McNair Paper Number 48 Chapter 2, January 1996
Both the Shah and his father came to power by way of military coups, thus the Shah's main pillar of support was the armed forces,(Note 1) which he directly supervised.(Note 2) The Shah's hold on the armed forces was based in his intense personal supervision of military affairs to the extent that he "insisted that the commanders of the army, navy, and air force report to him separately rather than act jointly."(Note 3) His compartmentation of the military was based, ironically, on fears of a military coup and led him to distrust his own hand-picked generals(Note 4) to the extent that "the shah trusted almost no one and assumed disloyalty even among his closest officers."(Note 5) Despite the Shah's paranoia, the military assumed even more importance with the passage of time and became his most important pillar, upon which his "survival critically depended."(Note 6)
During the Second World War, Muhammad Reza Shah replaced his father, Reza Shah, who abdicated and left Iran on a British ship.(Note 7) Following the end of the war, Muhammad Reza Shah was powerless to expel Soviet troops in the Kurdish and Azeri regions of Iran and had to rely on an ultimatum by President Truman to accomplish this task. When the popularly elected Muhammad Mossadegh was deposed by the United States and Britain the early 1950s, Reza Shah again came to power. Because he came to power through force, he understood that he needed force to maintain his position.
However, because he had twice attained his position with tacit U.S. and British approval, he had the reputation of being an American lackey incapable of acting without the approval of his American sponsors. Over the decades, the Shah's economic and social policies eventually led to development on
the one hand and unrest on the other. In the early 1960s, he introduced a "White Revolution" to redistribute the land, nationalize the forests, sell government industries, form a literacy corps and enact new electoral laws.(Note 8) Protests against these reforms were suppressed with military force. Among the protestors was a cleric, Ayatollah Ruhollah Mussavi Khomeini, who was imprisoned and later exiled. Ironically, by according Ayatollah Khomeini this notoriety, the Shah elevated the cleric to a status beyond that which he would have normally enjoyed and that would later contribute to the downfall of the monarchy.
Another reform undertaken by the Shah was the establishment of a single political party, the Resurgence Party (although he nominally allowed two parties and later one party, his goal was the same). By means of the Resurgence Party, the Shah hoped to exercise a degree of control over the bazaaris (merchants) and the ulama (religious scholars), over whom he had little influence. Instead of drawing them to him, it in fact had the opposite effect, alienating them further from the monarchy. During the Shah's last days, this alliance of bazaaris and ulama would prove to be an effective infrastructure for disseminating anti-imperial information and instructions.
In the long run, the Shah's economic policies had an uneven effect on the country. In spite of healthy oil revenues, the Shah became widely unpopular because of corruption, inflation, profligate spending (especially on advanced military hardware), and blatantly uneven distribution of the wealth. He further alienated himself from the populace by his reliance on foreign technicians and military advisors to supervise the training of his military and the upgrading and implementation of his modern weapons systems. Throughout this time, his power was based upon the allegiance of his armed forces.
The Shah ensured loyalty to himself by applying the divide-and-rule principle among his generals, accomplished by exacerbating intense personal rivalries among his generals and placing "personal enemies alternately in the chain of command" to preclude the possibility of a coup.(Note 9) Although he was never ousted by a military coup, his preventive measures precluded effective communications within the branches of the armed forces, leading to their utter psychological dependence upon him for any type of decision. This was evident not only in the military but also in the rest of society as well, especially in the social and political arenas. The Shah had so centered Iranian society upon himself that, without him, there was no functioning military, political, or governing system to run the country. The upper echelon of the officer corps was loyal to the monarch, who personally approved the promotion of all officers above the rank of major,(Note 10) any transfers above the rank of second lieutenant from one branch of the armed services to another, and the take-off or landing of any military plane.(Note 11)
Toward the latter part of the 1970s, many junior officers who had not been in the military system long enough to undergo the same level of scrutiny as their superiors, were judged to be less politically reliable because of their university backgrounds. At the universities, these junior officers had been exposed to the various anti-Shah factions (leftist and Islamic) that were prevalent in the late 1970s.(Note 12)
In terms of military capability, the Iranian armed forces had been seasoned with recent combat experience in Oman, where over 35,000 troops had assisted in the suppression of a Communist-supported rebellion in the southern region of Dhofar.(Note 13) During his reign, the Shah increased defense expenditures, expanding the number of personnel in uniform as he purchased advanced weaponry, primarily from the United States and Britain. The total number of personnel in uniform was 413,000 in 1978 (up from 181,000 in 1971). The armed forces included 285,000 in the army, comprising three armored divisions, three infantry divisions and four independent brigades (up from 150,000 in 1971 with the same structure). According to New York Times correspondent Drew Middleton, the Iranian Army had "the most advanced arms of any Asian country east of Israel," with 1,870 tanks (up from 960 tanks in 1971 and compared to 2,500 NATO tanks in Central Europe). The army was assessed to be "the most powerful for its size in Asia," according to Middleton's citation of American and British advisors. There were 28,000 in the navy, which had three destroyers and three frigates (up from 9,000 with one destroyer and one frigate in 1971). There were 100,000 in the air force with 459 combat aircraft (Israel had only 84 more) in 23 fighter squadrons (up from 22,000 with 140 combat aircraft in seven fighter squadrons).
The advanced level of military technology was especially evident in the Iranian Air Force, the Shah's favorite service and therefore the recipient of a formidable arsenal of state-of- the-art weaponry, which included over 200 F-4's and approximately 60 F-14's, with at least 20 more F-14's and 160 new F-16's to be delivered. At that time, these airframes were among the most advanced (and therefore coveted) in the non-Soviet world's air forces. The Iranian military was on the whole the largest in the region (only Egypt had a larger standing army and only Israel had more combat aircraft)(Note 14) and was geared toward defense from external attack. Because of longstanding concerns about Soviet and Iraqi intentions toward Iran, the Shah desired to ensure that Iran had the necessary means to deter any outside power with designs upon Iran. In addition, this advanced weaponry was a result of many years of expenditures that consumed a great part of Iran's national income to fuel the Shah's regional ambitions.(Note 15)
The Shah, like those who were to come after him, believed that Iran, by virtue of its size, its population, its resources, its military, and its armaments, should occupy the foremost position of power in the Persian Gulf. Through his efforts, the Shah "sought to make the Iranian military the dominant force in the Gulf and . . . the purchase of arms and military technology ran at more than $4 billion per annum."(Note 16) In spite of its advanced state of readiness in terms of weapons, size, and training, the military had no well-developed sense of institutional identity because of the Shah's idiosyncratic compartmentalization of the armed forces and his divide-and-rule policies.(Note 17) For this reason, the armed forces, although militarily proficient, were lacking any independent decisionmaking capability, sense of identity, or ability to coordinate among themselves. These factors would weigh heavily against them during the fall of the monarchy.
The Shah's government provoked a furor when it published an article through the government-controlled press on January 7, 1978, that ridiculed Ayatollah Khomeini. Two days later, a religious demonstration and march took place in Qum. The armed response left a number of demonstrators dead, giving the revolution impetus to begin in earnest.(Note 18)
From that point on, a series of demonstrations took place at 40-day intervals until the Shah's departure (in Shi'a Islam, a religious ceremony takes place for 40 days after a death). In the Iranian case, confrontations between demonstrators and security forces led to deaths, which were then commemorated on the 40th day. This in turn led to another demonstration, which resulted in casualties and started the process over again.(Note 19)
The 40th day after the Qum incident was February 18. Although religious leaders had called for peaceful strikes and worship, demonstrators in Tabriz took over the city for about 36 hours, attacking banks, liquor stores, and any other establishment that did not observe the strike. The Shah responded with military force, which led to a number of deaths, injuries, and arrests. This incident was the largest public protest in Iran since 1963 and placed Iran irrevocably on the road to revolution.(Note 20)
Although the commemorations for the dead that took place every 40 days led to more deaths and therefore more commemorations, there were protests and demonstrations in between the 40-day periods as well. During 1978, throughout Iran, demonstrations took place in over 55 cities, leading to governmental use of force to quell the uprisings, which in turn led to more unrest.(Note 21)
Cracks in the seemingly unassailable structure appeared in May of 1978, when two former Iranian Army officers, Lieutenant Mehrdad Pakzad and Captain Hamzeh Farahati, disclosed at a press conference in London that many in the military did "not believe in the regime at all,"(Note 22) and that the Iranian armed forces were rife with widespread discontent. They also alleged that they had not been allowed to resign their commissions and had eventually been imprisoned and tortured for "reading Marxist books,"(Note 23) a charge they denied.
On August 19, over 400 people were burned to death in the Rex Movie Theater in Abadan. Although security forces later arrested 10 people and extracted confessions from five of them, the government was blamed for the slow fire department response and the malfunctioning of its equipment. It did not help that the police had prevented rescue attempts. The 10,000 people who attended the funeral forced security and municipal officials to leave.
The most brutal repression of demonstrators occurred on September 8, which became known as "Black Friday." Although martial law was declared the day before, the government did not publicize the announcement. On the morning of September 8, thousands gathered in Tehran's Jaleh Square for a religious demonstration. The soldiers opened fire upon the crowd when it refused to obey the order to disperse. Tehran was in a state of chaos for the rest of the day. Although conflicting accounts exist regarding the number of casualties, several hundred persons were killed and many more were wounded during the government's raw use of military force to quell civil unrest. At that moment, the revolution took a more violent path from which it would not return.(Note 24)
In September 1978, Ayatollah Khomeini gave a speech coinciding with the end of Ramadan in which he proactively exhorted the Iranian armed forces to throw off the Shah's "yoke of slavery and humiliation" to join with their brothers.(Note 25) During October, Ayatollah Khomeini denounced elements of the Iranian Army, stating that they were
in reality under American command--it is even led at the upper echelons by American advisers and technicians. . . . But there have already been, among officers and soldiers, evident signs of trouble as the popular revolt mounts.(Note 26)
While this was true, these advisors and technicians neither led it nor were in any situation to exercise command over it. Although the statement was false, Khomeini played upon current sentiment to alienate the members of the armed forces from each other (within) and from society as a whole (without). By doing so, he hoped to paint them as an entity whose interests were inimical to the best interests of Iranian society. As he drove a wedge between the populace and the already unpopular military, he also raised doubts in younger members of the military who were not part of the established power structure or senior leadership, doubts as to who they were or why they were serving in such an institution. Having cast these seeds of self-doubt into the fertile ground of an entity so lacking in a sense of self-identity, he would later be able to give them a sense of belonging by welcoming them back into the fold as members of the new order.