Читать книгу Global Issues 2021 Edition - Группа авторов - Страница 32

The first major crisis in Iran’s relations with the West began in 1951, when the lawyer Mohammad Mosaddegh was elected prime minister. Soon after taking office, he introduced a wide array of political and economic reforms and nationalized Iran’s British-controlled oil industry. After diplomacy failed to obtain a compromise, the CIA, convinced by the British that Mosaddegh was a communist sympathizer, helped to overthrow him in a coup that became a turning point in Iran’s modern history.³²

Although the shah introduced many reforms, some of which lifted restrictions on women, he also created the notorious SAVAK secret police force, trained by the CIA and Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, to quash challenges to his rule. It soon became Iran’s most hated and feared institution, responsible for the torture and murder of thousands of the dissidents.³³ (See Short Feature.)

During the administration of Republican President Richard M. Nixon, the shah bought huge quantities of sophisticated U.S.-made weapons, establishing Iran as Washington’s Persian Gulf policeman.³⁴ The administration of Democratic President Jimmy Carter discouraged any questioning of the arrangement, and U.S. officials overlooked the anti-shah anger and resentment that was building in the country’s mosques.³⁵

Leading the opposition was Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, an outspoken senior Shiite cleric whose arrest in 1963 for an anti-shah speech sparked riots in which government troops killed up to 400 of his followers.³⁶ Exiled the following year, Khomeini eventually moved to Paris. As protests in Tehran intensified, the shah declared martial law and banned all demonstrations.

On Sept. 8, 1978, government troops opened fire on a large crowd of protesters in Tehran, killing nearly 100 people. The deaths stunned the nation, destroying any possibility of reconciliation. Strikes and massive anti-shah protests spread. “That’s the point when it turned into a revolution,” said Gary Sick, an Iran expert who served on the White House’s National Security Council during the administrations of Gerald Ford and Carter and is now a professor at Columbia University in New York.³⁷

Carter’s advisers were split over the worsening situation in Iran, Sick recalled. One camp favored the shah’s abdication and formation of a new pro-Western government of senior military officers and moderate clerics, with Khomeini as its figurehead. The other side advocated a military crackdown by the shah’s forces.

While Washington debated its options, the shah convinced opposition politician Shapour Bakhtiar to serve as prime minister while the shah went abroad “on vacation.” On Jan. 16, 1979, Bakhtiar assumed leadership, and the shah and his family flew to exile in Egypt, ending 2,500 years of monarchist rule in Iran.³⁸

On Feb. 1, 2019, Khomeini flew to Tehran, where he was met by up to 3 million Iranians celebrating in the streets. He denounced the Bakhtiar government as illegitimate. “I shall kick their teeth in,” the cleric proclaimed. “I appoint the government.”³⁹

A few days later, Khomeini named a provisional revolutionary government. His supporters took control of government buildings, TV and radio, and Bakhtiar fled to Paris. Iranians overwhelmingly voted for the establishment of an Islamic theocracy.⁴⁰