Iran: Before and After the Revolution

The most recent Iranian revolution brought down not only the Shah of Iran, but the president of the United States. It is generally believed that Jimmy Carter was not reelected because of his inability to obtain release of the hostages taken under order of Khomeini. This was a powerful beginning. It represented a tremendous break with the modern development of Iranian society, with its Westernization and linkage with the United States. The intention in the following pages is to compare and contrast the Iran of the Pahlavi regime and the Iran of the Islamic Republic.

Interestingly enough, the birth of the Pahlavi dynasty is associated with European politics and the conflict between the West and communism. The West has long had an influence on what happens in the Middle East. The startingpoint was an agreement between the British and the Persians which recognized an independent Iran. However, it also provided for British dominance of the region, which caused the Iranian Parliament to reject the agreement. This left the country somewhat in chaos, with incursions from the north by Bolshevik forces. Ultimately, however, neither communist nor Western imperialist was to win out. What happened was that one of the leaders of an oldstyle Cossack brigade took control of the government. This man was Reza Khan. Eventually he named himself shah, deposing the previous shah, and established what became the P

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r its failure to respond to the needs of the people. The shah did much to destroy his own image with his people. It is primarily his selfindulgence and his cruelty, exercised through the savak, that destroyed his image with the Iranian population. Interestingly enough, however, Miller (1996) made the important point that it was actually the shah's leniency that allowed the revolution to succeed. Although he did respond to the rioting of the late 1970s with martial law, the shah controlled the generals, not allowing them to respond aggressively. Miller implied that he might have been able to reverse the outcome of the revolution had he been willing to be as brutally repressive as Syrian President Hafiz alAssad in the early 1980s. After the Revolution One of the immediate repercussions of the Iranian revolution was upheaval in the Middle East. This not only affected Saudi Arabia and other conservative regimes seeking to maintain their power. It also impacted more secular regimes like Iraq and Syria. Iran and Iran had long been in conflict. The roots of the conflict were centuries old, not attributable to either the shah or the ayatollah. Instead, they began with the Persian and Ottoman Empires. In the modern era, th
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Approximate Word count = 2513
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)

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