Iran: the clergy take over
Roger Cooper
The resignation of Mehdi Bazargan brings to an undignified end Iran's 70year-old experiment in Western-style cabinet government. Bazargan was the first to admit the impotence of his government, but felt that he should 'soldier on' as long as possible to preserve the trappings of secular rule in the face of growing clerical dictatorship.
Significantly, it appears that Ayatollah Khomeini, Bazargan's sole source of legitimacy in the absence of a constitution or elections, will not appoint a successor. Iran is to be ruled directly by the faceless Revolutionary Council that has been the real force, after Khomeini, for almost a year. It is not clear why Khomeini Mt the need for a secular government which he repeatedly ignored, but perhaps it was the same motive that made the Shah keep Hoveyda for 12 years, a feeling that someone, preferably a puppet, was needed to run the state bureaucracy.
It remains to be seen whether the Revolutionary Council will now emerge from the shadows to reveal individual personalities; it seems unlikely, however, particularly in view of the wave of assassination attempts in recent months. Government ministries, ineffective though they have always been, cannot simply be dissolved, but from now on they will probably be headed by civil servants with purely executive authority, reporting individually to the Council, which is believed to consist of a dozen elderly clergymen.
Bazargan had tendered his resignation several times before, but Khomeini always refused to accept it. The reason for the sudden change was perhaps that Bazargan had begun to take himself seriously. A high-level leak has revealed that the Cabinet recently drafted a letter dissolving the Council of Experts, which has nearly completed its task of drafting the new constitution, on the grounds that it had exceeded its brief in altering the earlier draft so as to increase clerical power, and that its time limit had expired. This ineffective insult to the real powers in Iranian politics was probably the major factor in Khomeini's decision to end Bazargan's mandate — which had, in any case, become untenable in the face of massive anti-Western feeling.
The takeover of the American embassy was only partly connected with the demands for the Shah's extradition. Those responsible must have realised, or been made to realise within hours, that it was quite unthinkable that President Carter could, or would, return his old ally to face a firing squad. Yet instead of denouncing their pointless action, the government quickly joined the students' bandwagon, and used the state-controlled media to attack the United States. This ran counter to recent policy, since it was clear that the government was busily mending its fences with America and that a new pragmatic relationship (oil and petrodollars for food, military spares and technology) would soon emerge from the breaking of the Shah's old ties (based ultimately on the same equation). The final stage of this rapprochement took place last week in Algiers when Bazargan held talks with Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's National Security Advisor.
Bazargan belatedly caught the new mood, and one of his government's last actions was to cancel the 1959 bilateral defence treaty with the United States. To show even-handedness he also scrapped most of the 1921 treaty with the Soviet Union. Both these treaties were in effect dead letters, and it was a clear oversight that they had not been cancelled earlier. More serious to America at present must be the threat to cut off supplies of Iranian oil, which currently represents some 10 per cent of US imports, and almost a quarter of Iran's total exports. If this threat is carried out, the oil would probably find ready buyers on the spot market, but if Iran were to cut back production, further price rises would result.
The occupation of the British embassy seems almost an anachronism, but apparently Iranians have not outgrown their belief, once a compliment but now a tiresome one, that Britain still controls events in Iran. Khomeini was even rumoured at one stage to be a British agent. The attack certainly had some connection with Khomeini's false claim that the former prime minister, Shahpur Bakhtiar, had been given asylum in England, but it was later said to be 'protective custody'. But why wasn't the French embassy attacked or 'protected' when everyone knows that Bakhtiar is based in Paris? Khomeini's sojourn in Neauphlele-Château has paid handsome dividends for the French.
While British and American diplomats are showing infinite patience in dealing with Iran, knowing that any other course would aggravate matters in a country where the ordinary rules of behaviour no longer apply, public opinion in the West is rapidly losing what little sympathy it had for Khomeini's regime. The call by Ayatollah Khalkhali, who makes Judge Jeffreys look like a social worker, for volunteers to break into the Shah's hospital and dismember him, has only generated sympathy for the Shah outside Iran. And if Iran were now to break diplomatic relations with either Britain or the United States, as the students are demanding, many would be delighted despite the possible economic disadvantages. With the lucrative big contracts long since over, and the oil crisis scarcely likely to get much worse, such a break would probably harm Iran more.
It is not only Iran's relations with the West, however, that are in turmoil. The Soviet Union has suffered from the revolution economically and politically. The Kremlin at least knew where it was with the Shah, while Ayatollah Khomeini represents a dangerous and possibly contagious form of power. The abrogation of the 1921 treaty is not in itself a great blow, for geopolitical realities and the implications of the Brezhnev doctrine do not seriously alter the status quo along the Soviet Union's long border with Iran, but Iran is clearly even less likely to fall under Soviet influence today ('like a rotten apple', Khrushchev once predicted) than a year or so ago.
The brief franc-Arab honeymoon also appears to be over. The Palestinians, whose expectations were high when Arafat was feted in Tehran a year ago, never received much tangible aid. The Libyans, who initially welcomed the revolution, are noticeably less enthusiastic, while relations with Iraq have plummeted, with Baghdad actively encouraging Kurdish, Arab and Baluchi secessionism and denouncing the 1975 agreement, which ended years of skirmishes over frontier disputes and navigational rights. In apparent retaliation, revolutionary guards have kidnapped three Iraqi diplomats, a dangerous move since Iraq has been known to respond in kind to protect its diplomats. Iraq is itself vulnerable to uprisings by its own Kurds and Shi'a Muslims, but clearly feels that confrontation is a safer policy than coat' promise. Meanwhile the conservative Gulf states remain unhappy at the varions appeals to their large Shi'a minorities (in Bahrain they are probably a majority) t° overthrow their Sunni masters, and Iran's occupation of the three disputed Gulf islands is once again a live topic. The Shah, with offers of aid for the poor and contracts for the rich, made, friends with almost the whole world, an built up a chain of embassies of ludicrous ostentation. With its revolution still vet): much alive and its caretaker government now to be replaced by men totally ign°rant of the art of government, it is under' standable that a coherent foreign Polie.Ys should not yet have been formulated. It I also understandable that American inse.n sitivity over the Shah's medical visa (vvtlY,.; one wonders, was a top surgical team at if necessary a whole field hospital nu,, flown to Mexico, something the Sha." could easily have afforded?) should have sparked off Tehran's young hotheads. It would be a dangerous precedent, however, if these easily-swayed revolutionaries feel that they can decide what Iran's foreign (or domestic) policies should be.
On the domestic front, things are quieter than most observers were forecasting a few months ago. Ordinary Iranians have become inured to the continuing economic depression, with high unemployment and sharp inflation. Certainly these factors do not yet seem likely to erode the regime's power base. The decision to avoid a full show down with the Kurds has resulted in relative calm in the provinces, with the Arabs of Khuzestan sullenly subdued under the governorship of Admiral Madani, dubbed 'the Butcher' by Radio Baghdad. But in Tehran a growing mood of anti-clericalism is reported, and many quite disparate groups feel bitter that the revolution for which they all fought appears to have ended in what Bazargan, frank to the last, calls 'a takeover by the clergy'.
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