ShareThisIran's Islamic Revolution took place on Feb. 11, 1979. The country's monarch, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, missed it. He had gone abroad in mid-January promising that, when he returned, he would only reign -- not govern.
That wasn't good enough for the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeni, then living in exile in France. On Feb. 1, he flew a chartered jet back to Iran where he was greeted by millions of supporters, many of whom believed he was, quite literally, the messiah, the "hidden imam" awaited by the Shia faithful for centuries. Less than two weeks later, the Shah's government collapsed.
I was present at the creation, to borrow a phrase from Dean Acheson, secretary of state to President Harry Truman. Acheson, of course, was speaking of the origins of the Cold War. I am speaking of the origins of the War Against the West that was sparked by the Islamic Revolution and which continues to this day with no resolution in sight.
I was a young foreign correspondent, not wise to the ways of the Middle East. But I knew this about revolutions: Most fail. The American Revolution is the great exception. It established a new nation based on the "self-evident" truths that those who govern require the consent of the governed; and that no government can legitimately deprive its citizens of rights endowed by "their Creator."
Today, brave Iranians are protesting because they, too, want to choose their leaders and have those leaders respect their unalienable rights.
Iran's rulers have never lacked for apologists in the West. As Patrick Clawson and Michael Rubin note in "Eternal Iran," in the years immediately preceding Iran's revolution, Khomeini "changed traditional Shiite interpretations to make them revolutionary rather than quietist, to support the oppressed masses (the mostazafin) instead of the meek. This marriage of Third Worldism with Islam was the potent mixture that let clerical activists take charge of the opposition to the shah."
Many of my fellow reporters danced at that wedding. On Feb. 12, 1979, Time magazine reported: "Those who know (Khomeini) expect that eventually he will settle in the Shiite holy city of Qum and resume a life of teaching and prayer. ... Khomeini believes that Iran should become a parliamentary democracy, with several political parties."
A New York Times editorial predicted the ayatollah would provide "a desperately needed model of humane governance for a third-world country."
Prominent politicians and diplomats were equally clueless. President Jimmy Carter's U.N. ambassador, Andrew Young, called Khomeini "some kind of saint." William Sullivan, the U.S. ambassador in Tehran, compared Khomeini to Gandhi.
I did not read the revolution as they did. It seemed to me unlikely that the moderates would prevail over the radicals, or that the true believers would be patient for long with those they regarded as apostates.
I remember asking an Iranian journalist if he really thought the mullahs would permit criticism by secular types like him, and whether the kids now carrying AK-47s would quietly return to schools, factories and farms. He waved away my questions but I bet doubt crept up on him before the authorities shut down his newspaper and student supporters of Khomeini seized the U.S. embassy.
In the wider "Muslim world" there were many who understood exactly what was happening. Steve Coll writes in "Ghost Wars" that though Khomeni was a Shia, and therefore "anathema to many conservative Sunni Islamists ... his audacious achievements inspired Muslims everywhere."
I would argue that beyond inspiration, there was rivalry: Iran was being transformed into the first, modern jihadi state. Where was the Sunni equivalent? The seeds of a non-state, Sunni, jihadi/terrorist movement were soon planted. Watered with oil wealth, they would sprout from the deserts as al Qaeda a few years later.
The Shah was a despot. But Iran's ruling mullahs have been far more oppressive and lethal. Iranians by the tens of thousands have been putting their lives on the line, waging a revolution against the Islamic Revolution.
For more than three decades, I've hoped that one day I'd be able to return to an Iran that was not ruled by theocrats and thugs. That's still possible -- no thanks to Western leaders who so far have displayed neither courage nor convictions.
(Clifford D. May is president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on terrorism. E-mail him at cliff(at)defenddemocracy.org)
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