Chapter Fifteen: Arabia, Türkiye, and Iran, 1949-1979

While pan-Arabism and the Arab-Israeli conflict gave coherence to events in the core of the Middle East during the 1950s and 1960s, they had little impact on the region’s peripheral states. Instead, countries like Iran, Türkiye, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf States largely followed their own paths. Türkiye struggled to transition to democracy, Iran pursued a top-down modernization effort under the direction of its ruler, Mohammad Reza Shah(r. 1941-1979), and Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates fought to get a greater share of the revenue that their vast oil holdings generated. As such, the region’s peripheral states exercised only limited influence over the rest of the Middle East during the 1950s and 1960s.

That situation changed dramatically in the 1970s. While Türkiye remained largely outside of the region’s mainstream during that decade, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf emirates vaulted to prominence and began to exert substantial influence over the other states of the Middle East. To a considerable degree, their growing significance reflected important economic changes. Most notably, oil revenue stemming from surging demand in the industrialized world transformed Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf States into important regional and even global economic players in the 1970s. However, political changes also played a critical part in giving the peripheral states greater influence, particularly Iran. There, the cataclysmic Iranian Revolution of 1979, (sometimes refered to as the Islamic Revolution), would put the first modern, Islamist government in power in the Middle East and would, in so doing, encourage further Islamist challenges throughout the region.

Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States

At the end of World War II, the Arabian peninsula was an impoverished backwater that fell within Britain’s sphere of influence. By 1979, in contrast, it had become a fabulously rich region that occupied a prominent place within the American economic and strategic order, all thanks to its vast petroleum reserves and to the success of the producing states in gaining control of that resource. Indeed, the oil that they possessed not only raised living standards to previously unimagined heights but gave the Arab producer states substantial regional and even global influence. However, petroleum did not just bring about positive outcomes for the Arab producer states. Even as it provided enormous economic and political benefits, it would also spark significant domestic and international security issues for the Gulf States and, importantly, would help to bring about the birth of the violent, destabilizing Jihadist ideology that would begin to gain prominence in the 1980s.

The Hydrocarbon Age

Oil loomed large in the years immediately following World War II for the developed states of the West. Petroleum had emerged as the most vital resource of the age, one that fueled both the ongoing process of industrialization and the steady rise in living standards that millions had come to expect. A key raw material in the manufacture of many goods, it was essential to the production of fertilizer, chemicals, and plastics. More importantly, it had become the essential commodity on which nearly all forms of transportation had come to depend. This was especially true in the wealthy United States. There, inexpensive gasoline not only facilitated the movement of goods and people, but more broadly, rendered the social and spatial revolution of mass suburbanization possible. Already in motion before World War II, suburbanization accelerated rapidly after the conflict’s conclusion as Americans took advantage of inexpensive, government-subsidized loans and the construction of limited-access highways to buy new, detached homes in auto-dependent developments outside the central city. Automobile ownership rates made the sheer scale of this trend clear. Between 1945 and 1950 alone, the number of registered cars in the US nearly doubled, rising from twenty-six million to fifty million.

However, the affluence of the postwar United States was not a foregone conclusion. The suburbanization of the US that created so many jobs and that produced so much wealth depended on the continued flow of cheap, plentiful fuel. Inexpensive gas, in other words, was the literal oil that kept the machine of American prosperity going. There was a potential problem, however, the domestic supply of petroleum on which prosperity rested did not appear to be limitless. This issue was not lost on policymakers in the administration of Franklin Roosevelt (r. 1933-1945). Indeed, as we saw in Chapter Eleven, many policymakers had become so concerned during World War II that domestic reserves of oil were not sufficient to meet future demand that they had begun to seek alternative sources of petroleum abroad. They did not have to look very hard. With seemingly limitless reserves, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States appeared to be the obvious place from which to obtain that oil.

American policymakers were hardly alone in linking cheap petroleum to postwar abundance or in connecting continued economic growth to the Middle East’s vast reserves. Instead, nearly all of the industrialized states made clear that they saw inexpensive Middle Eastern oil as the foundation of continued prosperity. For example, British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin (1881-1951) declared after World War II that continued access to the region’s reserves was necessary if Britain hoped “to achieve the standard of living at which we are now aiming.”

The Middle East’s petroleum reserves were also essential to the achievement of vital American geostrategic goals. In the late 1940s, policymakers feared that the tremendous postwar economic dislocation in Western Europe could lead the region’s impoverished people to turn in desperation to communism and, in so doing, to bring their states into the Soviet Bloc, thereby irrevocably tipping the global balance of power in Moscow’s favor. To forestall such a train of events, Washington moved aggressively to rebuild Western Europe’s shattered economy through the passage of the Marshall Plan in 1948. Substantial in scale, it provided the critical injection of funds needed to jumpstart the region’s reconstruction and to spark a revival in living standards. However, American grants could not achieve a recovery by themselves. Implicit in Washington’s economic plans for Europe was the steady availability of inexpensive and plentiful Middle Eastern oil. Without it, Marshall Plan aid, however generous, would be unable either to turn Western Europe’s moribund economy around or, by extension, to contain communism in the region.

The Fifty-Fifty Deal

Deeply committed to opposing Marxism, King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud (r. 1902-1953) was only too happy to contribute to the American effort to contain the USSR. At the same time, however, he had become increasingly dissatisfied with the royalty arrangement that Saudi Arabia had negotiated with Aramco. This new perspective constituted a significant shift from the king’s earlier view of the concession. As we saw in Chapter Eleven, he had initially been more than content with the terms of the agreement and with the share of oil revenue he was receiving. Not only had the Aramco concession put all of the risk on the petroleum companies, but, since the late 1930s, it had also provided the kingdom with heretofore unimaginable amounts of wealth through the sale of its oil

In time, however, Riyadh’s views of the concession began to change. The sheer scale of Aramco’s profits, (three times the amount that the Saudi government received in royalties), and the fact that the US Treasury had collected $43 million in tax revenue from the sale of Saudi oil in 1949 while the kingdom had received only $39 million in royalty payments led Abdulaziz and his advisors to conclude that the terms of the concession needed to be revised. News of Venezuela’s success in securing a fifty-fifty arrangement wherein it received half of the revenue from the sale of its oil reinforced that line of thinking and spurred the king to demand a new agreement based on similar terms. In doing so, however, Riyadh did not want to put Aramco at a competitive disadvantage by raising its costs. Accordingly, Saudi officials focused less on getting a larger share of Aramco’s revenue than on capturing some or all of the substantial tax receipts that the American government collected on the company’s Saudi operations

With the assistance of high-priced American tax attorneys, Abdulaziz’s advisors found a way to divert that revenue. The solution lay in exploiting a component of the US tax code, the Foreign Tax Credit, that permitted American companies to deduct from their US returns any taxes, but not royalties, that foreign governments assessed on their operations. In other words, by agreeing to pay taxes to Riyadh that would then be offset dollar for dollar on its American return, Aramco could permit Saudi Arabia to enjoy a fifty-fifty split of its profits at no cost to the company’s bottom line. Implemented in 1951, the new arrangement worked as advertised. Riyadh’s share of oil revenue grew from $60 million in royalties in 1950 to $110 million in royalties and tax receipts in 1951. Over the same period, the US Treasury’s saw the revenue it received on the sale of Saudi oil in the United States fall from $50 million to just $6 million. Company profits remained unaffected.

Surprisingly, officials in President Harry Truman’s (r. 1945-1953) administration were not merely tolerant of this arrangement but outright enthusiastic about it. They recognized that it provided a way for them to advance an important but stalled regional agenda. During the late 1940s, Truman had sought to provide the kingdom with economic and military assistance designed to aid in the containment of the USSR. That effort had faltered, however, in the face of congressional hostility to the allocation of funds to states hostile to Israel. The Foreign Tax Credit provided a way around that opposition. Not requiring action on the part of Congress, it permitted the administration to indirectly provide Riyadh with aid and thus gave a delighted Truman administration a backdoor means of securing its regional objectives.

The new deal that Abdulaziz and Aramco officials negotiated had implications that went well beyond the kingdom. Other states in the Middle East quickly followed suit and renegotiated the terms of their concessions along similar lines with the result that the fifty-fifty deal became the new standard. The leaders of the Arab producer states were every bit as delighted with the terms of the new arrangement as Abdulaziz had been. After all, it meant that they were now receiving a much larger share of the profits on the extraction and sale of their oil.

At the same time, however, they quickly realized that the new profit-sharing agreement they had won was a more qualified achievement than it appeared at first look. The issue was one of control. While the petroleum states received a larger share of the profits, the oil companies continued to make all decisions related to the price and amount of crude extracted. In other words, while the producing countries earned more money as a result of the fifty-fifty deal, they had moved no closer to securing what was gradually becoming a critical goal for them: winning control of the petroleum that constituted the primary source of their wealth.

Saudi Arabia, 1953-1970

During the two decades following its adoption of the fifty-fifty agreement, Saud Arabia focused more on nation building and on developing the sinews of a modern economy than on assuming control of its oil. Initially, the kingdom found the going difficult. Poor leadership, power struggles within the ruling family, persistently depressed oil prices, and Nasserist-inspired instability combined to frustrate efforts to modernize Saudi Arabia in the 1950s and early 1960s. Under Abdulaziz’s son Faisal (r. 1964-1975), however, the Saudi state would finally find its footing and would establish a stable regime that would provide a model for the other oil-producing states located along the Persian Gulf.

Upon Abdulaziz ibn Saud’s death, his son, Saud (r. 1953-1964), became the kingdom’s second monarch. The new king faced three daunting challenges upon acceding to the throne. First, as Saudi Arabia lacked a functioning bureaucracy and did not yet even adhere to a budget, he needed to quickly develop the state capacity that the kingdom’s increasingly sophisticated economy required. Second, thanks to his father’s free spending, he had to address a substantial budget deficit and to find a way to impose fiscal discipline on the Saudi state and the country’s very large royal family. Finally, he was compelled to parry the increasingly dangerous ideological challenges that Nasserism and Ba’athism posed to his state and to his family’s rule.

Saud enjoyed at best mixed success in addressing these problems. To his credit, he did manage to establish the foundations of a modern government by expanding the size and reach of the bureaucracy and by creating a number of new departments such as the Ministries of Education and Communications. At the same time, however, his personal vices and diplomatic inexperience left him ill equipped to resolve the other issues that the kingdom confronted. Rather than addressing Saudi Arabia’s budget deficit, for example, he made it worse. Wasteful to an almost comedic degree, it took him just five years to turn the $200 million debt that he inherited in 1953 into a whopping $480 million deficit.

His efforts to meet the third challenge, fending off pan-Arabism, likewise fell flat. Saud initially sought to ensure the kingdom’s security by developing a close relationship with Gamal Abdel Nasser (r. 1954-1970). He felt compelled to abruptly change course in 1956, however, when he learned that the Egyptian leader had gained a worryingly large following in Saudi Arabia and, worse, had begun plotting a coup attempt against him. Determined to push back, the king responded in 1957 by offering the apparently receptive head of the Syrian security service, Abd al-Hamid Sarraj (1925-1913), a £1.9 million bribe conditioned on the intelligence chief preventing the union of Syria and Egypt. Unfortunately for the king, Sarraj had no intention of blocking the creation of the United Arab Republic (UAR) and promised to do so only so that he could lure the inexperienced and overconfident Saudi king into a trap. Sarraj’s plan worked to perfection. Releasing unimpeachable evidence of Saud’s plot to the press, he thoroughly embarrassed the Saudi king, destroying his credibility both internationally and, more critically, within the ruling family.

Accordingly, though Saud retained the formal title of king, his half-brother, Crown Prince Faisal, assumed control of the Saudi government in 1958 at the behest of the other princes. The change in leadership was very much to the kingdom’s benefit. Pious, fiscally prudent, shrewd, and diplomatic, Faisal was everything that his brother was not. He immediately launched a successful anticorruption campaign and, with the assistance of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), quickly restored the kingdom’s fiscal position. Despite Faisal’s success, however, Saud was not yet fully out of the picture. As a result, there followed a six-step forward, five-step back dance in which the two brothers traded power over the next few years. That struggle only ended in 1964 when Saud’s threat to start a debilitating civil war led sixty-five ulema and one-hundred princes to depose him and to formally elevate Faisal as the kingdom’s third ruler.

Now king in his own right, Faisal moved aggressively to legitimate the rule of the Saudi family and to inoculate the country from the threat of radical ideologies and Arab nationalism. He approached this task with a three-pronged strategy. First, in what amounted to an updated version of the traditional Arab practice of building loyalty through generosity, the new king devoted an increasing share of the state’s oil revenue to the provision of patronage. Beginning in the early 1960s, Saudis enjoyed steadily improving healthcare and welfare benefits, access to an expanding educational system, and growing employment opportunities in the expanding army and central bureaucracy. Second, he acted to improve the quality of life in the kingdom by funding development projects aimed at providing Saudi Arabia with modern infrastructure, particularly, as we shall see, after the price of oil exploded in the 1970s. Finally, he secured the support of the Wahhabi religious scholars by giving them the perquisites and salaries of state employees and by establishing religious universities.

Religion was also central to Faisal ‘s efforts to combat Arab nationalism outside the kingdom. Personally pious and politically conservative, he disapproved of the secular and socialist ideas of the Ba’athists and Nasserists and viewed those ideologies as dangerous to the well-being of the Arab people. Determined to blunt their appeal, he promoted pan-Islamism as an alternative form of identity and sought to bolster the kingdom’s standing with more-conservative, religious Arabs by emphasizing Saudi Arabia’s role as guardian of the Holy Places. More concretely, he gave sanctuary and support to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and, as we saw in Chapter Fourteen, challenged Nasser by backing the royalist guerrillas who were waging an insurgency against the Egyptian-backed republicans in Yemen.

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC)

In the meantime, Saudi Arabia and the other oil-producing states were growing increasingly frustrated with the amount of revenue they were receiving. To a substantial degree, their unhappiness was a function of the growing oil surplus that had emerged over the course of the prior decade. A product of the imbalance between a sharp increase in the supply of petroleum and a far-more modest rise in demand, the glut put strong downward pressure on prices. The entry of the USSR into the global oil marketplace in 1955 dramatically exacerbated this trend. Flooding the world with cheap petroleum, Moscow made an already bad situation even worse for the oil-producing states.

At first, the glut affected the oil companies rather than the producer states. That it did so was a function of corporate policy. While the companies continued to pay royalties based on the official posted rate, they increasingly had to discount the price at which they sold their oil on the open market. In other words, they were forced to absorb the difference between the market rate and the official one. The companies were willing to continue doing so for a time but, by the end of the 1950s, found the practice no longer tenable. British Petroleum (BP), formerly the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), was the first to act. To the shock of the producing states, it cut the posted price of oil by a substantial eighteen cents per barrel in 1959. For a time, it stood alone. In August 1960, however, Standard Oil of New Jersey announced that it, too, was reducing the amount paid to the producing states for oil, in its case chopping the per barrel price by fourteen cents, a drop of 7 percent. This move broke the dam. In short order, the rest of the petroleum companies followed suit with cuts of their own.

The leaders of the oil producing states were enraged. The August 1960 reduction of the posted price meant a corresponding drop in royalty payments to states that derived nearly all of their revenue from the sale of petroleum. Worse, the oil companies had announced the change unilaterally. Indeed, they had not even offered so much as a by-your-leave to the countries that actually owned the oil.

The producer states responded with collective action. Already unhappy about the failure of revenue to rise sufficiently in the years since the fifty-fifty agreements went into effect, the governments of Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela met in Baghdad in September 1960 to explore the creation of a collective organization that could better represent them in negotiations with the oil companies. Under the direction of the head of the Saudi Directorate of Oil and Mining Affairs, Abdullah Turayqi (1919- 1997), the attendees established the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). Intended to limit the global supply of oil, it was empowered to establish maximum production quotas for each of the member states. In other words, the organization that Turayqi and his fellow ministers had created was a cartel designed to raise prices by limiting supply.

The organization would later assume a powerful position in global economic and political affairs. Initially, however, it enjoyed at best mixed success. On the positive side, OPEC rapidly gained many new member states over the course of the 1960s and, by dint of its mere existence, compelled the oil companies to think twice about cutting prices or taking further unilateral action. At the same time, however, the ongoing oil glut, made worse by the entrance into the market of major new producers like Libya, ensured that prices remained low and that the organization could not raise them by limiting production.

The attempt by the Arab oil states to embargo the sale of petroleum to pro-Israeli countries during the Six-Day War demonstrated the producers’ continued weakness. Seeking to help Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, the oil ministers of Libya, Kuwait, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Algeria announced on June 6, 1967, that they were deploying what they called the “oil weapon”: an immediate embargo of the sale of petroleum to countries friendly to Israel including the US, Britain, and West Germany. The embargo’s impact on Middle Eastern production was immediate and substantial. Coupled with the closure of the Suez Canal, it depressed oil exports from the region to a mere 40 percent of their prewar level.

Despite this significant drop in supply, however, the oil weapon ultimately proved unsuccessful in preventing countries friendly to Israel from receiving adequate supplies of petroleum. What had gone wrong? How was it that a substantial drop in Middle Eastern production did not produce a concomitant shortfall in the consuming states? Put simply, the embargo’s failure was a function of America’s excess domestic capacity. Taking advantage of the country’s ability to quickly ramp up production, the administration of President Lyndon Johnson (r. 1963-1969) ordered American oil companies to expand domestic production and directed them to restructure supply chains so that the US could make good West Germany and Britain’s petroleum deficits. As a result, the embargo proved to be little more than a costly failure for the Arab oil producers. Indeed, the lesson was clear: so long as America retained the excess capacity needed to serve as the world’s swing producer, meaning that it constituted a supplier of last resort that could raise production to offset shortfalls elsewhere, the oil weapon would remain ineffective.

The Gulf States: “East of Suez”

Meanwhile, a significant changing of the guard took place in the Persian Gulf in the late 1960s and early 1970s. During the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, as we have seen, Britain had assumed a colonial relationship with Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, and the seven smaller emirates known collectively as the Trucial States. In contrast to Britain’s diminished role in other parts of the Middle East, that arrangement remained essentially unchanged following the Suez Crisis. By the mid 1960s, however, the breakup of the empire had rendered the arrangement between London and the Gulf principalities anachronistic and had made the stationing of the 6,000 British troops that garrisoned the emirates a needless burden on the exchequer, one that seemed increasingly incompatible with Britain’s more-and-more challenging fiscal situation. As such, it was hardly surprising that Prime Minister Harold Wilson (r. 1964-1970, 1974- 1976) responded to the onset of a severe balance-of-payments crisis in January 1968 in part by announcing the liquidation of Britain’s remaining military obligations “east of Suez.”

Wilson’s announcement set off a panic in the Gulf States. The leaders of those oil-rich but vulnerable countries had at times chafed under British dominance, but they also valued the protection that it afforded them both against broad ideological challenges like pan-Arabism and against more acute military threats like the radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Oman and the Arabian Gulf (PFLOAG) guerrilla movement that had emerged in the 1960s. Indeed, the sheikhs of Dubai and Abu Dhabi were so concerned about the loss of British security that they offered to defray the cost of the garrisons if Britain agreed to retain them. Ultimately, London opted not to take them up on this offer. Instead, it helped the seven Trucial States join together to form the United Arab Emirates (UAE) so that they could better protect each other, and it provided Oman with military assistance in its campaign to defeat the PFLOAG. These initiatives were successful. As a result, despite the anxiety that some of the leaders of the Gulf States had expressed at the time of Wilson’s announcement, the Persian Gulf region remained stable following the withdrawal of British troops in 1971.

The Turning Point

Its stability after Britain’s withdrawal was likely in part a function of the astonishing increase in the price of oil that occurred during the 1970s. At root, the dramatic run up in prices that occurred over the course of that decade was a function of supply and demand. Thanks largely to suburbanization in the US and increased automobile ownership in Western Europe, North America, and Japan in the 1960s, consumption of oil in the non-communist world exploded, rising from nineteen million barrels per day in 1960 to a then-staggering forty-four million barrels per day in 1972. Supply also increased during this period, but, in a turnaround from the situation in the 1950s, it failed to match pace with the now-galloping surge in demand. Irresistibly, as a result, the price of crude oil began to tick upward. The rate of increase was slow at first, but it began to accelerate dramatically after 1970, doubling between that year and the end of 1972 alone.

Changes in the American oil market contributed significantly to the rise in prices and made possible an important shift in power from consuming to producing states. While the United States remained the world’s largest producer into the 1970s, it reached its peak, pre-fracking production total of 11.2 million barrels per day in 1970. Thereafter, with domestic production flat and demand continuing to rapidly grow, the US was compelled to make up the difference between the amount of oil it produced and the amount it consumed by increasing the quantity that it imported. That rise was enormous, and it came shockingly fast. Indeed, imports surged from 2.2 million barrels per day in 1967 to a staggering 6 million barrels per day in 1972. The growing gap between domestic production and consumption would have two important effects. First, the mounting shortfall would play an important part in spurring the rise in world oil prices. Second, though few noted it at the time, the American petroleum deficit had a secondary impact of even greater consequence. With its spare capacity having disappeared thanks to the combination of plateauing domestic production and rising demand, the United States was no longer able to offset supply shocks or to prevent price surges by pumping more oil as it had in the past. With enormous consequences for the price of oil, the US had ceded its role as the global swing producer, a position that Saudi Arabia would henceforth occupy.

Meanwhile, as a result of the changing balance between producers and consumers, the OPEC states were now finally in a position to begin shifting control over the supply and price of oil from the companies to the producer countries. That process began in 1971 with the Tripoli and Tehran Agreements. Made possible by the growing imbalance between supply and demand, those deals included both substantial price increases and a move from the fifty-fifty arrangement that had obtained for the prior two decades to a new system that granted the oil states 55 percent of the profits from the sale of their oil.

This success merely whetted the OPEC states’ appetite for further concessions. The following year, they pushed for what Saudi Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources Ahmed Zaki Yamani (1930-2021) called “participation”: partial ownership of the companies that held the oil concessions in their states. This process followed two paths. Intent on avoiding substantial disruptions to the market, some states like Saudi Arabia agreed on a gradual process of nationalization. In its case, it began with a 25 percent ownership position that gradually increase to 51 percent in 1983. Others such as Algeria and Libya pursued a far-more aggressive path and assumed majority stakes immediately. Regardless of the approach, participation succeeded in substantially increasing the producer states’ share of what were, thanks to rising demand, rapidly growing profits. It is important to keep in mind, however, that revenue was not the main reason that the OPEC states pursued ownership. On the contrary, while they certainly enjoyed the added income they received, they sought partial ownership primarily as a way for them to challenge the concession system and, critically, to secure control, and, thus, sovereignty, over their countries’ most valuable resource.

The transformation of the relationship between the producing and consuming states reached its culmination during the Yom Kippur War between Israel and the Arab republics of Egypt and Syria in October 1973 (we will explore the conflict itself in Chapter Sixteen). Rapidly increasing prices were the first sign of the changed environment. OPEC had already succeeded in raising the price of a barrel of oil by 12 percent to $2.90 in June and was preparing at the time the war started to demand another big increase at a meeting with oil company representatives scheduled to begin in Vienna on October 8. Already fraught owing to the crisis atmosphere created by the fighting between Israel, Egypt, and Syria, the negotiations collapsed when oil company representatives balked at the producers’ shocking demand for a doubling of prices. However, the failure of the negotiations did not stop the Arab oil ministers from increasing prices. On the contrary, emboldened by the fighting, they adjourned to Kuwait City where they unilaterally raised the cost of a barrel of oil to $5.12.

More importantly, they once again deployed the oil weapon. The day after they raised prices, the Arab ministers announced significant production cuts scheduled to take effect immediately. A few days later, they followed by imposing an embargo on the sale of petroleum to countries like the US that supported Israel. This time, the oil weapon worked. With Saudi Arabia having replaced the US as the world’s swing producer, the embargo and, especially, the production cuts created oil shortages and severe economic pain in the industrialized world. The result was steep inflation, biting recessionary conditions, and wrenching social discontent among Western consumers long conditioned to expect cheap energy.

More broadly, the embargo and the production cuts signaled that the producing states, rather than the consuming ones, now called the shots when it came to the supply and price of petroleum. The OPEC states were quick to take advantage. While motorists in the US endured gas lines and fumed about rationing, the producers cheerfully exploited their newfound power to complete the process of nationalizing their oil industries that had begun with the “participation” agreements in 1972. Henceforth, as a result, those states would hold title to their most valuable natural resource. Western consumers were largely unaware of that shift, but they were intimately familiar with another change that OPEC put in place at the Shah’s urging. Meeting in Tehran in December 1973, the organization increased the price of oil to $11.65 a barrel, a four- fold increase in less than six months.

The Good Times

The next four years were, in the words of one of the organization’s executives, “OPEC’s Golden Age.” They were indeed good times for producer countries like Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. The massive influx of petrodollars, (US dollar holdings earned through the sale of oil), provided the means for them to thoroughly transform and modernize their economies. The amounts were mind boggling. Between 1965 and 1975, Saudi Arabia’s GDP rose from 10.4 billion Saudi Riyals to over 164 billion Riyals thanks almost entirely to the massive surge in oil prices that occurred in the early 1970s. No one benefited more from this flood of wealth than the thousands of princes who made up the royal family. Drawing little distinction between state revenue and dynastic wealth, they waged an arms race of conspicuous consumption in which they spent extravagant sums on fleets of cars, new palaces, huge yachts, and European luxury properties. All told, the royal family alone skimmed off an estimated 30 to 40 percent of the kingdom’s oil revenue.

While the princes certainly enjoyed their newfound income, the scale and openness of their spending also threatened to undermine the legitimacy of the royal family. After all, their gambling, drinking, and naked materialism were hardly consistent with the strictures of Wahhabi Islam. Aware of the potential danger that the gap between the kingdom’s professed values and the behavior of its rulers posed to the dynasty’s legitimacy, Faisal used the surge in oil revenue to prevent the emergence of discontent. To limit any objections that the ulema might have raised to the princes’ lifestyle, he increased the subsidies that he provided to mosques and religious colleges and lavished funds on the religious scholars’ effort to bring Wahhabi ideas to Muslims outside the kingdom. Meanwhile, though he refused to consider any genuine move toward democratic government, he took two steps designed to retain the support of the emerging middle class. First, he steadily increased the number of people directly employed by the state. Second, he dramatically accelerated a series of ambitious, five- year modernization programs that had begun at the start of the 1970s. Thanks to the quadrupling of oil prices in 1973, for example, he was able to raise the amount allocated to the first five-year plan (1970-1975) from $9.2 billion to $21 billion. Later programs were even larger. Most notably, as a result of the windfall that followed the Yom Kippur War, the Saudi government was able to assign an order of magnitude more money, a staggering $200 billion, to the second five-year plan (1976-1980).

As a result of these programs and a third completed in the early 1980s, Saudi Arabia experienced a stunning transformation in a remarkably brief period of time. Between 1970 and 1985, it completed a huge array of modern infrastructure projects including highways, ports, electric power networks, universities, powerplants, housing developments, and hospitals, and it massively increased the social welfare benefits provided to the Saudi people. However, Faisal did not survive to see the success of the economic development plans that he had launched. Shot by one his nephews as revenge for the death of a sibling during demonstrations against the introduction of television in the 1960s, he died in 1975. Thus, it was his brothers and successors, Khalid (r. 1975-1982), and Fahd (r. 1982-2005), who, having continued his policies, reaped the fruit of his modernization program.

Differences over Israel notwithstanding, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf principalities retained strong relations with the US in the 1970s. To a substantial degree, the perpetuation of close ties with Washington was a function of the oil producers’ perceived vulnerability. Concerned that the flood of wealth that they had begun receiving had transformed them into tempting targets for foreign enemies, they sought the security that only Washington could provide. Faisal led the way. Determined to ensure his kingdom’s security, he went to great lengths to maintain good relations with Washington. Even during the Yom Kippur War when ties between the two countries were at a low ebb, for example, he took steps to minimize the breech and even went so far as to secretly provide oil to the US Navy. Likewise, it was the Saudi king who persuaded the other Arab producer states to bring the oil embargo to an end in March 1974.

More broadly, aware that recessionary conditions in the developed world would ultimately hurt the producing states, the Saudi king also agreed to help the US resolve the balance-of-payments problem that the sudden rise in petroleum prices had caused. Accordingly, over the next few years, his government undertook a series of actions designed to repatriate a huge share of the petrodollars that it had acquired from the sale of oil in the US. It purchased American goods for its modernization effort, acquired $34 billion worth of arms from Washington, invested in businesses and real estate in the United States, and bought US government securities. These latter purchases were substantial. Indeed, by the end of the 1970s, the kingdom held more US debt than any other entity.

While the close relationship with America may have helped secure Saudi Arabia from foreign dangers, it contributed to significant tensions within the kingdom. The problem was the newly empowered Wahhabi ulema. As previously noted, Faisal had sought to legitimize the regime and to mute opposition to modernization in part by embracing religion. Central to this campaign was his effort to secure the support of the religious scholars. To do so, he had put them on the state payroll, ceded domestic power to them, given them control of higher education, and lavished revenue on their efforts to spread Wahhabism abroad. For a time, this strategy seemed to work. Supported by ample state funds, the ulema largely refrained from criticizing the royal family and instead focused on spreading their severe construction of Islam both to people within the kingdom, particularly the hundreds of thousands of Arab guest workers who lived in Saudi Arabia, and, more broadly, to Muslims across the globe.

By the mid-1970s, however, Faisal’s effort to secure the support of the religious scholars had begun to boomerang. Though they appreciated the state’s largesse, the Wahhabi ulema increasingly recoiled at the kingdom’s close relationship with the US and at the Saudi princes’ over-the-top lifestyles and began to doubt the regime’s commitment to the Islamic values it claimed to espouse. As a result, even as the Wahhabi ulema were using the government’s substantial financial assistance to spread extreme Islamist and jihadist ideas throughout the Arab world, particularly, as we shall see, in Egypt, they were also quietly fostering domestic opposition to a state that many religious scholars had come to conclude was not adhering to the tenets of Wahhabism. Indeed, unbeknownst to the Saudis, Wahhabi ideas had given birth to a secretive, insurgent Islamist movement within the kingdom. Led by a man who claimed to be the Mahdi, the group had emerged out of the Religious University of Medina, where, not coincidentally, members of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood had found sanctuary, and had, in the late 1970s, quietly begun to plot the overthrow of the Saudi government.

Türkiye: Democracy and Its Discontents

For the Republic of Türkiye, the period between 1945 and 1980 was one of both tumult and continuity. During that time, the country experienced dramatic changes including the transition from a single-party state to a multiparty democracy, the rise of political extremism on both the right and left, substantial, if uneven, economic growth, and tremendous social and demographic change including rapid urbanization. At the same time, however, the military’s assumption of an extraconstitutional role as the guarantor of both Kemalism and political stability ensured that postwar Türkiye enjoyed substantial continuity with the values and ideas of the early republic.

The Transition to Multiparty Democracy, 1945-1980

At the end of the Second World War, Turkish President Ismet Inonu (r. 1938- 1950) and the Republican People’s Party (RPP) that had ruled the country since the early 1920s found themselves in a difficult position. They had successfully navigated the challenging diplomatic waters of the war years but had done so only by pursuing policies that alienated three key components of the Kemalist political coalition: the urban middle class, government administrators, and the large landowners of rural Türkiye. The bureaucrats had seen inflation destroy the purchasing power of their salaries thanks to the expansion of the money supply required to pay for a bigger military, the large landowners had endured costly price caps on agricultural products, and the middle class had suffered under confiscatory wartime taxes. By 1945, as a result, these influential parts of the ruling party’s base had quietly begun to demand fundamental political changes.

This discontent set the stage for the liberalization of Türkiye’s political system immediately following World War II. The process started when four dissident members of the assembly including future prime minister Adnan Menderes (1899-1961) and future president Celâl Bayar (r. 1950-1960) openly opposed a land-reform bill, arguing that it would weaken faith in the government’s commitment to private property and thus discourage investment. Though the law passed over their objections, Menderes and his colleagues remained undaunted. They followed their defeat by calling for political liberalization and full democracy. These demands were too much for the RPP. It responded by kicking Menderes and two fellow dissidents out of the party, a move that appeared to doom their push to liberalize Türkiye. Salvation came from an unexpected source. In a dramatic speech at the opening of the assembly in November 1945, President Inonu rescued the liberalization drive by calling for a gradual transition to full democracy. Having been given a second political life, Menderes and Bayar followed by officially establishing the republic’s first meaningful opposition party, the Democratic Party (DP), in January 1946.

The creation of the DP shook up the political system. Appealing directly to groups like the middle class, the landlords, and the peasants, the new party amassed an enthusiastic following and made a good showing in elections held in May 1946. The DP’s success deeply alarmed the leaders of the RPP. Worried that they might continue to lose support, they responded by coopting the Democratic Party’s main policy proposals. They jettisoned the latest five-year plan in favor of a free-market approach designed to appease the middle class, devalued the Turkish currency, the lira, and moved to weaken support for the DP among the religiously minded peasantry by allowing schools to teach religion once again. These changes seemed to work. Coupled with the defection of a number of DP assembly members to the newly formed Nation Party in 1948, the new policies put the RPP in a commanding position going into the 1950 election.

The DP’s upset victory thus came as a startling surprise. In what amounted to an electoral revolution, the party won 54 percent of the vote and an overwhelming majority in the assembly. It was a shocking upset that led the RPP and its allies to consider a variety of responses to its rival’s success. Indeed, the military leadership even quietly proposed staging a coup. To his credit, however, Inonu decided to respect the wishes of the voters and declined the offer. As a result, for the first time since its formation, the party that had secured the country’s independence and territorial integrity after the Great War had lost its monopoly on power. Türkiye had become a genuine multi-party democracy.

The Democratic Party in Power, 1950-1960

Thanks to its promotion of policies that appealed to its business and especially rural constituencies, the Democratic Party enjoyed widespread popularity during its first few years in power. Under Menderes, who served as prime minister, its key reforms fell into two areas. First, while the DP retained a broad commitment to secularism, it also eased some of Kemalism’s more extreme restrictions on religion. It ended the ban on making the call to prayer in Arabic, endorsed teaching Islam in public schools, and permitted religious broadcasts on the radio. Second, it instituted a series of sweeping economic changes designed to liberalize the economy and to encourage the agricultural sector. It established the Turkish Industrial Development Bank to loan state funds to capitalists, gave farmers easy credit from the Agricultural Bank, maintained high wheat prices, and, with the help of the Marshall Plan, facilitated the mechanization of agriculture through the importation of American farm equipment. The results were impressive. Benefitting from good weather and a 50 percent increase in the amount of land under cultivation, the economy grew at a12 percent clip during the early 1950s.

Economic growth translated into continued success at the polls for Menderes and the Democratic Party during the 1950s. Boosted by the booming agricultural sector, the DP cruised to an easy victory in the 1954 elections. It won 58 percent of the vote to the RPP’s 35 percent, giving the Democrats 503 seats in the assembly as compared to a mere 31 for the RPP. However, the DP did not fare as well in elections held in 1957. That year, it won just 47 percent of the vote while the RPP’s share rose to 41 percent. Still, since the Turkish political system rewarded the leading party with a disproportionate share of assembly seats, the DP retained a tight grip on power.

The precipitous decline in support for Menderes and the DP in 1957 stemmed largely from Türkiye’s worsening economic circumstances. Resting as it did on the continued importation of tractors and other agricultural equipment, the growth that had boosted the party in the early 1950s had produced a steadily rising balance-of- payments deficit. By 1958, the bill finally came due. Desperate for an infusion of additional foreign cash, Prime Minister Menderes’s government was forced to agree to implement a series of harsh austerity reforms in exchange for a $359 million IMF stabilization loan. The resulting economic pain fueled growing opposition to the DP, particularly among urbanites, who saw the purchasing power of their salaries eroded by inflation, and among farmers, who no longer enjoyed favorable treatment from the government.

Menderes’s increasingly heavy-handed political repression also contributed to the DP’s declining popularity. Taking a page from the RPP, his party freely used the power of the state against its political rivals. Most notably, shortly after taking control of the government, the prime minister had ordered the treasury to confiscate property that the RPP had obtained when it had controlled the state in the 1930s. After its big victory in 1954, the DP went even further. It implemented changes to the electoral system that imposed new burdens on the opposition and passed a law that permitted the government to force long-tenured RPP bureaucrats, judges, and academics to take early retirement. Later, as its political position weakened, the DP embraced outright illiberalism, organizing a parliamentary commission to investigate the RPP and banning the party’s representatives from sitting in parliament.

The Coup of 1960

This last action was too much for the military. Alarmed by the DP’s increasingly autocratic actions and, more importantly, by its deviation from Kemalism, a group of military officers launched a coup on May 27, 1960. Citing the need “to prevent fratricide and to “extricate the parties from the irreconcilable situation into which they had fallen,” the coup’s leader, Colonel Alparslan Türkeş (1917-1997), announced over the radio that the army had assumed control of the state. The junta promptly closed parliament, suspended the constitution, named a popular general as head of state, and established a new body, the National Unity Committee (NUC), to run the country until a new constitution could be drawn up and new elections held. They also outlawed the DP and arrested all of the party’s assembly members including Menderes and Bayar.

Differing visions of Türkiye’s future soon split the NUC into radical and conservative factions. The key issues dividing the body were the duration of military rule and the extent of the reforms that the coup leaders intended to put in place. Led by Türkeş, the radical faction wanted the military to rule for a long period so that it could impose a top-down political and cultural revolution designed to turn Türkiye into an authoritarian state along the lines of Nasser’s Egypt. The rival conservatives instead called for a quick end to military rule and for a limited series of reforms aimed at ensuring the perpetuation of Kemalism and at preventing future political parties from abusing power as the DP had. For a time, the two factions coexisted uneasily in the NUC. The balance tilted irrevocably toward the conservatives, however, after the radicals undertook a purge in the army in August. Alienating many moderate officers heretofore unaffiliated with either faction, this move left Türkeş and his supporters so isolated that the conservatives were able to force them from the NUC in November 1960.

Having dealt with the radicals, the conservative faction then moved to revamp Türkiye’s political system and to implement a new constitution. They did so in hopes of achieving two overarching goals. First, they wanted to prevent future political parties from trampling basic rights as the DP had. Accordingly, they devoted fully one third of the new constitution to provisions assuring civil liberties such as the independence of the media and the right to collective bargaining. Second, they sought to ensure the perpetuation of the Kemalist revolution. To do so, they strengthened the judiciary, created a bicameral legislature, and established a new institution, the State Planning Organization (SPO), to coordinate economic development through a series of five-year plans modeled on the statist practices of the 1930s. Most importantly, they created a new executive body called the National Security Council (NSC). Composed of the president, the chief of the general staff, and the heads of the service branches, it advised the government on national security issues. However, its remit did not remain confined to matters of defense for long. Instead, through a process of bureaucratic mission creep wherein its members perceived a growing range of topics to be relevant to national security, the NSC soon became an enormously influential body that ensured a powerful voice for the Kemalist officers in the new government.

Establishing the Second Republic, the coup of 1960 marked a watershed moment in Türkiye’s political development. Not only did it break the DP’s grip on power, but it also set two lasting precedents. First, it established that the military had an extraconstitutional right to take control of the state if the politicians abused power or strayed too far from the Kemalist legacy. Second, the coup set the standard that future military involvement in politics would be temporary and that the officers would return power to the civilian government as soon as feasible.

The Second Republic, 1960-1980

The performance of the economy during the early years of the Second Republic seemed to validate the coup. Under the direction of the SPO, Türkiye shifted away from the DP’s emphasis on private enterprise and back to the statist, Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) approach that had shaped the Turkish economy during the heyday of Kemalism in the 1930s. However, there was one substantial difference. This time, the drivers of economic growth were private firms rather than state-controlled operations. Sheltered by protective tariffs and ensured access to imported raw materials through the maintenance of an artificially strong lira, the powerful, oligopolistic corporations that emerged in the 1960s quickly came to thoroughly dominate the Turkish economy. For a time, they led an impressive expansion. Indeed, to the satisfaction of the officers who had overseen the creation of the Second Republic, economic growth averaged an impressive 6.9 percent per year between 1963 and 1967.

However, the coup leaders were far-less pleased with the political system that emerged during the early years of the Second Republic. Their frustration began with the first post-coup election in the fall of 1961. While Inonu’s RPP won the election as they had hoped, it secured the backing of just 37 percent of the electorate, while parties that drew support from the same groups that had backed the now-outlawed Democratic Party took 49 percent of the votes cast. This suggested both the continued appeal of the DP’s platform, and the depth and breadth of popular opposition to the coup. Inonu did manage to oversee several RPP-dominated coalition governments in the early 1960s, but those governments were shaky and the RPP was never able to find its footing. Instead, to the chagrin of the military it was seven-time Prime Minister and future President Süleyman Demirel’s (1924-2015), center-right Justice Party (JP) that would emerge as the dominant political force during the Second Republic.

More troublingly from the perspective of the military, the mainstream parties no longer enjoyed a monopoly on political power in Türkiye. Instead, thanks to rapid demographic growth and, ironically, the liberal constitution that the officers had put in place, new, extremist political movements of both right and left proliferated in the decade following the coup. Inspired by Marxist writings and by the transnational, antiestablishment zeitgeist of the 1960s, leftist movements won a following among university students and Türkiye’s small-but-growing working class. These organizations grew rapidly during the late 1960s and early 1970s but failed to make substantial political inroads in part because they splintered along ideological fault lines. For example, the Marxist Federation of the Revolutionary Youth acrimoniously split at the beginning of the 1970s into competing Guevarist and Maoist factions. In contrast, the far-right ultranationalist groups that developed in the 1960s, including, most notably, Alparslan Türkeş’s National Action Party (NAP), enjoyed substantial coherence and unity.

Predictably, the rise of extremist political organizations produced violence and instability. Inspired by the dramatic global revolutionary events of 1968 such as the Tet Offensive in Vietnam and the French student revolt in Paris, far-left organizations began to engage in aggressive political acts such as seizing control of Istanbul University and occupying a tire factory. They grew substantially bolder and more militant in the early 1970s. Over the course of the decade, far-left groups organized guerilla movements, robbed banks, and kidnapped American military personnel as part of their effort to overthrow the state. Furious, the ultranationalists did not permit these actions to go unchallenged. Instead, with the tacit support of Demirel’s government, rightist militias such as the NAP-affiliated Gray Wolves joined the state’s security apparatus in aggressively combatting leftist violence.

Fed up with the volatility and the Marxist threat to Türkiye’s political system, the military moved to restore order in 1971. In what became known as the Coup by Memorandum, the chief of staff gave Prime Minister Demirel a letter in March 1971 indicating that the army would once more assume power if the government did not implement sweeping reforms and “neutralize the current anarchical situation,” a threat that impelled Demirel to promptly resign. The officers followed by moving to curtail the leftist challenge. Declaring martial law, the NSC directed a brutal and far-reaching crackdown on leftist organizations and pressured the assembly to approve a series of constitutional amendments designed to prevent further disorder. They included curbs on the autonomy of the universities, restrictions on press freedoms, and limits on the independence and power of the courts. Ironically, in other words, the same officers who had so insistently enshrined civil liberties in the constitution of 1961 were now, just a decade later, acting to place severe limits on those very rights.

Turkish Foreign Policy

The story of Türkiye’s diplomatic relations between 1945 and 1980 was far-more straightforward than the course of its anarchic internal political system. Its foreign policy during that time centered on achieving two overarching goals. First, in conjunction with the United States, it worked to prevent the USSR from expanding its influence into the Middle East. Second, it sought to ensure that Britain’s majority-Greek colony of Cyprus would become a separate state rather than a province of Greece when it won independence and that its government would respect the rights of the island’s Turkish minority. For the most part, these goals were in harmony. Coming into conflict in the 1970s, however, they briefly drove a wedge between Washington and Ankara.

Türkiye was an early partner in America’s effort to contain the Soviet Union. As we have seen, Washington had worked closely with Ankara to foil Joseph Stalin’s

(r. 1928-1953) effort to gain control of the Dardanelles and Bosporus Straits in 1946 and had made Türkiye a recipient of American military and economic aid through the Truman Doctrine the following year. The relationship became even closer when Türkiye joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1952. Assuming the role of an “unsinkable aircraft carrier” for the United States, it thereafter hosted combat jets, U-2 spy planes, and, until President John F. Kennedy (r. 1961-1963) removed them following the Cuban Missile Crisis, Jupiter nuclear missiles. Despite acrimony over the withdrawal of the rockets, Türkiye remained a committed and faithful partner in Washington’s containment policy.

However, a crisis stemming from the decolonization of the island of Cyprus would threaten that relationship. In the early 1950s, the Cypriots had entered into negotiations with London aimed at ending British rule of the island. Two factors complicated those talks. First, the population of Cyprus was divided uneasily between a Greek majority that lived largely in the south and a Turkish minority, about 20 percent of the population, that predominated on the island’s north side. Second, under their nationalist leader, the Archbishop Makarios (r. 1960-1977), the Greek Cypriots were pushing for enosis, or union with Greece, rather than independence.

The possibility of Cyprus joining Greece was unacceptable to the Turkish government. It feared that enosis would both imperil the rights of the Turkish Cypriot minority and present Ankara with a serious strategic dilemma should it find itself in a conflict with Athens. Accordingly, the Turkish government first successfully pressured Britain into making Cyprus an independent state rather than a part of Greece and then ensured that the new state’s constitution guaranteed the civil and political rights of the island’s Turkish minority. Despite a push among Greek Cypriots to curtail those assurances following the country’s independence in 1960 and an outburst of intercommunal violence in 1964, relative calm prevailed during Cyprus’s first decade. Thus, by the early 1970s, it appeared to casual observers that the island had put ethnic conflict behind it and that it was well on its way to becoming a stable, multi-ethnic state.

Events soon made clear that such conclusions were wildly inaccurate. Rather than continuing to come together as a unified polity, Cyprus would instead shatter along ethnic lines in 1974. The cause was the continued desire among Greek-Cypriot ultranationalists to achieve enosis. Intent on securing that goal, extremists in the Cypriot National Guard deposed Makarios in 1974 and with the encouragement of the military junta then ruling Greece, declared their commitment to immediate union. The Turkish government reacted aggressively to this precipitate action. Viewing the move as both a serious threat to its national security interests and as an unacceptable violation of the civil and political rights of the Turkish Cypriots, it responded by deploying troops to the predominantly Turkish northern half of the island in July. The landing dramatically enflamed the situation and sparked the start of a sustained campaign of ethnic cleansing across Cyprus that resulted in the flight of Greek Cypriots to the south and Turkish Cypriots to the north. Ankara followed by formally partitioning the island and by establishing a Turkish Cypriot government in the territory its troops occupied. That state gained nominal independence as the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus in 1983; however, Ankara was the only government to recognize it.

The intervention in Cyprus may have been popular among Turkish nationalists, but it sparked a growing rift between Washington and Ankara. Angry at Türkiye’s precipitate move, congress responded by promptly imposing a sweeping embargo on military aid. However, the American move did little to restrain Türkiye. Instead, furious at what it saw as unwanted interference in a Turkish domestic issue, Ankara retaliated by immediately shutting all American military facilities in Türkiye save for the NATO airbase at Incirlik. The rift was not merely deep but also long lasting. Pressured by Greek- American and Armenian-American lobbying groups, Congress did not lift its ban on the provision of military aid to Türkiye until July 1978. Only then did bilateral relations begin a gradual thaw.

The 1980 Turkish Coup D’etat

In the meantime, Türkiye experienced mounting domestic economic and political challenges over the course of the 1970s. The country’s economic woes had two sources. First, while it had enjoyed high growth during the period of ISI development when domestic demand for consumer goods remained unmet, it had, by the early 1970s, entered a phase during which it was unable to shift to an export-oriented growth strategy, and thus offset plateauing internal demand owing to the fact that its protected industries were too inefficient to compete in global markets. Second, the revolution in oil prices that occurred in 1973 proved peculiarly challenging for developing states such as Türkiye that depended on imported petroleum for continued economic growth. Indeed, thanks to the quadrupling of crude prices in 1973, Türkiye was soon spending an astonishing two-thirds of its foreign-currency earnings on imported oil and thus had only limited reserves with which to purchase imported capital equipment. Unwilling to abandon its expansionary policies, the government responded by accepting a dramatic increase in its external debt and by dealing with the resulting balance-of-payment problems by increasing the money supply. This approach worked for a time, but coupled with the rise in fuel prices that followed the Iranian Revolution, it also pushed inflation to an unsustainable 90 percent in 1979.

Meanwhile, despite an accompanying declaration of martial law and an intensive crackdown on leftist organizations, the Coup by Memorandum had failed to restore stability to the political system. Two problems stood out. First, thanks to the mainstream parties’ unwillingness to work with each other and their inability to secure outright majorities, small parties, particularly far-right ones, found themselves in a position to wield influence well beyond what their numbers justified. For example, Türkeş’s NAP was able to translate the paltry three seats it held in the assembly in 1975 into two cabinet posts thanks to its ability to give Demirel the slim majority he needed to form a government.

Second, the late 1970s witnessed a return to the political instability and violence that had marked the early part of the decade. The resurgence of bloodshed began in May 1977 when clashes between police and demonstrators during a May Day parade resulted in thirty-nine deaths and a retaliatory bombing campaign by leftists. The following year, the murder of the retired rector of Istanbul Technical University created fears of worsening political disorder, while five-days of confessional conflict between Sunnis and Alevis, a mystical variant of Twelver Shiʿism, raised the specter of sustained religious clashes. The situation deteriorated rapidly from that point. All told, political violence claimed the lives of 5,000 people between January 1978 and September 1980. The wave of violence that made clear that the civilian government had lost its ability to maintain order. In response, the military once again stepped in and orchestrated a bloodless coup in September 1980 that finally brought the tumultuous Second Republic to an end.

Iran: From Coup to Revolution

Iran had a far-more difficult time after World War II than did Türkiye. That it did so is perhaps surprising in light of the country’s enormous oil reserves and the significant growth it experienced under the rule of the shah. After all, a rising standard of living is typically associated with political stability. However, such was not the case in Iran. Rather than producing political and social stability in the country, the economic expansion served merely to mask seething, broad-based discontent with the regime. Dissatisfaction, ironically, that the rapid, oil-fueled process of growth helped to create. Tamped down for many years, that pent-up resentment would burst forth in a sudden political deluge in the late 1970s that would, in an astonishingly brief period of time, first sweep aside the Shah’s regime and then establish a purportedly traditional, but ultimately revolutionary new state under the firm dominance of the Shiʿa clerical establishment.

The Nationalist Challenge, 1950-1953

The early years of Mohammad Reza’s reign would prove pivotal in setting the stage for the revolution. Two issues dominated Iran at that time. The first was the question of who would rule. Would it be the young shah, whom the Allies had place on the throne in 1941 and who enjoyed the backing of the armed forces? Or would it instead be the majlis, the Iranian parliament, which the rural notables dominated? The second issue revolved around the question of who would control the country’s oil resources and receive the lion’s share of the revenue from its sale. Would it be the British-owned AIOC, which earned far more profit and paid far more in taxes to the British government than it provided in royalties to Iran, or would it instead be the government in Tehran and, by extension, the Iranian people that earned the majority of the profits?

These two issues would come together at the end of the 1940s to profoundly shape the trajectory of Iran’s political development. Initially, the Shah appeared to hold the upper hand in the struggle for political dominance. Emboldened by a failed assassination attempt in February 1949, the heretofore weak monarch acted to centralize power in his hands by declaring martial law and by taking an active role in the direction of the country for the first time. He followed by pursuing negotiations aimed at replacing the 1932 agreement between Iran and the AIOC with a new one patterned after the far-more-generous fifty-fifty deal that Venezuela had obtained in 1943. It was a bold initiative that if successful, would not only increase the amount of revenue that his government received each year but would also boost his nationalist credentials to such a degree that he would be able to fully restore the power that the monarchy had lost when the Allies had deposed his father.

However, the AIOC was unreceptive to the Shah’s proposal. On the contrary, the company indicated that it was willing to agree to no more than comparatively modest revisions to the existing system of royalty payments. Given the disparity in power between his state and the British-government-controlled AIOC, the Shah felt that he had little choice but to accept the company’s offer. Accordingly, he soon signed what came to be known as the Supplemental Agreement. Believing that the deal was enough for him to secure the nationalist credentials needed to consolidate his dominance of the government, he was more than satisfied with the terms that the British offered. However, there remained one substantial complication: the new understanding with the AIOC would not go into effect until the Majlis had approved it.

Unfortunately for the Shah, the emergence in 1949 of a powerful new opposition movement prevented him from securing the legislature’s formal endorsement of the Supplemental Agreement. It was led by an elderly notable named Mohammad Mosaddegh (1882-1967). A strong nationalist and proponent of democratic rule, Mosaddegh had long been a prominent figure in Iran. He had participated in the Constitutional Revolution, held office as a Majlis deputy, and served as a cabinet minister until Reza Shah (r. 1925-1941) forced him into a long internal exile.

His time in the political wilderness ended in spectacular fashion just after the Shah’s government revealed the terms of the Supplemental Agreement. Opposed to the Shah’s power grab and to any deal with the AIOC that gave Iran less than 50 percent of the profits, he organized and launched a series of mass popular demonstrations in October 1949 that directly challenged both of the dominant power centers in the country at that time: the Shah and the British. He followed by establishing a new, populist political party called the National Front. Mosaddegh’s actions immediately reshaped the balance of political power in Iran. Drawing support from a broad range of groups that included the Westernized middle class, the bazaar merchants, many leftists, and the followers of the influential Ayatollah Abol Ghasem Kashani (1882-1962), the party gave Mosaddegh the strength to block approval of the Supplemental Agreement in the Majlis. It also provided him with the institutional basis needed to mobilize people in support of a slate of far-reaching goals that included free elections, the suspension of martial law, strict royal adherence to the 1906 constitution and, to great popular acclaim, the nationalization of the AIOC.

From that point, he had little trouble dealing with the inexperienced shah. Taking advantage of the chaos that followed the assassination of Prime Minister Ali Razmara (r. 1950-1951) in March 1951, he succeeded in persuading the Majlis to approve his nationalization plan and to name him prime minister. He solidified his position the following summer by luring Mohammad Reza into a political blunder. It started when Mosaddegh demanded that the Shah cede to him the power to name the minister of defense, a change that would give him control over the military. The Shah’s refusal to do so prompted Mosaddegh to resign. Thus, for a brief period, it appeared that Mohammad Reza’s steadfastness had allowed him to reassert royal control. In fact, the Shah had fallen into a well-planned trap. At Mosaddegh’s behest, the National Front and the communist Tudeh Party responded by holding massive demonstrations in Tehran that quickly compelled the young monarch to back down. Thereafter, Mosaddegh, who had resumed his post as prime minister and assumed the defense portfolio, ruled Iran almost without challenge.

Having subordinated the Shah, the prime minister next set his sights on the British. Determined to take control of Iran’s oil, he followed the passage of the nationalization bill in the Majlis by seizing the oilfields and by announcing his desire to enter into talks with the British aimed at determining how much Iran would have to pay AIOC shareholders as compensation for the nationalization of the company’s assets. However, the British government did not prove to be as easily intimidated as the young shah had been. Determined to retain control over Iran’s oilfields, it steadfastly refused to accept nationalization or to discuss compensation and indicated that it was willing to negotiate only over the size of Iran’s royalty payments and not over ownership or control. To show it meant business, it simultaneously undertook a series of aggressive actions designed to force Tehran to back down. It brought suit against Iran in the World Court, beefed up its military forces in the Persian Gulf, froze Iranian assets, and imposed a blockade designed to prevent Mosaddegh’s government from selling oil. It also waged an aggressive and racist propaganda campaign designed to damage Mosaddegh’s reputation in the West by painting him as an emotional and irrational man.

The Iranian prime minister was taken aback by these nakedly imperialist actions and appealed to the United States for aid. He got precious little support for his troubles. Officials in the Truman administration were not unsympathetic to Iran and did take steps to try to bridge the divide between London and Tehran. At the same time, however, they were disinclined to undermine the position of a key Cold War ally and concerned that the nationalization of the oil concession in Iran might encourage other countries in the developing world to follow suit. Accordingly, Washington focused not on getting London to accept Mosaddegh’s action, but instead on an ill-conceived, and ultimately unsuccessful, campaign to find the right mix of verbiage and enhanced profit sharing that would allow Mosaddegh to accept continued British control over Iran’s oil.

Operation Ajax, 1953

With America refusing to take Tehran’s side, London’s strategy of pressuring Iran appeared to be bearing fruit in early 1953. Increased unemployment, rising inflation resulting from the Iranian prime minister’s decision to continue to pay the country’s idle oil workers, and a general economic slowdown stemming from the British blockade eroded support for the National Front. Likewise, Mosaddegh’s growing reliance on extraconstitutional methods such as his move to suspend voting midway through elections in 1952 alienated many of his allies including Kashani, a loss of support that his increasingly close relationship with the Tudeh Party only partially counterbalanced.

These problems would grievously erode Mosaddegh’s support, but it was a shift in American policy that would ultimately do him in. The change was in part a function of electoral politics. As we have seen, the Truman administration had sought to maintain at least a public neutrality in the crisis. The administration of Truman’s successor, Dwight Eisenhower (r. 1953-1961) had no such compunction. Instead, fearing that Mosaddegh’s reliance on the Tudeh had undermined his ability to resist Soviet subversion, it adopted an explicitly pro-British line. It urged Mosaddegh to accept a compromise solution that came nowhere near to meeting Iran’s minimum conditions and refused Tehran’s request for a desperately needed loan. The president went much further in the late spring of 1953. Fearing the Tudeh Party’s rising influence, he instructed the CIA (with assistance from British MI6) to foment a coup aimed at removing Mosaddegh from power and at installing the pro-Western Shah as the dominant political force in the country.

Direction of the coup, codenamed Operation AJAX, fell to former President Theodore Roosevelt’s (r. 1901-1909) grandson, the CIA agent, Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt (1916-2000). A covert-operations veteran, he devised a plan in the early summer of 1953 to restore the Shah and remove Mosaddegh from power. It called for Imperial Guard troops to deliver a firman, or royal decree, to the prime minister dismissing him from office and naming General Fazlollah Zahedi (1892-1963) as his successor. Concurrently, other units loyal to the Shah would arrest National Front leaders, seize key sites in Iran including the telegraph office and the radio station, and occupy strategic positions in the capital so as to prevent a repeat of the mass demonstrations that had thwarted the Shah’s attempt to dismiss Mosaddegh in the summer of 1952. It was a well-developed operation, albeit a nakedly imperialist one, and the administration quickly approved it. Accordingly, in July, Roosevelt entered Iran by car from Iraq with a game plan and a briefcase full of cash.

Operation AJAX may have been a sound plan on paper, but it flopped badly when royalist forces tried to execute it on August 15. Tipped off by an informer, Mosaddegh arranged for a large force of loyal troops to meet the unit sent to deliver the firman to him and had its commander arrested. Meanwhile, he ordered other soldiers to prevent royalist forces from leaving their barracks. As a result, the coup collapsed before it had even started.

Despair and euphoria coexisted in Iran in the immediate aftermath of the failed coup. On one side, Mossadegh’s supporters were exuberant that the operation had flopped so badly. Huge crowds of National Front and, especially, Tudeh loyalists poured into the streets the following day to celebrate what they saw as a great victory over Iran’s foreign and domestic enemies. On the other, the coup’s demoralized supporters were in complete disarray. The Shah and his wife had fled by plane for what they believed would be permanent exile as soon as they had learned of Operation AJAX’s failure; many other coup plotters, including Zahedi, were forced to lie low to avoid arrest. For its part, the Eisenhower administration could neither hide nor escape. Instead, it ordered Roosevelt to return home and glumly pondered how it could salvage its relationship with Mosaddegh in hopes that he might continue to help the US contain Soviet influence in Iran.

Roosevelt, however, was not yet ready to abandon the operation. Instead, confident that his network of Iranian assets remained intact, he hurriedly put in motion a new plan designed to exploit Mosaddegh’s post-coup complacency. The operation unfolded in two phases. First, on August 18, the US ambassador persuaded Mosaddegh to have security forces clear the Tudeh mobs from the streets of Tehran by hinting that the US might withdraw its recognition of his government if he could not maintain order. Confident that the royalists had been thoroughly routed, the prime minister agreed to do so immediately. Accordingly, later that day, army and police units forced thousands of Tudeh supporters to return to their homes. With the streets no longer controlled by Mosaddegh’s defenders, the stage was now set for the second phase of Roosevelt’s improvised plan. Deftly exploiting London’s contacts with key underworld figures, he used the cash he brought with him to Iran to arrange for a pro-shah mob composed of toughs from the athletic clubs of south Tehran to begin rampaging through the capital on the morning of August 19. Predictably, Mosaddegh ordered the army to break up the riot. When he did, Roosevelt struck. He arranged to have pro-shah units occupy the telephone-telegraph office, the military staff headquarters, and the radio station. Most importantly, he directed a substantial force to lay siege to Mosaddegh’s home.

The American CIA agent’s ad-libbed plan was a complete success. By the end of the day, pro-royalist forces held all key government ministries as well as the critical communications exchanges. More importantly, after a short and bloody firefight outside Mosaddegh’s residence, they had arrested the prime minister. Three days later, a delighted Shah returned from Italy to reclaim his throne, determined, this time, not merely to reign but to rule Iran as an absolutist.

Operation AJAX had momentous consequences for Iran, Britain, and the United States. For London, the results were mixed. On the surface, the AIOC, renamed British Petroleum (BP) in 1954, was in a significantly weaker position in Iran than it had been before the oil-nationalization dispute. It had not only been forced to agree to the fifty-fifty split in profits that had become standard throughout the world, but it had also been compelled to accept a consortium arrangement in Iran in which it held only 40 percent of the shares while Royal Dutch Shell, a group of American companies, and the Compagnie Français assumed the balance. In truth, though, Britain’s losses were far-less severe than they appeared at first look. Not only did it retain control over pricing and production decisions in Iran, but thanks to the fact that Royal Dutch Shell was really a British company, it also continued to hold the dominant position in the consortium.

The results of the coup were also ambiguous for Washington, though they did not appear to be so at the time. Indeed, so far as the Eisenhower administration was concerned, the coup had been an enormous success. It replaced a figure whose Cold War bona fides were in doubt with one of impeccable anticommunist credibility and had done so at a minimal cost. As such, it appeared to be a great victory that helped to institutionalize covert operations as a preferred tool of American foreign policy. However, the coup’s success ultimately proved to be short lived. As we shall see, it permanently tarnished Washington’s image in Iran and left many Iranians bitter at what they perceived to be a serious betrayal of both their country and American principles.

For Iran, in contrast, the results were almost entirely adverse. Most obviously, by entrenching the autocratic shah in power, the coup severely set back efforts to institutionalize a system of representative government. It also grievously weakened the moderate, secular opposition movements and thus created an opening that more extreme forces would later exploit. It had another, subtler implication as well. Roosevelt’s ability to pull victory from the sure jaws of defeat led Iranians of all social classes to conclude that the US, especially the CIA, had an almost-preternatural ability to manipulate political events in Iran. As we shall see, that belief would play a key role in shaping events during the Iranian Revolution.

Where Historians Disagree: The Iran Coup

Western interpretations of the 1953 coup have traditionally emphasized the strategic dimensions of the crisis. Locating the coup firmly within the structure of the Cold War, scholars and writers have long maintained that Washington went forward with Operation AJAX out of fear that the USSR would exploit the chaos in Iran if it failed to act. For example, the journalist Robert Fisk argues that the Eisenhower administration undertook the coup because it was “fearful that Mosaddegh would hand his country to the Soviets” if Iran secured control of its oil. In a similar vein, the political scientist Mark Gasiorowski asserts that Washington moved to topple the Iranian prime minister not for economic reasons but instead out of concern that his unwillingness to come to terms with London could create the proper conditions for the communist Tudeh Party to take control of Iran and bring it into the Soviet orbit.

In recent years, the historian Ervand Abrahamian has forcefully challenged this understanding of the coup. Emphasizing economic rather than strategic considerations, he repudiates the idea that Cold War concerns about potential communist inroads in Iran shaped either Washington’s decision to support Britain in the dispute or its willingness to go forward with Operation AJAX. Instead, he contends that American inflexibility on the question of continued British control was a product of a desire to prevent the establishment of a precedent that could lead to the nationalization of Western oil concessions in other developing states and that could thus threaten American interests. As he asserts, Eisenhower was acting not out of concerns about Soviet inroads in Iran but instead out of fear of the repercussions that oil nationalization could have on such faraway places as Indonesia and South America. In other words, in Abrahamian’s conception, the coup that deposed Mosaddegh was not, at heart, an episode in the Cold War struggle between the superpowers, but instead a fundamentally imperialist action rooted in a different contest: the struggle between the developed world and the Global South (a modern term that has taken the place of the more belittling concept of the Third World).

Consolidation of the Shah’s Regime

Having been granted a second political life, the Shah moved aggressively upon his return to Iran to solidify his control of the country. He immediately outlawed the National Front and other opposition parties, arrested many of their leaders, and denied non-regime-approved candidates the right to run for office. Later, he established a pair of parties so subservient to the throne that cynical Iranians referred to them as the “yes” and the “yes, sir” parties. Making liberal use of the regime’s now-uncontested power, he also ordered the police to destroy the Tudeh Party. This effort was not entirely successful thanks to the party’s robust, organizational structure; still, the campaign did succeed in driving it underground. Later, with the assistance of the CIA and its Israeli equivalent, Mossad, the Shah’s government established a ruthless secret-police organization known by its Persian acronym, SAVAK. Making liberal use of force, torture, and arbitrary arrest, it worked to prevent the emergence of any effective political opposition. Finally, the Shah exploited Iran’s surging oil income, it rose by a factor of five between 1950 and 1960, to provide patronage to his key supporters and to fund substantial pay raises designed to ensure the loyalty of the bureaucracy and the army.

The Shah’s efforts to solidify his control of Iran in the years immediately following the coup were quite successful. High pay, pensions, generous benefits, and new equipment from the US secured the loyalty of the military, while his expansion of the bureaucracy substantially increased the number of people who were dependent on the regime for their livelihood. More broadly, the steady rise in oil revenue underwrote a growing prosperity that seemed to erode popular support for the opposition during the latter half of the 1950s. Indeed, coming on top of the support the regime enjoyed from conservative clerics such as Kashani and the Ayatollah Burujardi (1875-1961), the economic good times seemed to have cemented the Shah’s hold on power.

New Challenges, 1960-1963

Appearances were not what they seemed, however, and anti-regime sentiment continued to simmer just beneath the surface. Three events brought it into the open in the early 1960s. First, the onset of a severe economic contraction ended the good times and rekindled anger toward the government on the part of many poor and middle-class Iranians. Second, pressure from the Kennedy administration for democratic reforms compelled the regime to implement a series of liberalizing measures, including an end to the ban on the National Front, and thus created room for anti-shah political activity for the first time since 1953. Finally, the government’s naked vote rigging and ballot box stuffing in successive Majlis elections infuriated Iranians of all classes. The result was a wave of popular strikes and demonstrations in the early 1960s organized by the Westernized middle class to protest the Shah’s autocratic rule.

Mohammad Reza’s difficulties broadened considerably in 1963 when an influential cleric, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1900-1989), began denouncing the government in a series of sermons he gave in the main madrasa in the religious city of Qom. A scholar of Aristotelian logic, Khomeini was an uncompromising figure who despised the Shah for his embrace of secular, Western reforms and who advocated an extreme and austere version of Shiʿism. Many of his key ideas, such as his opposition to constitutionalism, his hostility to the idea of female suffrage, and his insistence on gender separation even among children, were unpopular with the majority of Iranians. However, Khomeini was savvy enough to avoid making those positions public, and instead focused on three lines of attack that he grasped would win him broad popular support: criticizing the autocratic nature of the regime, condemning the Shah for selling oil to Israel, and, especially, demanding an end to American dominance of Iran.

This last line of attack took on a new intensity in 1964. Eager to strengthen Iran’s relationship with the US, the Shah accepted a $200 million loan for the purchase of military equipment and signed a status-of-forces agreement that granted diplomatic immunity to US military personnel stationed in Iran. Khomeini loudly condemned both deals. In a series of scathing sermons, he argued that the status-of-forces agreement “reduced the Iranian people to a level lower than that of an American dog” and likened the American loan to the one-sided concessions that the Qajar shahs had sold to Europeans in the nineteenth century. These criticisms were effective and quickly won him a substantial following.

The White Revolution

The Shah responded aggressively to the challenges of the early 1960s. To signal to both the National Front and its more radical offshoot, the Freedom Movement, that there were limits to the amount of political dissent he was willing to tolerate, he instructed state security forces to violently suppress student demonstrations at the University of Tehran in January 1962. To assert his power over the clerics, the Shah ordered SAVAK agents and army paratroopers to storm the madrasa in Qom and arrest Khomeini in June 1963. The move against the ayatollah was bloody. Several seminary students died in the operation and hundreds more perished when the military brutally suppressed demonstrations in support of Khomeini in Tehran over the next few days. The regime soon released the ayatollah but twice rearrested him after he continued to preach against the Shah’s rule. Finally, in 1964, the government moved to blunt his criticism by exiling him from Iran.

The attempt to diminish Khomeini’s influence was a complete failure. Settling in the Shiʿa religious center of Najaf in Iraq, Khomeini began giving a series of influential sermons denouncing the Shah that soon drew an audience among the thousands of Iranians who visited the tomb of the First Imam, Ali Ibn Talib (601-661), each year.

Smuggled home by pilgrims, copies of the Ayatollah’s increasingly vitriolic addresses would win him a substantial following throughout Iran.

Meanwhile, though the regime relied heavily on repression to cow its critics, it also took steps to coopt them. Most notably, it paired its use of force with a reform program called the White Revolution. Intended to prevent either a “black” Shiʿa revolution or a “red” communist one, it sought to rally the people to the state by modernizing Iran and by eliminating many of the country’s worst inequities. It instituted profit sharing for industrial workers, legalized women’s suffrage, and established an educational initiative, based on a successful Cuban model, aimed at teaching illiterate Iranians to read and write. Most importantly, it put in place an aggressive land reform program aimed at making the peasants independent and at weakening the political power of the rural notables. The regime went even further in 1967 when it passed the Family Protection Law. Designed to emancipate women, it raised the age of marriage to fifteen, made divorce more difficult for men, and barred husbands from taking more than one wife without the consent of his existing spouse or spouses. It also discouraged the practice of veiling, though it did not outright ban the practice. The White Revolution and the Family Protection Law were not without their detractors, and they did nothing to loosen the monarch’s grip on power. Nonetheless, they proved to be broadly popular, sufficiently so that they helped to blunt the challenges that the Shah faced in the early 1960s.

The Oil Boom

Equally important in depriving the opposition of any kind of momentum was the robust, oil-fueled economic growth that Iran experienced in the late 1960s and, especially, in the early and mid-1970s. As we have seen, surging global demand for oil beginning in the 1960s had given the producers the upper hand vis-à-vis both the consumer states and the oil companies and had dramatically raised the price of petroleum. The result was an absolute bonanza of foreign revenue for Iran. Its oil income shot up from a comparatively modest $34 million in 1953-1954 to $5 billion in 1973-1974 before hitting a mind-boggling $20 billion in 1975-1976, a nominal increase of 59,000 percent in a little more than two decades!

Sustained by the massive inrush of petrodollars, the White Revolution and other modernization initiatives produced impressive results. In the countryside, the land reform program resulted in more than two million peasant families acquiring legal title to their own farms while the construction of huge new dams provided ample water for irrigation. In the cities, petrodollars and ISI policies produced a period of rapid industrialization. With government support in the form of tariffs and subsidized loans, entrepreneurs connected to the palace established thousands of industrial facilities including textile mills, machine tool factories, and soft-drink bottling plants, while the regime itself underwrote the construction of larger industrial concerns such as steel mills, automobile assembly plants, and even a nuclear powerplant. Education and health programs enjoyed similarly rapid growth. Between 1963 and 1977, elementary school enrollment rose by 250 percent while college registration quadrupled. Over the same period, the number of doctors in the country tripled.

It was in many regards a tremendous achievement. Fueled by the vast surge in oil revenue, the regime had succeeded both in rapidly developing Iran’s economy and in modernizing much of the country’s infrastructure. It is certainly true that the Shah’s stated goal of making Iran one of the globe’s top-five powers by the end of the century was little more than hyperbole. Still, sustained by the huge inflow of petrodollars, Iran experienced undeniable and enviable economic growth in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

At the same time, the Shah misspent a huge share of Iran’s oil windfall. In particular, his regime devoted an absurd amount of its new wealth to arms purchases designed to fulfill the Shah’s ambition to serve as the “gulf policeman.” This aspiration meshed well with a new American foreign-policy initiative, the Nixon Doctrine, that President Richard Nixon (r. 1969-1974) had announced in 1969. Designed to prevent the US from ever again becoming bogged down in a conflict like the Vietnam War, it called for Washington to refrain from deploying American troops to the developing world and to instead rely on powerful regional allies to contain Soviet adventurism. Staunchly anticommunist, the government of Iran appeared well suited to fill that role in the Gulf region.

The Shah’s regional ambitions also complemented America’s now-pressing need to redress the balance-of-payments deficit that surging oil prices had created. As we saw in the context of Saudi Arabia, Washington understood that the sale of advanced weapon systems to the producer countries would allow the US to repatriate a substantial share of the petrodollars that had begun flowing to the Middle East in the early 1970s. Accordingly, after the Yom Kippur War, the Nixon administration lifted nearly all restrictions on arms purchases to Iran and encouraged the Shah and his generals to go on a shopping spree. They did so with abandon. Over the next five years, Iran bought billions of dollars’ worth of sophisticated American weapons including F-14 fighter jets, destroyers, and the latest antiaircraft missiles. Washington was not alone in providing Tehran with high-tech arms. Also looking to redress its balance-of- payments deficit, Britain too sold substantial quantities of weapons to the Iranian military. In fact, it provided so many Chieftain tanks to Iran in the 1970s that the Shah’s army ended up fielding more of them than did the British military.

The Shah also squandered a significant amount of oil revenue on spectacles designed to enhance the prestige of the monarchy. These included his formal coronation ceremony held in 1967 and, especially, his commemoration of the Iranian monarchy’s two-and-a-half millennia anniversary in 1971. Attended by a vast assemblage of heads of state and other notables, the celebration was a bacchanalian occasion of epic proportions. Held at the ruins of the ancient Persian capital of Persepolis, this lavish and ahistorical event involved thousands of actors in period costumes, a series of bizarre speeches in which the Shah linked himself to Cyrus the Great (r. 559-530 BCE), and a succession of almost comically indulgent feasts. Catered by Maxim’s of Paris, the elaborate meals were served on the finest Limogès china and washed down with a staggering 25,000 bottles of wine including prized vintages such as Château Lafite Rothschild. To the shock of ordinary Iranians, the total bill for the event was $21 million, an obscene figure for the time.

Renewed Discontent

The commemoration of the Iranian monarchy at Persepolis was not merely a conspicuously expensive affair, but also one that failed utterly to achieve its purpose. Designed to bind the Shah’s subjects to the regime through the construction of a new, national identity, the elaborate ceremony had little resonance with a people that perceived its history not in dynastic terms but instead in an Islamic framework. Indeed, rather than building loyalty to the regime, the event contributed to a rising sense of alienation and helped to feed a growing opposition that, ironically, drew increasing strength from the same oil-fueled economic boom and reform program that had dissipated the protest movements of the early 1960s. What explains this paradox? How could the reforms of the White Revolution and the rapid economic growth that had raised living standards for most Iranians have gone from easing dissatisfaction with the regime in the 1960s to producing widespread discontent in the 1970s?

Three consequences of the economic expansion and the modernization effort explain this apparent contradiction. First, while the oil boom resulted in an absolute rise in per capita income, it also badly exacerbated Iran’s already stark income inequality. That it did so was largely a function of the fact that the regime’s economic-development strategy was a top-down program that centered on distributing oil revenue to the wealthiest Iranians so that they could invest it in businesses that would, it was hoped, raise living standards for the lower classes. As a result, the flood of oil money that poured into Iran in the 1970s went disproportionately to regime officials and their hangers on, a fact that the upper class’s increasingly brazen displays of conspicuous consumption made obvious to all.

Second, while the oil boom and the Shah’s modernization program were popular, they also challenged the position of two highly influential groups in Iranian society: the bazaar merchants and the religious scholars. For the bazaar merchants, the period since the White Revolution had been a difficult one. The oil boom and the growing integration of Iran into the global economy had produced a rise in cheap imports that undercut the price of the artisanal handicrafts that were their livelihood, while the development of Western-style stores threatened their longstanding dominance of the retail sector. For the ulema, the problem was less the economic changes that Iran was experiencing than the reforms that the Shah had pushed through. Most notably, they bitterly opposed the Family Protection Law’s transfer of marriage, divorce, and inheritance proceedings from shariʿa courts to secular ones. That change not only contradicted their deeply held understanding of how a properly functioning Muslim society should be organized but, as important, directly undercut their authority, influence, and income.

Finally, and most importantly, the reforms of the White Revolution and the rapid economic expansion that followed raised expectations that the Shah’s regime either could not, or would not, meet. The issue of unmet expectations existed up and down the social ladder. For rural Iranians, the White Revolution had led them to conclude that they would soon acquire land and see the benefits of modernity extended to their villages. Instead, to their mounting frustration, most continued to live in communities that lacked basic elements of modern life such as electricity, plumbing, and schools. Worse, while many peasants did gain title to their farms thanks to the land-reform program, the poorest, the rural laborers, received no land at all and frequently lost their jobs due to the mechanization of agriculture that the influx of oil wealth had made possible. Millions consequently found themselves with no choice but to move to the shantytowns that were springing up around the country’s cities. There, they eked out a meager existence as low-wage, unskilled workers, a far cry from the life that the White Revolution and the oil bonanza had promised.

Members of the westernized middle class fared much better than rural Iranians during the economic expansion of the 1970s, but they too were bitter, not just about the regime’s failure to meet their economic expectations but, as important, about its refusal to satisfy their political aspirations. Their economic frustration stemmed to a large degree from their inability to fill the best jobs or to access the housing that they desired. Instead, the top positions managing the Shah’s infrastructure and maintaining the military’s new, high-tech military equipment went to highly skilled American contractors. Thanks to the lavish salaries the regime had to offer to attract them, they were also well-positioned to outbid Iranians for increasingly scarce housing. Politically, meanwhile, the White Revolution had reinforced the expectation of middle class Iranians that they should and would enjoy the right to participate in the governance of the state in accordance with their economic importance. To their frustration, the Shah instead continued to jealously maintain his tight grip on power.

As anger at the regime mounted in the 1970s, many workers, students, and members of the intelligentsia began to join underground political organizations or to adhere to radical new ideologies. Militant leftists gravitated toward a pair of underground guerrilla organizations: the Fedayin-e Khalq, an offshoot of the Tudeh Party that drew on the works of radical thinkers like Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), and the Mojahedin-e Khalq, a radical outgrowth of the Freedom Movement that promoted a mix of Shiʿa and Marxist thought. Put off by the violence that those groups espoused, other, more moderate leftists instead fell under the influence of the French-educated intellectual Ali Shariati (1933-1977). Drawing on both progressive Western thought and the spirit of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838-1897), he articulated a new, radical conception of Shiʿism as a populist, revolutionary ideology and likened the Imam Husayn (626-680) to

modern-day insurgents like Che Guevara (1928-1967). A prolific author, he criticized the ulema for quietism and for collaborating with the upper classes, and he attacked the Pahlavi state for its autocratic rule and failure to adhere to the social-justice values that he maintained lay at the heart of what he called the “Red Shiʿism of the Imams.” Shariati’s death under suspicious circumstances while in exile in 1977 ended his criticism of the regime but did not diminish his popularity. On the contrary, his ideas continued to inform the views of millions of Iranians during the revolution.

While many leftist students and intellectuals gravitated toward Shariati, the large, westernized middle class instead coalesced around the National Front and Mehdi Bazargan’s (1907-1995) Freedom Movement. Revived in 1977 by two veterans of Mosaddegh’s government, Shapur Bakhtiar (1914-1991) and Karim Sanjabi (1905- 1995), the National Front was a liberal secular political party that demanded free elections and a return to the constitution of 1906. Itself an offshoot of the National Front, Bazargan’s Freedom Movement similarly called for a return to democracy and promoted a moderate, Islamic-modernist form of government that integrated Western science and technology with Muslim values.

For their part, the urban poor, the baazaris, and the ulema increasingly adhered to the views of the exiled Khomeini. Spread by cassette tapes that returning pilgrims smuggled into Iran, the Ayatollah’s weekly sermons offered a scathing critique of the Pahlavi state. He condemned the regime for its economic shortcomings, its corruption, its inability to extend the benefits of modernization to rural people, its refusal to protect the bazaaris from foreign competition, and, especially, its subservience to the US. Seemingly rooted in traditional Shiʿa thinking, these critiques resonated deeply with millions of poorer and more conservative Iranians.

In fact, Khomeini’s ideas broke sharply with longstanding Shiʿa teachings. He made this clear in a book he published in the early seventies called Velayat-e Faqeh, or The Jurist’s Guardianship. Arguing that the idea of monarchical government was a relic of pre-Islamic times, it called for Iran to be restructured as a theocratic state in which the senior clerics ruled the country as the representatives of the Hidden Imam. Khomeini claimed in the book that his idea for religious rule was well-grounded in longstanding Shiʿa thought. Despite some precedent among late-Safavid-era clerics, however, it in fact marked a radical break with earlier Shiʿa thinking. It was an innovation that had no basis in either Qurʾanic teaching or the guidance of the Twelve Imams.

Khomeini was well aware that his guardianship idea would be unpopular with many Iranians and that it would engender fierce opposition from pro-Western reformers and advocates of democracy. Accordingly, taking advantage of the fact that the book was all-but-unknown beyond a small circle of seminary students, he shrewdly refrained from discussing it publicly and instead presented himself as a typical Shiʿa conservative. Indeed, as we shall see, it was only after he had curbed or defeated his rivals in 1979 that he would begin to pursue openly the theocratic state that he had envisioned in Velayat-e Faqeh.

Vacillation

Meanwhile, even as dissatisfaction with the Shah’s regime deepened, rising criticism from the international community put further pressure on the Iranian government in the mid-1970s and encouraged the opposition to act more boldly. Human rights groups including the International Commission of Jurists and, especially, Amnesty International, brought global attention to the lack of due process and to the shocking prevalence of torture in the Iranian legal system. Far more important, however, was the criticism coming out of Washington. Implying that the US might limit or end arms shipments if Iran did not end its more egregious human rights’ violations, the new American president, Jimmy Carter (r. 1977-1981), aggressively pressed the Shah to ease his government’s worst human rights abuses. In response, the regime implemented an assortment of high profile, but ultimately modest reforms including the relaxation of censorship laws and the release of some political prisoners.

These reforms may not have been substantive, but because they signaled weakness they had the unintended consequence of spurring opposition groups to step up their criticism of the Shah’s government. Most notably, in 1977, newly formed professional associations issued petitions attacking the government while the National Front released a public letter that boldly demanded the restoration of civil liberties and free elections. Owing in part to the treatment that Mohammad Reza had begun to receive for the cancer that would soon kill him, the government seemed unable to maintain a consistent line toward the opposition groups and instead veered erratically between conciliation and repression. Most notably, while state security forces violently attacked protestors at demonstrations held in Tehran in November 1977, the courts quickly acquitted and released those whom the police had arrested. This lack of consistency proved disastrous for the regime. Continued repression merely stoked anti-shah anger, while conciliatory gestures suggested not moderation or restraint but instead a degree of indecision and vulnerability that served only to embolden the regime’s opponents to further action.

The Iranian Revolution, 1978-1979

Indeed, the regime’s vacillation in 1977 would inspire the outbreak of a protest by seminary students in Qom in January 1978 that is conventionally understood to mark the beginning of the revolution. The demonstration had its origin in an inflammatory editorial in a government-controlled newspaper that accused Khomeini of engaging in immoral behavior. Concluding from the inconsistent response to the recent demonstrations in Tehran that they could protest without bringing the wrath of the state down on them, thousands of conservative seminary students in Qom reacted by taking part in a march organized to protest the attack on the Ayatollah. Furious about the insults to Khomeini, they demanded that the Shah’s government issue a formal apology and that it permit him to return to Iran. However, the religious students had in fact badly misjudged the regime’s willingness to tolerate dissent. This time, in sharp contrast to their more-measured handling of the protests in Tehran, the police used deadly force to break up the demonstrations.

A watershed event in the revolution, the violence set in motion a train of events that would result in the protests spreading rapidly throughout Iran. Key to that process was the deft exploitation of the Shiʿa custom of holding a commemorative service forty days following a person’s death. Shrewdly turning the memorial services into demonstrations against the regime, the religious protestors ensured that the state would respond to the services with deadly force, thus guaranteeing that a series of even bigger protests would occur in an even larger number of cities and towns forty days later. Still, even as the demonstrations grew in size and number, there was little sense at that time that the protests were going to produce a change of regime in Iran. Indeed, the situation began to stabilize in the early summer after a moderate ayatollah, Mohammad Shariatmadari (1906-1986), called for an end to the memorial demonstrations in order to prevent further bloodshed.

However, the lull proved to be very brief. Following a deadly arson attack on the Rex Theater in Abadan in August that resulted in the deaths of 377 people, the protests roared back to life with a vengeance. Widely, if incorrectly, blamed on SAVAK, the incident galvanized popular opinion against the Shah. As a result, the demonstrations that followed the cinema fire were different in kind and size from those that had occurred in the spring. Considerably larger and involving a far-broader and more- moderate cross section of the population, they reflected surging dissatisfaction with the Shah’s regime among the technocratic middle class.

The new round of protests culminated with a massive demonstration in Tehran on September 8. Known as Black Friday, the huge rally and the regime’s violent response to it marked the beginning of the end for the Shah. Though the government’s use of force that day resulted in the deaths of far fewer people than was commonly understood at the time, the violence ended any chance that the Shah could negotiate an agreement that permitted him to remain in power. Thereafter, all elements of Iranian society worked together to force the Shah out. Most notably, oil workers, bazaar merchants, bank employees, railroad engineers, and even the Shah’s own bureaucrats followed the violence on September 8 by launching a coordinated, nation-wide strike aimed at compelling him to step down.

Shutting down the Iranian economy, the strike left the Shah isolated and weak. Indeed, popular opposition was so strong by December that the regime felt it had no choice but to permit a massive opposition march in Tehran involving an estimated two million people. If the sheer size of the rally did not make adequately clear that the people of Iran wanted the Shah to go, the protestors’ approval of a series of resolutions demanding Khomeini’s return and the transformation of the country into an Islamic republic surely did. With desertions from the military rapidly rising, even the Shah began to grasp that his time as Iran’s ruler was coming to an end. In desperation, he asked Shapur Bakhtiar to serve as prime minister. On December 30, the latter agreed to do so, an action that resulted in his prompt expulsion from the National Front, but only on the condition that Mohammad Reza depart Iran immediately. The Shah dragged his feet for a time, but, on January 16, 1978, he and his family finally left the country. Just sixteen days later Khomeini returned to a hero’s welcome.

Khomeini’s Victory, 1979-1981

The departure of the Shah and Khomeini’s triumphal homecoming marked the end of the first phase of the Iranian Revolution and the beginning of its far-more divisive and complex second stage. The first phase had centered on the twin questions of whether the Shah would continue to rule and whether Iran would remain a monarchy. On those points, nearly all Iranians agreed. The second addressed a more fundamental and divisive issue: whether the country would have a democratic state controlled by the people or a fundamentally religious one dominated by the Shiʿa clergy.

That there was a second phase to the revolution came as a surprise to the moderates in the Freedom Movement and the National Front. Since all political parties save for the far-left ones agreed on a shared vision of the country as an Islamic republic, the moderates had assumed that the departure of the Shah marked the end of the revolution and the beginning of Iran’s transformation into a democratic state. They soon discovered, however, that their idea of an Islamic republic was decidedly different from the conception that Khomeini held. Where they interpreted the term to mean that Iran would be a Western-style, multiparty democracy that rested on Shiʿa values, Khomeini instead understood it to describe a state based on the concept of velayet-e faqeh that he had earlier developed, meaning that the clerics would hold the final say over political and social questions. The moderates were assuming that Iran would become a democratic state while Khomeini was calling for it to be, at root, a theocracy. Still, the leaders of the moderate parties were not particularly concerned about Khomeini’s undemocratic conception of what an Islamic republic entailed. Despite the Ayatollah’s enormous popularity, three-million people greeted him upon his return from exile, he was politically inexperienced and appeared to be both naive and fundamentally backward looking. The moderates were confident the Ayatollah would be no threat to their vision.

For a brief time, events seemed to reinforce this view. It is true that Khomeini forced Bakhtiar from office by declaring that he would not recognize the legitimacy of any figure associated with the Shah’s regime. However, faced with the popular and savvy liberal politicians, a seemingly chastened Khomeini agreed to establish a liberal provisional government and named Freedom Movement leader Mehdi Bazargan as its prime minister. He likewise accepted an arrangement in which the liberal parties held two-thirds of the cabinet posts in the new government, and critically, indicated that he no longer supported the idea of clerical rule. Accordingly, Bazargan and the other moderates turned their attention away from Khomeini following his return and focused on drafting a new constitution that would transform Iran into an Islamic republic dominated by secular political parties.

Events would soon make clear that the moderates had badly underestimated Khomeini. He was not, as they believed, either backward looking or naive. On the contrary, he was an unusually savvy and ruthless political figure, a skilled bureaucratic infighter and a charismatic leader who was capable of deftly manipulating public opinion. Shrewdly exploiting the rapidly shifting events of the revolution, he outmaneuvered the moderates over the next year and solidified his position as the dominant figure in Iran.

Khomeini began by quietly moving to strengthen his political position at the moderates’ expense. First, to divide his opponents and to prevent the emergence of a broad coalition against him, he struck a temporary alliance with the Tudeh and the Fedayin-e Khalq. He followed by establishing an increasingly powerful Islamist shadow state that paralleled Bazargan’s provisional government. Dominated by the ulema, this extraconstitutional body was composed of the Revolutionary Council, which passed laws and checked the authority of the Provisional Government, and the Central Committee, which coordinated the many local Islamist groups and militias that had emerged in late 1978 and early 1979 as the Shah’s state was imploding. Other moves soon followed. Over the course of the spring and early summer of 1979, Khomeini arrested and executed members of the Shah’s regime, assumed control over the judiciary, and, most critically, created a new Islamist paramilitary force called the Revolutionary Guard that he could use to break up the moderates’ political rallies. Undertaking all of these initiatives with consummate skill, Khomeini quickly solidified his political position. As a result, by the summer of 1979, he was ready to vie with the moderates for control of the revolution.

Khomeini focused his challenge on the constitution that the liberals had been writing. In June 1979, Bazargan and the moderates had completed a draft document based on the constitution of France’s Fifth Republic. While rooted in Shiʿa values, the new constitution was a strongly democratic document. It emphasized the rule of the people, eliminated the monarchy, and, importantly, assigned no meaningful power to the clergy. Satisfied with their work, the liberals were ready to present their draft to the people for formal ratification. Before they could do so, however, Khomeini’s supporters objected. Calling for a formal review before the document went to a public vote, they demanded that a council of prominent Shiʿa legal scholars, the Assembly of Experts, first examine and refine the draft. Stacked as it was with Khomeini’s supporters, the assembly unsurprisingly released a revised draft that was very different from the one that the moderates had produced. Far more theocratic than democratic in both structure and character, it drew explicitly on the concept of velayet-e faqeh to assign the clerics and, especially, Khomeini, enormous power. Emblematic of these changes was its declaration that the Ayatollah’s rule was divinely ordained and that he answered to none but God.

Still, Khomeini’s position and the passage of the revised constitution were far from assured. Many Iranians, perhaps even a majority, supported neither the Ayatollah nor his idea of clerical rule and instead backed moderate parties like the Freedom Movement and the National Front. Women were particularly vocal in expressing their opposition. Fearing the loss of the rights that they had gained since the White Revolution, they organized mass demonstrations to make clear their refusal to accept the imposition of new restrictions. Even many of the ulema opposed Khomeini. Most notably, a number of influential moderate clerics found his velayet-e faqeh idea to be troubling both because it lacked grounding in Shiʿa thought and because it broke with the religious scholars’ longstanding practice of acknowledging the government’s authority over secular matters in exchange for the state respecting the clergy’s dominance over religious and social affairs. In other words, Khomeini may have had enormous influence, but he also continued to face substantial opposition that limited his capacity to force through the radical changes enumerated in the revised draft of the constitution.

Ultimately, it was Khomeini’s deft exploitation of the Hostage Crisis with the US that assured both his victory in the struggle for power and the passage of the revised constitution. The conflict’s genesis lay in President Carter’s decision to permit the exiled Shah to travel to New York City for cancer treatment in October 1979. While unsuccessful, Mohammad Reza died in 1980, the president’s decision breathed life into an elaborate conspiracy theory in Iran that held that Washington was plotting to overthrow the revolution and to return the Shah to power. Such an action was wildly beyond the capabilities of even the powerful CIA, but it appeared entirely plausible to a people well aware of the agency’s role in overthrowing Mosaddegh in 1953. Attention quickly centered on the US embassy in Tehran. Fearing that the CIA was using it as a base from which to execute a change of government, just as it had in 1953, a group of Iranian students loyal to Khomeini seized it on November 4, 1979, and took a number of American State Department personnel hostage.

In two ways, the occupation of the embassy immediately and fundamentally altered the political balance in Iran. First, acute conflicts with a foreign power typically create a rally-round-the-flag effect in which patriotic sentiment and approval for a country’s leader rise rapidly. Such was certainly the case in Iran in 1979 and 1980. Even among people who opposed his ideas, support for Khomeini soared following the onset of the Hostage Crisis. Second, just as the conflict with the US enhanced Khomeini’s influence, so did it grievously damage the moderates’ political standing. Championing an essentially American-style system of constitutional government, Freedom Movement and National Front leaders suffered a sharp loss of support due to their association in the public imagination with the US.

Now in a commanding position, Khomeini shrewdly exploited the crisis. He kept his moderate rivals on their heels by preventing Bazargan from securing the release of the hostages, a move that prompted the prime minister to resign, and by steadily releasing copies of embassy files detailing meetings between them and American officials that, while unremarkable, appeared ominous in the hothouse atmosphere of revolutionary Iran. He also muted dissent by equating criticism of the government during a time of crisis with treason. Most importantly, he took advantage of the upsurge in patriotic sentiment that the Hostage Crisis produced to secure popular approval of the revised constitution in a referendum held in December 1979.

The passage of the constitution was a major political victory for Khomeini that solidified his control of Iran. Based on the ideas that he had outlined in Velayat-e Faqeh, the document established an Iranian state that bore only a superficial resemblance to the kind of government that people like Bazargan had envisioned. While the constitution did assign the power to conduct the routine business of state to a secular president and Majlis, it placed both firmly under the thumb of an interlocking apparatus of powerful, unelected institutions controlled by the clergy. At the top of that structure stood Khomeini: the supreme leader who officially ruled in the name of the Hidden Imam. The constitution accorded him vast powers. He held the authority to declare war, to grant amnesty, and to appoint many high-ranking officials including the commander of the military, the head of the Revolutionary Guard, and the chief justice. Just beneath him was an unelected, twelve-man body called the Guardian Council that had the power to determine who could, and who could not, stand for election to the Majlis and the presidency. More importantly, functioning like an Islamic supreme court, it could veto any legislation that it determined was contrary to Shiʿa principles as it defined them and thus held the unchecked power to determine the constitutionality of any law the Majlis passed.

The constitution did not merely vest enormous power in the religious scholars, but also created a complex, self-reinforcing structure that ensured that any effort to chip away at their authority was doomed to failure. To start with, the Supreme Leader was not popularly elected. Instead, the Assembly of Experts selected him from among their ranks. He, in turn, appointed half of the Guardian Council. The Majlis had the power to name the other six members, but it had to choose them from a list of candidates created by a body called the Supreme Judicial Council, which was itself composed of clerics appointed by the Supreme Leader. To complete the series of closed loops that Khomeini and his supporters had put in place to ensure perpetual clerical dominance, the Guardian Council enjoyed the power to vet the legal scholars on the Assembly of Experts who chose the Supreme Leader. In other words, since the top-ranked clerics effectively named each other to the key posts and councils in the government and since one of those bodies, the Guardian Council determined the constitutionality of all laws, only the clerics could meaningfully alter the structure of government or, critically, shift power from the ulema to the secular state. Unsurprisingly, they have vigorously resisted proposals to do so. Thus, despite periods of intense public dissatisfaction with religious rule, Iran’s government has remained essentially unchanged since 1979.

Khomeini claimed that the new constitution and the system of religious rule were firmly grounded in longstanding Shiʿa religious traditions. In fact, it was a radical innovation with almost no past precedent. The very core of it, the concept of velayet-e faqeh, had traditionally formed the legal justification for the clergy’s oversight of those who could not care for themselves such as widows, children, and the developmentally disabled, and had never before constituted the basis for a government. Likewise, the Shiʿa clergy had at no point in the past exercised political power and had instead been content to adhere to a form of separation of religion and state wherein the secular government dealt with the affairs of the world while the clergy held sway over religious and social matters. In other words, while carefully camouflaged in a conservative wrapper, the new state that Khomeini’s constitution established in fact constituted a fundamental break with past practice that vested nearly all power in the hands of the Ayatollah and his closest allies.

The passage of the new constitution marked the end of the second phase of the revolution and the culmination of Khomeini’s nearly total political victory. By the time the constitution had gone into effect, he had neutered the moderate parties that had been his most serious rivals and had assumed complete control of the government. It is true that he still had to deal with the leftist organizations with which he had entered into an alliance of convenience against the liberals in 1979. Likewise, he continued to face a spirited, if doomed, opposition from the first president of the republic, Abolhassan Banisadr (r. 1980-1981). By 1980, however, neither the president nor the leftists could overcome Khomeini’s commanding ideological and institutional position. Thus, despite a savage terror campaign on the part of the Mojahedin-e Khalq, he was able to brush aside his remaining political enemies and cement his total dominance of Iran, a reality made emphatically clear when Banisadr and the leader of the Mojahedin-e Khalq fled the country together aboard a commandeered jet in July 1981. The Iranian Revolution, or perhaps more properly, the Islamic Revolution, was over.

The Transformation of Iranian Society

Khomeini’s political victory had enormous ramifications for Iran. Most obviously, it permitted the Ayatollah and his supporters to impose a sweeping Islamist social revolution on the country. They wasted no time in doing so. The new government immediately banned alcohol and most Western movies, quickly closed newspapers that did not hew to the official line, compelled schoolteachers to adopt a stilted curriculum developed by the state, launched a violent campaign to Islamicize the universities, and reimposed shariʿa law, including traditional criminal penalties such as flogging. No group felt the effects of the Khomeinist social revolution more acutely than did women. The regime required them to veil, revoked the rights they had received under the Family Protection Law, discouraged them from wearing Western clothing, forced them from the judiciary and teaching, reimposed gender segregation, and even revived practices such as child marriage. Implemented at breakneck speed, the changes that Khomeini had imposed were far reaching and constituted a true social revolution that transformed Iran into a visibly different country than it had been just a few years earlier.

Unsurprisingly, the Khomeinist social revolution was far from universally popular. While the Ayatollah’s reform program received a warm reception among rural Iranians and shantytown dwellers, it faced staunch opposition among members of the technocratic middle class who were bitterly disappointed that the overthrow of the Shah had resulted not in a genuinely representative government but instead in a state that was even more autocratic than the one it had replaced. In light of the new order’s willingness to make liberal use of brute force against any protests, however, there was little that they could do to protest Khomeini’s regime. Defeated, the Westernized middle class thereafter adopted a cynical view of the government that saw it as an alien and even hostile entity that they had to endure so long as they remained in Iran. Not all of them chose to do so. Weary of the repression they faced at home, more than one million members of the middle class voted with their feet in the years after the revolution and, at great economic cost to Iran, took their considerable education, skills, and entrepreneurial abilities with them to the West in search of a better life and greater freedom.

Conclusion

The Iranian Revolution was yet another of the watershed events that the Middle East experienced during the tumultuous twentieth century. It greatly weakened America’s position in the region, stoked Sunni-Shiʿa conflict, and, most importantly, announced the arrival of Islamism as a major political force in the Muslim world. It was not, however, the only major event to occur in the region in 1979. Indeed, while it was clearly the most important, it was but one of a series of cataclysmic changes that would, collectively, effect a fundamental restructuring of the Middle East that year. It is to these events and to their complex genesis that we will now turn.