back to the Middle Ages, but Iranians seem to have taken it all in their stride.

So what were the causes of the Revolution? There was a tendency back in the 1970s to look for all historical causes in political economy and the material conditions of people's lives. Such an approach is not helpful here. Under the two Pahlavi Shahs, the population of Iran rose three-fold and the state's revenue went from about £2m sterling to about £10-12,000 million. What we can say for certain is that the quadrupling of oil prices in 1973-74 made Iran valuable and people realised (as I did even as a student in Isfahan) that oil revenue could finance any kind of experiment in government. It could pay for not just the Shah's Great Civilisation but also clerical government, what Ayatollah Khomeini called "the stewardship of jurist" or velayat-e faqih. Imagine for a moment if the Shah's regime or the Islamic Republic had been required to finance their ambitions through income taxes. History would have been quite different.

It seems to me the causes of the Revolution lay entirely in the realm of culture. Iranians came to believe that the Shah, with his break-neck modernisation and his alliance with the US was threatening their very identity. In other words, they would cease to be Iranian. The Shah failed to gain the loyalty or affection of any class of society: the bazar, the clergy, the modern classes or indeed anybody but a diminishing peasantry and the officer corps. In contrast, Ayatollah Khomeini seemed to represent an Iranian-ness that many held dear. The tragedy, of course, was that it was all too late. As I say in my book, what the Iranians did not achieve what they hoped to achieve, and what they most sought to preserve they lost.

So what will happen? You all know Iran, probably much better than I do, and you will be aware that it is a country of vast extent, immense mineral wealth, a large market and an ingenious population. Despite the mismanagement of the economy -- really the Islamic Republic could not have done worse if it had tried -- Iran has great potential. It can certainly join the ranks of advanced nations and maybe in our lifetimes. But to get from here to there means the Islamic Republic has to pass through two ordeals, and right now. The first is the nuclear issue and the second is the presidential election next June.

Ayatollah Khomeini demolished the imperial army and air force because he believed-- rightly-- that they were the principal channels for the westernisation of Iran. In its place, Iran developed a well-motivated but lightly armed professional force called the Corps of Revolutionary Guards and a volunteer militia of shock troops known as the basij. Those forces did well enough in driving the Iraqis out of Iran in the summer of 1982, but in six more years of bloody warfare were not able to progress further. Iran had to settle with a ceasefire with Iraq in 1988 and was quite fortunate to escape defeat. Thus a nuclear deterrent has its strategic attractions for Iran.

. Iran insists that it is interested only in civil uses for nuclear power. Since civilian nuclear power is uniquely unsuited to Iranian conditions, few outside Iran give any credit to those claims. It is more likely, and perhaps even more rational, that the Islamic Republic wishes to master the processes of nuclear fission and bomb manufacture to create a strategic uncertainty that will give her protection from her many enemies and influence over her neighbours. Such a policy is popular in Iran, as far as I can tell, but it is dangerous. Saddam Hussein in Iraq attempted to create a strategic uncertainty about his nuclear and chemical weapons and ended up with his country overrun and himself on the gallows.

Meanwhile, we have to get through the presidential election next June. The last one, in 2009, was not a brilliant success. A large minority of the public thought the poll was rigged. Young people poured onto the streets and were subdued and dispersed with violence. The candidate declared as victor, Mr. Ahmadinejad, has been a lame duck for four years. The supporters of the regime need a new President capable of stabilising the economy and reviving the oil industry but also one who is not a reformist or soft on Britain and America. Such a gentleman may be quite hard to find by fair and democratic means.

Does it matter? The Islamic Republic rests on two legs: a religious legitimacy, on which I am not qualified to comment, and a democratic legitimacy. If the democratic basis of Islamic government is allowed to fall away, the Islamic Republic will find the next thirty years rather harder going than the last thirty.

The content of this talk does not necessarily express the views of The British Iranian Chamber of Commerce. The views and opinions expressed are those of the author.