Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (11 page)

This was Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who, in March 1963, “publicly accused the Shah of violating his oath to defend Islam and the Constitution.”
⁷
Khomeini assailed the White Revolution for what he saw as its cavalier regard for established mores. By extending the franchise to women, Khomeini said, the shah’s reforms were promoting the “spread of prostitution.” He also objected strongly to measures that would make it possible for non-Muslims to hold appointments as judges.

But what he objected to most of all was the shah’s dependence on the United States and his willingness to pursue close relations with Israel. In one of his speeches, alluding to the fact that Iran had formally recognized the government of Israel, Khomeini wondered aloud whether the shah was actually a “Jew” and an “infidel.” The shah’s secret police, the infamous SAVAK, arrested Khomeini. The security forces had already cracked down on religious students in the seminary town of Qom a few weeks earlier when they gathered to protest government approval for the opening of liquor stores there. Now the students rioted again. Dozens were killed.

Other leading clerics, though not quite as aggressive as Khomeini, shared his disapproval of the White Revolution; Grand Ayatollah Borujerdi, before his death, had issued several fatwas condemning aspects of the shah’s reform program. After the riots in Qom, leading clerics worried that the shah was preparing to have Khomeini executed, and one of their most prestigious members, Grand Ayatollah Mohamed Kazem Shariatmadari, moved to have the title of “Grand Ayatollah” given to Khomeini as a preemptive measure. (Their reasoning was that the shah would never dare to end the life of one of the country’s highest-ranking clerics.) The shah backed down and released Khomeini. In 1964, Khomeini delivered another scorching reproach of the shah over a planned agreement for the stationing of US forces in Iran, which many Iranians regarded as a violation of their country’s sovereignty. Khomeini was arrested again.

By now his religious colleagues had tired of their tug-of-war with the shah, and there was little protest when the government sent Khomeini into exile. Most of the religious scholars saw their primary role as helping the faithful to navigate the
tremendous moral and social confusion generated by the shah’s program. They did what they could to push back against plans to create a state-approved “Religion Corps” that would push an officially sanctioned view of Islam, and they resisted, to the extent that they could, the steady erosion of their moral authority. The shah was just as determined to keep them in their place. For the time being, the overwhelming majority of religious scholars saw no reason to engage in outright opposition.

T
he oil money was flooding in. The economy was booming. Few challengers dared to speak openly against the monarchy. And so, in 1971, the shah decided it was time to celebrate. Given the scale of his presumptive success, he saw no reason to stint. Years earlier his advisers had brought up the idea of organizing a public ceremony to showcase Mohammad Reza Shah’s achievements. Now the revenue from Iran’s energy windfall made it possible for those plans to be realized in the most lavish possible fashion. The festivities needed a suitably grandiose occasion, and so the shah decided that they should commemorate the twenty-five-hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Persian monarchy, staring with the rule of King Cyrus the Great. The event began in October 1971, when the shah formally paid his respects at the tomb of Cyrus. The religious establishment of the country noted that their secularizing monarch was choosing to portray Iran’s pagan past as the real source of national glory. It was a vision that left little space for the role of Shiite Islam.

Most of the celebration took place nearby on the grounds of the ancient Achaemenid capital of Persepolis, where the organizers had erected a city of lavishly appointed tents to house the six hundred invited guests, who included sixty heads of royalty and heads of state. For the chief designer the shah hired the man who had redecorated the White House for Jacqueline Kennedy. The visitors, who were ferried between the site and the airport by a fleet of Mercedes-Benz limousines, watched a lavish son et lumière show against the backdrop of the ruins that included a procession by seventeen hundred Iranian army soldiers dressed in period costumes. Then the partygoers indulged in a six-hour feast catered by Maxim’s of Paris. The guests included Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia and Soviet president Nikolay Podgorny, US vice president Spiro Agnew, and Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz Tito, the Duke of Edinburgh and Imelda Marcos of the Philippines, Spain’s Prince Juan Carlos and the Congolese president, Joseph Mobutu. It was, arguably, the jet-set event of the century—notwithstanding the abject poverty on display in villages just a few miles away from the site of the festivities. And no one paid much attention when that radical cleric, Khomeini, issued his own jeremiad against the event from his exile in Iraq.

The
New York Times
estimated that the total bill for the event came to around $100 million, though that probably involves a considerable amount of guesswork.
⁸
Aware of the sensitivity of the subject, the shah forbade any discussion of the costs. He was, however, undoubtedly in a position to pay the bill. Oil revenues hit $885 million the year of the Persepolis celebration. The next year they doubled. In 1974 they reached $4.6 billion—and then soared to $17.8 billion in 1975. With little apparent consideration of the effects, government officials doubled the amount allocated to the shah’s Fifth Development Plan, raising it to $63 billion.
⁹
Iranian growth went up by 30.3 percent in 1973–1974 and 42 percent in 1974–1975.
¹⁰
Unsurprisingly, inflation shot up. The economy overheated. Lines of ships formed outside Iranian port facilities that did not have the capacity to unload all the goods that had been purchased.

Nineteen seventy-five was also the year that the shah decided to complete his country’s political transformation. Though he was ostensibly an ally of the United States, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi often expressed his contempt for what he saw as the indiscipline and moral laxity of the liberal democracies. Though a staunch anti-Communist, he believed in central planning and the Soviet Union’s apparent success in mobilizing resources for the common good. Having spent decades curtailing the opportunities for political expression of his subjects, he now moved to bring that process to its logical culmination by declaring Iran to be a one-party state. From now on, everyone had to be a dues-paying member of his Rastakhiz (Resurgence) Party. “Those who believe in the Iranian Constitution, the Monarchical regime, and the principles of the White Revolution, must join the new party,” he announced. “Those who do not believe in these principles are traitors who must either go to prison or leave the country.”
¹¹
It was precisely this brand of centralizing arrogance that Mohammed Daoud and many other leaders found so worthy of emulation.

They were mistaken. Politically and economically, the shah’s regime had attained the apogee of hubris. From here the initiative would pass to others.

B
y the summer of 1978 Prime Minister James Callaghan appeared to have weathered the worst. The trauma of 1976, when Britain had been forced to go cap in hand to the International Monetary Fund, was fading from memory. Callaghan and his team had managed to make moderate cuts in spending and hold inflation at manageable levels. The economy was picking up, and if Callaghan could sustain the positive trend, he had a good chance of winning the next election.

But there was a catch: these achievements were contingent on good relations with the unions. A former union official himself, Callaghan had plenty of credibility with the labor movement’s leaders, and he had put this capital to use by pressing them to moderate their pay demands. This was in keeping with Keynesian orthodoxy, which dictated that the best way of fighting inflation was the control of wages and prices, an approach known as “incomes policy.” In July 1978 it was time to negotiate a new deal. Union leaders felt that their previous forbearance entitled them to a reward. The government recommended a raise of 5 percent. The Trades Unions Confederation rejected it.

Desperate to keep inflation at bay, Callaghan tried to bring the unions to heel by denying government contracts to companies whose workers refused to go along. But the unions had had enough. The first unraveling came in September, when 57,000 workers at Ford Motor Company’s British subsidiary voted to go on strike. In late November, company management finally capitulated, granting its workers a pay increase well above the limit that Number Ten Downing Street had recommended.
Callaghan and his government protested, but that was about all they could do. Other unions decided that it was time to join in.

The floodgates opened. The public-sector unions announced that they, too, wanted higher pay. Next the nurses joined the strike, followed by hospital support staff. Emergency rooms closed their doors to all but the most dire cases. Callaghan was forced to dispatch substitute workers from the armed forces to keep basic services going. Garbage men went on strike, and uncollected trash began to pile up around British cities. Bread rationing was declared when bakers stopped work. A work stoppage by truck drivers triggered shortages of food and gasoline. On January 22 the unions announced a nationwide “Day of Action” that was observed by 1.5 million workers; a whole range of institutions, from schools to airports, shut their doors. The United Kingdom had not seen the likes of it since the General Strike of 1926. The misery was magnified by a bitterly cold winter that buried many parts of the country in wet snow. In Liverpool even the grave diggers stopped work. The city council actually considered, for a while, burying the dead at sea.
¹

It was a prodigious mess, but if anyone could deal with it, surely it was Callaghan. No one else could boast a comparable range of experience. Before taking up residence in Number Ten Downing Street, Callaghan had served as chancellor of the Exchequer, foreign secretary, and home secretary, which made him the only British politician to have held all four of the great offices of state. He had a smooth, jovial manner and an easy pragmatism that endeared him to both ruling-class and ordinary voters. His personal popularity was immense.

But while the prime minister well understood that Britain could not continue on its current path, he had no clear alternative to offer. He was, after all, the Labour leader. The unions dominated his party. What’s more, the characteristics that had served him so well on his rise now boomeranged against him. His cheery sense of absolute self-belief had earned him the label “Sunny Jim,” and his unflappability was a key ingredient of his personal popularity. On January 10, 1979, this trait was on full display as he returned to London from a summit meeting of the leading industrial powers held on the island of Guadeloupe. It was bad enough for his image that Callaghan had been basking in the Caribbean sunshine at a time when his countrymen were slogging their way through mountains of garbage. Greeting journalists at the airport, Callaghan brushed off their questions about the dark national mood: “I promise if you look at it from the outside . . . I don’t think other people in the world would share the view that there is mounting chaos.” It was a remark that made him appear fatally disconnected. The next day’s edition of the tabloid the
Sun
ran a damning headline: “Crisis? What Crisis?”

Callaghan never actually said those words. But the accusation stuck—precisely because his optimism appeared at such odds with the images that dominated the evening news. For nonunionized Britons, the “Winter of Discontent,” as the months of strikes were soon dubbed, was more than just another episode in a long history of industrial unrest. It was not just that sidewalks were vanishing under piles of garbage or that coffins were going unburied. Strikers and the police clashed in pitched battles that evoked nightmarish visions of anarchy. The promise of the late-nineteenth-century labor movement—the brotherhood of man and the rights of the oppressed—had devolved into a kind of storm-trooper anomie. Twice before in the course of the decade, the unions—with the all-powerful miners in the vanguard—had toppled governments. Now that recent history appeared to be repeating itself, with a vengeance. It all reinforced the widespread notion that Britain had entered a period of crippling decline.

There was one small consolation for Callaghan: he had little to fear from the leader of the opposition. Her name was Margaret Thatcher. She had ascended to the leadership of the Conservative Party four years earlier after launching a surprise challenge to Edward Heath, the former prime minister in whose cabinet she had served for four years until his defeat in 1974. She had been in charge of the Ministry of Education, where one of her modest reforms—canceling free milk in school lunches—earned her the nickname “Margaret Thatcher, Milk Snatcher.” (Never mind that she had actually increased the budget for her department during her stint.) In professional terms, this scarcely compared with Callaghan’s experience as a holder of all four of the great offices of state.

She represented, as far as Callaghan and his advisers could see, a sort of ideological dead end. She talked, almost like an American, about “free markets” and the virtues of capitalism. She preached the need to tighten the money supply and choke off inflation—all fine and good, but the unions would never allow it, as they were now demonstrating. She even talked quite aggressively about the need to discipline the labor movement: “The unions have unique power and unique power requires unique responsibility,” she declared in one of her duels with Callaghan in the House of Commons. “That responsibility has not been forthcoming. That is the reason for the position in which the country finds itself today—about which there can be no dispute.”
²
This was tough talk, but few professional politicians took it seriously—even within her own shadow cabinet. What could she possibly do about the unions that hadn’t been tried before?