6

EXCLUSIONARY POLITICS AND THE REVOLUTIONARY END

IN MOST NARRATIVES of Iranian history, the last shah is often described as a tragic figure—a despot so riddled with megalomania and obsessed with Western modernity that a mass revolution was fait accompli. The evidence shown in the previous chapter revealed an interesting twist in this popular characterization: the Pahlavi regime did not become extremely personalistic and exclusionary until after outlasting the domestic conflict of the early 1950s. The ease by which the shah could not only endure those troubles but also destroy opposition with American backing helped spawn the coalitional tendency toward narrowing that, as historians know well, detached the Pahlavi leadership from societal interests and paved the way for the revolutionary end. Only recently have newer biographies of the shah acknowledged that only after being restored to power did he and other officials begin justifying repressive absolutism as the “natural order” of things.¹

The institutions created after such coalitional narrowing manifest in the White Revolution, an ambitious plan to modernize Iran. Such policies did great economic and political damage to traditional sectors of support that still stood with the Pahlavi regime, such as landowners and ʿulama. Worse, they failed to mobilize the beneficiaries of economic development, such as newly landed farmers, to replace those lost sources of traditional loyalty. Provisions of patronage and protection on a collective scale were nonexistent, as the regime relied upon few classes or groups within society beyond a small stratum of dependent elites. It also lacked constructive methods of dealing with social resistance apart from violence. This spelled trouble in 1978, when small antiregime demonstrations began in the context of a mild recession. These protests were neither revolutionary nor armed, but the state lacked the institutional ability to neutralize such dissent through peaceful means. Not only could opposition leaders, from ideologues and students to bazaar merchants and the ʿulama, recruit from an enormous audience of discontent citizens, but the regime also could not negotiate with these opponents for peace, for it lacked the credibility necessary to offer assuaging reforms. Revolutionary crowds paralyzed the country despite the monarchy deploying repressive violence. In the end, not even American support could prevent the shah from fleeing the country for the last time.

THE WHITE REVOLUTION OF 1963

By 1960, another economic downturn had hit Iran. Serious balance-of-payments deficits arose, as rising import costs and other expenditures outpaced oil revenues. Austerity measures checked inflation but depressed employment and wage levels, giving rise to new protests. Unexpectedly loud demonstrations broke out in response to the orchestrated 1960 Majles elections, which landed elites dominated.2 In May 1961, thousands of teachers launched a strike to demand higher salaries, to which the police responded sternly. A subsequent rally over the economic situation attracted seventy thousand people, including many old National Front activists.³ In January 1962, student riots at Tehran University elicited army intervention.

The specter of urban unrest returning compelled the shah to consider unprecedented economic and political reforms. The clearest signal was promoting ʿAli Amini to the premiership after the May 1961 teachers’ strike. Unlike others in the shah’s covey, Amini had ascended the ministerial ranks as a more independent operator. His appointment coincided with the recognition that the state, after a decade of recovery, could now engineer policies on a national scale without relying upon societal intermediaries. Its swelling bureaucracy had become one of the leading sources of employment for educated Iranians. By the late 1950s, over two hundred thousand worked for the public sector, with the majority having been hired in the previous decade.4 However, Amini barely lasted a year. His anticorruption investigations came close to touching the shah himself, while efforts to trim military spending, which in 1961 consumed more than a quarter of the budget, met terminal resistance. Still, Amini’s stewardship paved the way for new policies, in particular land reform, which would become the basis of the modernization program dubbed the “White Revolution.” In January 1963, the shah announced this eponymous national program, ratifying it in a hasty referendum that returned nearly six million votes in favor and just 4,115 negating.⁵ The White Revolution encompassed a comprehensive package of land reforms, industrialization, and enfranchisement, supplemented by new social and educational provisions.

From the start, the White Revolution was created not in collaboration but in opposition to Iranian society, in particular the regime’s old coalitional trifecta—the landlords, bazaar, and clergy. For the shah and his mandarins, the regime was on a manichean mission to enlighten a backward nation, and any who opposed it were antediluvian reactionaries. This was an ambitious leap toward a “Great Civilization,” one that would make Iran not only a progressive example for the rest of the Middle East but also the industrial envy of the West.⁶ Such a campaign was influenced by the shah’s American exposure. During his many visits to the United States, he had marveled at the mechanized plants, bourgeois consumption, and sprawling cities that seemed like desiderata of modernization. That prosperity came before democracy was never questioned. Despite the waning number of absolutist monarchies left in the world, the shah argued Iran was a cultural exception whose people would always accord him “both the right and the obligation” to rule.⁷ The long tenure of Prime Minister Amir ʿAbbas Hoveyda, whose premiership spanned 1965–77, provided the continuity to implement these ideals.

Propelling such exclusionary state-building were the intertwined impetuses of oil wealth and U. S. support. During the period from 1961 to 1972, Iran weaned itself off American economic assistance. Figure 6.1 depicts this transition, with U. S. foreign aid dropping from $147 million in 1961 to virtually zero by 1972, whereas oil revenues increased from $283 million to nearly $1.6 billion. By the early 1970s, income from gas and petrochemical production plus older royalties from the controlling Anglo-American consortium constituted over half of national revenues.⁸ Other kinds of aid were scaled down as well. With fiscal grants gone, economic assistance through technical support and targeted loans stopped altogether in 1967. Military support continued through training and advisory functions, but by the mid-1960s the shah was expected to purchase arms outright.9 At the same time, the availability of oil rents reduced incentives to improve domestic revenues through tax collection. A 1967 survey found that 25 percent of all tax income returns were missing due to evasion and noncompliance, a trend that worsened over the next decade.¹⁰

FIGURE 6.1   U.S. foreign aid and oil revenues in Iran, 1961–1972

Note: U. S. foreign aid includes economic and military components. Most economic assistance ended in 1967.

Sources: Bharier (1971); USAID (serial); Central Bank of Iran (serial)

Critically, the vast majority of Iran’s rentier wealth accumulated a decade after the White Revolution began reconfiguring society. Hydrocarbon wealth amplified coalitional narrowing into institutional form but did not create it. The 1973 oil embargo by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), which Iran helped establish in 1960, brought hydrocarbon windfalls to a new high. Figure 6.2 plots out the resulting wave of new expenditures. Gross fixed capital formation, a useful indicator for state investment into the domestic economy, slowly rose from $1 billion to $3 billion annually throughout the 1960s before reaching $8 billion in 1973 and peaking at $37 billion in 1977. The GDP registered a similar breakneck pace, jumping from $4.7 billion in 1963 to over $70 billion in 1977. However, such mammoth spending resulted in excess liquidity and hyperinflation. Inflation averaged over 12 percent from 1973 to 1976 and crested at 27 percent in 1977.11

FIGURE 6.2   Iranian state investment and economic growth, 1963–1978

Sources: Bharier (1971); World Bank (serial); Central Bank of Iran (serial).

The other catalyst for Iranian state-building was the United States, as Iran remained a client even as it gained fiscal independence. The 1958 destruction of the Iraqi monarchy had shocked American diplomats and exposed Britain’s retreating imperial shadow. The loss of that British client regime helped patch up what Anglo-American tensions remained from the 1956 Suez Crisis and hastened discussions on how to contain the dual threats of Soviet communism and Arab Nationalism.12 Those perceived threats underlay the Kennedy White House’s insistence for the shah to implement land reforms, even to the point of recommending the appointment of Amini.¹³ Modernization theory was at work, as some U.S. analysts were convinced that rural uprisings represented the greatest menace to Iran’s stability—a strange conclusion given that leftist and nationalist movements drew upon the urban middle sector.¹⁴ However, such pressures upon the shah for reform emphasized economic change, not democratization. Iran’s geopolitical value as a barrier against Soviet advancement and pro-Western energy supplier required an authoritarian client regime at its helm. Thus the United States remonstrated little when the government stamped out public protests throughout the early 1960s, reinstated martial law, and rigged the 1963 Majles elections.¹⁵

The Johnson administration more steadily backed Pahlavi rule, and in return the shah was among the staunchest non-Western leaders in backing the Vietnam War. The regime continued to give concessions to the United States on its home soil. A seminal example was the Status-of-Forces Agreement (SOFA) signed in October 1964, which granted U.S. military personnel in Iran immunity for all crimes.¹⁶ It was the most generous SOFA inked with any U.S. ally and incendiary for Iranians who remembered past Western occupations. Another concession was allowing the CIA to operate intelligence stations monitoring Soviet missile activities, as well as granting overflight and landing rights for its spy planes. The regime was also careful to maintain controlled but consistent ties with Moscow, characterized by occasional arms purchases and energy deals. It exchanged crude oil with Soviet bloc states in Europe, such as Czechoslovakia, in return for assistance in creating industrial plants.17 Still, no other single country save the United States preoccupied the Iranian ruling elite. The prevailing belief was that much like in 1953, America would rescue the monarchy if another crisis exploded—such was Iran’s importance. Between the U.S. Embassy, MAAG officers, visiting delegates, private contacts, and policy principals in Washington, the shah and his advisers constantly interacted with agents of American power.

LAND REFORM: DISSOLVING RURAL ARISTOCRACY

Large-scale land reforms under the White Revolution began with laudable intentions. By the late 1950s, Iran was over two-thirds rural and counted some fifty thousand permanent villages. Of these, nearly ten thousand belonged to just 2,250 absentee notables, 6,885 were held by the ʿulama as part of their vaqf endowments, and 2,167 had belonged to the Pahlavi monarchy itself as Crown Lands.¹⁸ Premier ʿAli Amini and his Minister of Agriculture, Hasan Arsanjani, advocated the redistribution of these lands to downtrodden tenants. Neither the communists nor the National Front had garnered much support outside cities, and empowered peasants could appreciate the shah for emancipating them from feudal obligations. In January 1963, Arsanjani convened a peasant congress in Tehran to discuss these plans, drawing over 4,200 rural delegates.¹⁹

Reforms began with a curt mandate: no landlord could own more than one village. Through rentals and exchanges, the state reallocated thousands of deeds and properties to landless tenants. Smaller landowners owning less than a village were targeted later on. By March 1963, the state had redistributed two thousand villages in part or whole to the rural underclass, creating over 120,000 new peasant landowners.²⁰ After a decade, the government trumpeted the program as complete. In total, 787,000 new farming households had been created due to the receipt of new estates.21 In addition to land grants, the government created agricultural cooperatives to provide financial credit and logistical support to small cultivators and families. Other productive investments included mechanization, irrigation, and additional capital inputs.²² Finally, it conceived new programs to enhance education, improve health care, and manage water resources in peripheral regions. The Literacy Corps was one such initiative, bringing educational access to villages that had seldom, if ever, received services from the government.²³

However, while these schemes indeed reconfigured property relations, they also began dismantling the regime’s constituency of large landowners. Many rural notables were shocked at the indiscriminate nature of the program, but the shah brooked no resistance. Martial law under Amini’s premiership allowed land reform proposals to come into effect, since the landlord-dominated Majles had been suspended. The shah vilified complaints from provincial magnates, calling many absentee landlords “black reactionaries” to his White Revolution.²⁴ Further hardline tactics included the removal of local bailiffs in some areas to encourage peasant mutinies, while ignoring landowner complaints of lawlessness. That was worthy of note since the United States had helped create the rural gendarmerie, which numbered thirty-five thousand in 1966 and was supposed to keep order in the countryside.²⁵ This heavy-handed approach differed from the way the monarchy released its own Crown Lands. It gave some villages to friends and supporters, while the rest was sold at market rates to cultivators, entrepreneurs, and investors, resulting in massive profits.²⁶

Most large landlords were not reduced to penury, although they did suffer significant losses. For instance, the government purchased many estates at a price between 100 to 180 times their annual tax contributions; however, so many landowners had grown accustomed to underpaying their taxes with state complicity that this meant substantial loss of wealth.²⁷ Still, many were able to leverage their social capital to partner with new industrialization ventures, giving their land not to tenants but public enterprises and thus enriching themselves further as agents of the state. Many re-created their aristocratic lifestyles in cities, sinking much of their savings into property speculation and other fields of profit. Through various connections, many elites still held onto some rural properties well into the 1970s. The overall effect was the political destruction of this dominant stratum. The loss of feudal tenure laws meant the extermination of collective status. Another indicator was that their representation in the Majles dropped to less than a quarter by the late 1960s and continued diminishing afterward.28 What further sped this demotion was the regime’s increasing reliance upon official parties to convey the spirit of popular participation in parliament, whereas in the past most landlords had run as independents.

Land reallocation, however, did not replace the old class of barons with a new political surrogate. The formulation of rural initiatives had been technocratic, with one of the few opportunities of popular input being the one-sided referendum for the White Revolution. As a result, while the regime imagined it had created a generation of patriotic yeomen with unfettered mobility, in reality it failed to mobilize new cultivators into any unified organization that could provide information and support to the monarchy. The incoherent results of rural reforms speak to this. First, land programs reinforced old patterns of insecurity.²⁹ Redistribution reproduced inequality at the local level by awarding differently sized plots to tenants based upon preexisting cultivation rights. Thus sharecropper families, nearly one-third of the rural populace, stayed landless. “It makes no difference to the peasant whether his landlord owns one village or 600 villages; he will still have to pay rent and be at the landlord’s mercy.”³⁰ Another third received parcels less than two hectares, far less than the eight to ten needed for household subsistence. Moreover, of the 1.3 million landowners expropriated, the majority were petty landlords rather than titled notables; for them, the loss of even small estates was impoverishing.³¹

Second, the regime showed little commitment to its initial dream of cultivating a nation of patriotic yeoman. The credit-based agricultural cooperatives languished out of neglect; they shrank from 8,400 to 2,800 by the late 1960s due to inadequate managerial expertise and technical resources. Instead, planning agencies began commercialization in hopes of maximizing the agrarian sector’s export potential.32 The state collaborated with private partners to establish eight quasi-public agribusinesses, ninety-three farming corporations, and thirty-nine new production cooperatives. They garnered epic infusions of government subsidies, long-term credit, and low-interest loans; per hectare, they received fourteen times the financial assistance than what agricultural cooperatives gave to farmers.³³ Most of all, collectivized agriculture required the reallocation of plots already earmarked to peasants and sacrificed food production in favor of cash crops. That, plus rising consumption, turned Iran into a net food importer in 1974. Further, by reducing demand for tenant labor, industrial farming spurred the migration of over two million rural poor to cities, where they often faced greater hardships in shantytowns.³⁴

All this underscores the Pahlavi leadership’s failure to mobilize reform beneficiaries into political bulwarks. Even excepting rural migrants and peasant families displaced by agribusinesses, there were still hundreds of thousands of newly landed farmers who gained under the White Revolution. They were a new phenomenon—a petty bourgeoisie who could now market and develop their own goods with state support.³⁵ Moreover, the shah could also claim to have overseen the creation of better roads, more electricity, and new schools. However, material gains did not automatically translate into political support; a more systemized understanding of what was required for continued patronage was necessary. The regime created no organizational entity to do this—no peasant union, provincial congress, or other institution that could recruit local communities to act as its spokesman or replace the landlords displaced in the Majles with new representatives. Instead, it expected that its anemic multiparty framework would appeal to the rural masses despite that neither the Melliyun nor the “opposition” Mardom parties had much of any grassroots presence in these areas.

When voter apathy resulted in these parties’ middling performances in the rigged 1960 elections, regime officials rallied to another party—Iran-Novin (New Iran). Proposed years earlier by Hassan Ali Mansur, a ministerial veteran and another Pahlavi stalwart, New Iran began from a dowreh of technocrats and economists.36 With royal backing, the new party reaped an overwhelming majority in the 1963 Majles elections and again in 1967 and 1971. Following Mansur’s assassination in 1965, Prime Minister Hoveyda became party leader, and New Iran replaced the Melliyun party as the “loyalist” party.

However, New Iran was little better in creating a popular following below the elite level. More so than its predecessors, it had an organizational infrastructure that connected local councils and regional committees to a national leadership. Still, it had little programming in rural areas. Though it claimed hundreds of thousands of rural members, most were affiliated by way of membership in agricultural cooperatives, which were required by law to associate with the party.³⁷ New Iran candidates won Majles elections in these districts because the party could manipulate the electoral process, meaning rural affiliates still had little voice in selecting their representatives. The senior ranks of the national leadership were filled with well-known politicians or aspiring ministers who sought to advance their own careers rather than promote policy debates and national initiatives.³⁸ As a result, political life in most villages remained moribund, something that fit with the shah’s mentality: he feared that a politicized farming class could betray him if led by a subversive lieutenant, a major reason why he dismissed the popular Arsanjani after the 1963 peasant congress.³⁹ Despite its large size, the peasantry would remain on the margins, even throughout the Iranian Revolution. Fears of a rural insurrection came to naught; but so too was wasted the opportunity for a narrowing dictatorship to acquire and mobilize a new political base.

INDUSTRIALIZATION: SUFFOCATING THE BAZAAR

Urban industrialization pursued the same agenda as land reform: make Iran an economic powerhouse no matter the cost to the regime’s old allies, in this case the bazaar. Much as land reforms brought propertied farmers into existence, the White Revolution’s state-invested capitalism in the cities would create a new class of wage earners distinctive from preexisting forces. And yet, much like its inaction in rural areas, the state did little to organize industrial labor to replace the bazaar proprietors it was slowly alienating.

Following the template of import-substitute industrialization (ISI), state policies implemented during the 1960s prioritized light enterprises and national commerce as staging grounds for later advanced production. Early returns were impressive, with nonoil sectors like textiles and commodities driving an over 50 percent increase in industrial output from 1963 to 1966 alone.40 Banking and other financial services grew to accommodate new demands for capital and credit. In this context, the number of industrial firms employing ten or more workers jumped from 1,581 in 1960 to 6,626 in 1972, while industrial employment rose from about 1.7 million to 2.5 million, with manufacturing and construction becoming key sectors.⁴¹

However, state-directed industrialization was not more effective here than in other developing countries. Familiar structural problems like infrastructural bottlenecks, skill shortages, and restricted competition precluded innovative breakthroughs and scaled growth.⁴² Escalating oil revenues after 1973 strengthened the emphasis on creating capital-intensive sectors, which exacerbated urban joblessness. For all its wealth produced, the production of hydrocarbon exports required less than half of one percent of the labor force. Heavy manufacturing sectors had only mild needs for unskilled and semiskilled workers due to the emphasis on capital-intensive goods that could emulate Western industry. For instance, by 1975 the shah could boast of having car factories—but still needed to import labor-intensive inputs like sheet metal. Unemployment statistics illustrate this dilemma. In 1966, economists estimated a 16 percent joblessness rate, of which the majority was illiterate.⁴³ A decade later, despite historic economic growth, unemployment still measured over 16 percent despite that rural joblessness had dropped below that number, implying a far higher urban figure.⁴⁴

The failure of ISI does not make the Pahlavi regime exceptional. What demands attention are the coalitional priorities embodied in its agenda. Bazaar retailers, artisans, workshops, and guilds faced creeping dislocation as industrialization eroded their economic power. They had significant commercial sway, controlling half the handicraft production, two-thirds of retail trade, and three-quarters of wholesale trade.45 Many did benefit from urban growth and the rise in internal trade that came with industrialization. Large merchants profited greatly, some moving into land speculation and others becoming industrialists themselves. Yet as a class, the bazaar fell under destructive pressure. Much as the Pahlavi court dismissed the value of obstinate landlords, so too was the bazaar deemed an anachronism. The shah and Prime Minister Hoveyda often characterized them as avaricious sharks whose business methods and religious conservativism were incompatible with capitalism.⁴⁶

From 1963 onward, the Ministry of Economy implemented ISI-friendly policies that cut into bazaar profits. Import restrictions designed to protect state-vested enterprises also undermined the bazaar’s long-standing commercial monopolies and merchandising methods.⁴⁷ New banking laws also favored large loans for industrial projects rather than the small-scale credit needed by shopkeepers. By 1976, the bazaar only accounted for 24 percent of all commercial products. One observer lamented how “the bazaar, which has survived the vicissitudes of invaders, is dying . . . the bazaar as a way of life has come under attack.”⁴⁸ As oil wealth rose in the 1970s, so too did the regime’s plans to overrun the bazaar with structures of glass and steel. In Tehran and other large cities, planners began calling for sprawling malls, state-run supermarkets, and office towers to replace old bazaar districts. Many bazaaris saw this “Woolworth mentality” as a direct offensive against their livelihoods.⁴⁹ Resistance was futile, however. In Mashhad, the second largest city, local outcries could not prevent the government from demolishing thousands of shops around a religious shrine in the bazaar during the mid-1970s.⁵⁰

Royal hostilities worsened over time. In September 1975, when warned of hyperinflation and food shortages by royal court chief Asadollah Alam, the ruler “blamed the problem entirely on hoarding” and price gouging by the bazaar.⁵¹ As a result, the new state-run hegemonic party, Rastakhiz (Resurgence), began attacking the bazaar. Among other measures, it launched an “anti-profiteering” campaign that handed down punitive sanctions against the bazaar, among them price ceilings, higher taxes, licensing restrictions, and disruptive inspections with an army of ten thousand hired students.⁵² The results were devastating. By 1978, the Rastakhiz-led campaign had handed out 250,000 fines, banned twenty-three thousand merchants and traders from their home districts, and imprisoned eight thousand businessmen, with another 150,000 cases against shops and retailers pending in court.53

As these measures emasculated the bazaar, the regime did little to marshal alternative support among the new working class. Despite high unemployment, many wage-earning families indeed gained during the White Revolution. For the first time, many could access modern housing, consumer goods, and higher education. Gender equality also noticeably improved. Yet, much as in rural areas, the regime did little to give this new group any stake in its survival. Labor laws from the post-Mossasdegh period still prevented workers from creating any “solidarity structure” that could result in coordinated action.⁵⁴ It controlled all unions and syndicates and set wage levels, while also prohibiting strikes and other collective actions. By the 1970s it had become obvious that labor had no political outlet to express their frustrations about growing urban hardships. For instance, the emphasis on heavy industry meant that in Tehran, regulators favored the operation of a few mechanized factory bakeries over the city’s three thousand neighborhood bakeries, many of which were shuttered.⁵⁵

Rising inequality also became problematic as inflation pummeled purchasing power. During the years between 1969 and 1974, by the government’s own figures for shares of total household expenditures, the top 20 percent of families accounted for nearly 56 percent, a net increase, whereas the lowest 40 percent accounted for just 17 percent, a net decrease.⁵⁶ More visibly, a new echelon of capitalist elites had replaced the Thousand Families as the country’s preeminent holders of wealth, among them industrial moguls (including royal cronies and retooled landlords), private investors, and the Pahlavi clan itself. Just 150 families owned 67 percent of all financial establishments and industrial enterprises and sat upon more than a thousand company boards.⁵⁷

Given their isolation from the conditions of everyday life, many officials made tone-deaf gestures that infuriated workers, epitomized by the shah’s younger brother’s comment on pollution and gridlock: “If people don’t like traffic jams, why don’t they buy helicopters?”⁵⁸ Other evidence regarding the regime-labor disconnect lay in the shah’s 1975 directive to privatize government companies, with the goal of demonstrating his benevolence by allowing workers to acquire shares even on credit. Yet what workers desired in this period of inflation and deprivation was not paper stock but rather material protections against the rising cost of food and fuel, which had outstripped their wage levels.

In short, urban workers lacked any institutional intermediary that could funnel their interests into politics. For instance, by the late 1960s, the New Iran party could claim hundreds of thousands of wage-earners in its membership, but as in rural areas only because unions and syndicates were mandated to associate. Most workers had little contact with any party official or delegate, including their supposed Majles deputies. The party doctored its activity for the press, such as inflating the number of participants or inventing issue-based campaigns that never happened.59

This vacuous framework meant that New Iran also did not provide “buy-in” to the other urban beneficiary of the White Revolution—the educated professional class, many of whom were funneled into state employment. The central bureaucracy mushroomed in size, with nonmilitary payrolls jumping from 260,000 in 1963 to 856,000 in 1972 and nearly 1.3 million in 1976.⁶⁰ The shah and his advisers assumed economic dependence upon the state alone would capture the bourgeoisie’s political loyalties, but in reality most shunned New Iran because it was indistinguishable from the state itself, with no ideology or agenda. For instance, by the early 1970s the Ministry of Interior could state honestly that it no longer screened Majles candidates before elections—instead, New Iran did the job for it, with its officials weeding out its ranks with no less prejudice. With little room for internal contestation, national conventions of New Iran were glorified exercises of praising the shah’s policies, with the sole function to update the official platform with royal directives.

DILUTING AND DISMISSING THE ʿULAMA

From the late 1950s, the shah began viewing clerical influences, including the powerful and established ʿulama of Qum, with suspicion. The clerics presented a formidable obstacle. Cemented through centuries of reciprocal ties with the dynastic center, the clergy’s power manifest through its educational, religious, and economic activities. The shah upended those arrangements in stunning fashion, demoting the ʿulama in almost every sphere of influence.

The Amini premiership began this coalitional divorce. Sensing the potentiality of land reforms, in 1959 the Grand Ayatollah Borujerdi preemptively issued a fatwa (Islamic legal opinion) against land redistribution by invoking tenets of shariʿa that enshrined the sanctity of property rights.61 After his death in 1961, other senior ʿulama continued to press the issue. They leveraged their large networks of mosques, schools, and courts to appeal to a wide audience and lead public sermons on the matter. The issue concerned more than the potential loss of their own landed assets. For many, the regime was overstepping its boundaries by violating the clergy’s hierocratic domain, a sacral space governed by Islamic jurisprudence and that could not be overrun by temporal mandates. From September 1962 onward, seminarians led protests in Qum against the land program, attracting nearby landlords, bazaar workers, and students.⁶² However, land redistribution continued. The government took control of many vaqf lands, renting some out to farmers on ninety-nine-year leases, while transferring other plots to larger producers.⁶³

Further friction emerged over the issue of female enfranchisement, another initiative of the White Revolution. Even moderate jurists who seldom spoke on politics began to release fatwas against new laws enhancing women’s rights, calling the reform a Western corruption that would destroy Iran’s social fabric.⁶⁴ Among the most critical was the Ayatollah Seyyed Ruhollah Khomeini. He joined with more conservative jurists in lambasting the White Revolution as violating both Islamic law and the Iranian constitution.⁶⁵ Signaling this worsening split with the regime, the ʿulama led a boycott of the January 1963 referendum, with many bazaar shops closing in support. In Qum, Khomeini led a series of vitriolic sermons against the shah and Western imperialism that drew twelve thousand students.⁶⁶ More protests and police clashes exploded in March, when SAVAK and army paratroopers battered a demonstration at the Faiziya Seminary, resulting in hundreds of deaths. Further demonstrations culminated in the June 1963 killings, when Khomeini’s arrest instigated riots in Tehran and other cities, spurring an army onslaught. However, this marked a pyrrhic victory. Though Khomeini was exiled, the crackdown lionized him as both a leading voice among the ʿulama and major opposition figure against the shah.67

After the early 1960s, the Pahlavi regime sought to bring the religious sphere fully under its control through repression and bureaucratization. The shah no longer believed he needed the legitimating approval of the ʿulama or that new laws should abide by their view of Shiʿa doctrine. The police and SAVAK thus began eliminating religious critics, driving them underground or into exile. The regime’s religious allergy extended even to nonclerical groups that drew upon Islam for inspiration, such as Ali Shariʿati’s intellectual following and Mehdi Bazargan’s Liberation Movement.⁶⁸ The official press resounded with the acerbic attacks, framing the ʿulama, like the landlords and bazaar, as black medievalists who threatened the enlightening enterprise of the White Revolution.⁶⁹ In addition, administrative agencies either curtailed or assumed control over Islamic schools, religious shrines, and other clerical assets. Many closed; the number of seminaries plummeted from 229 in 1963 to just 138 in 1968.⁷⁰ It then co-opted a small minority of clerics who assumed quasi-governmental positions and became spokespersons for the “official” Islam desired by the shah—one free of anti-Pahlavi elements and incidentally submissive to state authority. A Religion Corps came about in 1971 modeled after the Literacy Corps, consisting of university graduates charged with propagating this official version of Islam through proselytizing and educational services.

In essence, the autocracy attempted to displace the ʿulama. For the next decade, a predictable pattern of interaction emerged. The regime would decree a new law, against which the ʿulama would dissent with countervailing fatwas that cited Shiʿa doctrine or constitutional law. The shah would plow ahead anyway, ignoring calls for religious exemptions and threatening retribution to any who resisted further. A characteristic effort took place in September 1973, when the Education Ministry—which had already rolled back much religious materials throughout curricula—decreed that girls in religious high schools could no longer wear the veil. The shah dismissed the clerical outcry, noting “this is not . . . the first time the mullahs have criticized our social reforms” and ordered the statute enforced even if it meant closing all the schools for noncompliance.71

However, much like its failure to incorporate landed farmers and urban labor, the regime’s desire for unconstrained policy making obscured important trends and opportunities to harness the religious arena as new fount of support. For instance, contrary to expectation that urbanization would secularize Iranian society, the bazaar, industrial workers, and rural migrants generated rising demand for Islamic materials and literature like sermons, translations, and other teachings as the White Revolution proceeded. In addition, informal religious associations for laymen proliferated; after 1965, over 12,300 sprang up in Tehran alone, providing new spaces for wage earners and modest families to engage in religious and political debate.⁷²

The shah and his clique also could not see a vital opposition trend—how Khomeini and his followers fostered alliances with formerly moderate jurists offended by the monarchy’s anticlerical stances, resulting in an underground network that circulated his writings inside the country and ensured his political relevance. Likewise, the regime’s distance from the clergy rendered it unable to combat anti-Pahlavi rhetoric at the doctrinal level, which was where Khomeini’s critique of the shah evolved after his exile. His reformulation of Shiʿa doctrine held that it was not so much the Pahlavi crown but instead the secular state itself that threatened the community of Shiʿa believers—a circumstance that could only be rectified with his new theory of vilayet-e-faqih, or direct rule by the ʿulama.⁷³ Similarly, officials could not marshal clerics beyond the few on the government payroll to refute accusations that the Pahlavi monarchy lacked Islamic credentials. Neither could they justify to the urban pious, in theological terms, why religion and politics needed to remain separate, which formed the crux of Khomeini’s critique: by neglecting his religious duties, the shah was no longer fit to be a political leader.⁷⁴

The absence of institutional contact between the regime and clerical sector mirrors development in the party system, which continued to play an ancillary role after the 1960s. By 1975, New Iran had ossified even by its own lethargic standards. Further, the shah recognized that the inflationary crisis had created rising social and political tensions, as exemplified by new labor unrest, as well as guerilla attacks by urban militant movements. The solution, concocted by a small group of political advisers, was to remove the mask of electoral competition altogether in favor of one hegemonic party. The result was the Rastakhiz. In theory, Rastakhiz resembled the fascist model of an organic party-state, with every societal group represented in a large corporatist system governed by a single command structure.75 Designed to be coextensive with the political system, every Iranian over eighteen was required to join. Rastakhiz superseded all of civil society—rural cooperatives, bazaar guilds, labor unions, and so forth.

In practice, however, Rastakhiz became an even hollower royal appendage. Whereas New Iran at least began from a dowreh, Rastakhiz was artificially grafted onto the public from the start. Almost overnight, the government installed branches across the country, created a liberal and conservative wing, and even founded a political science college for cadres.⁷⁶ Yet Rastakhiz had no ideological content. Despite its fifty thousand claimed cells and bombastic populist rhetoric, the party held few organizational events.⁷⁷ Instead of developing a grassroots infrastructure or internal platform, the regime used Rastakhiz to further attack the bazaar. The party often acted like an auxiliary police in many markets. In addition to the antiprofiteering campaign and new regulations, it replaced the trade and craft guilds with business chambers headed by Pahlavi dependables and backed the campaign to replace “flea-infested” bazaar districts with new highways and shopping centers.⁷⁸

Rastakhiz also made the crown’s alignment against the ʿulama more explicit. The shah dismissed the possibility of incorporating clerics into the party, despite its all-encompassing role to represent Iranian society: there was still no need for “listening to the clergy, much less making concessions to them.”⁷⁹ Instead, Rastakhiz declared the shah as the spiritual leader of Iran and among other activities changed the existing Islamic calendar to a more fictitious imperial version. To little surprise, Khomeini and other clerics denounced the party as against Islam and forbade the pious from joining.

The failure of the Pahlavi regime to use Rastakhiz to widen its coalition served as a microcosm of its wider disconnect from Iranian society. The state could fashion all the accoutrements of the industrialized modernity envisioned by the shah—factory plants, land redistribution, political parties, and secular government. Yet it refused to incorporate social forces, whether former enemies, old allies, or new actors, into the institutions of that new order. This would have historic consequences soon enough, when the shockwaves of crisis exposed an emperor—or in this case, a king—with no clothes.

REPRESSION, DETACHMENT, AND AMERICAN EXPECTATIONS, 1963–1979

During the White Revolution, the Pahlavi regime’s destruction of its old tripartite coalition of landlords, the bazaar, and ʿulama went hand-in-hand with several other trends that eroded its social foundations. The first was deepening neopatrimonialism. By the mid-1960s, the entire political system revolved around the shah. Despite the large Iranian bureaucracy, major policies originated from him or trusted lieutenants—premiers, ministers, bureaucrats, committee heads, army commanders, and SAVAK officials who reported to him.80 Such an environment made the Majles a legislative afterthought. As a result, the regime had little grasp of public opinion. For instance, in 1974, economists pleaded with the royal court to exercise fiscal discipline with the incoming flood of oil revenues, for quantum increases in spending would cause hyperinflation and potential social troubles.⁸¹ Yet officials ignored such warnings, insisting that new expenditures for petrochemicals, steel mills, military weapons, and other impressive items would be appreciated by the masses.⁸² They believed that citizens were more concerned with Iran’s global prestige than material needs at home.

Second, the shah extended patronage as enrichments for individuals rather than collective groups. For aspiring politicians, promotions and appointments were treasure. Others received material prizes. While the royal family accumulated $20 billion in private wealth, the quieter operation of the Pahlavi Foundation shows the strongest evidence of individualistic patronage. Created in 1958 to replace the royal office in charge of selling Crown Lands, the Foundation operated publicly as a nonprofit charitable enterprise but privately served as the royal court’s investment arm.83 At various points, it controlled Bank Omran (the fifth largest commercial bank), the National Iranian Tanker Company, agribusinesses, factories, and hotels. All told, the Pahlavi Foundation had shares in 207 companies equating to over $3 billion in assets.⁸⁴ This gave the shah enormous resources to channel toward favored personalities. Close associates, for instance, sat on the board of Bank Omran, despite few of them having an understanding of the banking sector. Investor friends received capital injections from the Foundation’s coffers. After the 1973 oil boom, the Foundation even started directly paying the pensions of well-liked bureaucrats.

Third, the autocracy continued to see coercion as the most effective method of dealing with opposition. There was no reason to believe otherwise. Authorized to monitor and punish, SAVAK was the warden in one of the Middle East’s largest police states. It exploited a huge network of informants supplemented by the latest technologies. It could make dissidents lose their jobs, torture arrested critics, and dole out extrajudicial violence. At any given point, it held thousands of political prisoners, among them religious clerics, bazaar workers, guerrilla fighters, literary scholars, university students, and labor activists.⁸⁵ Fear of SAVAK also buttressed censorship laws in sanitizing the media and education. In the 1970s, urban insurgencies by new guerrilla movements like Mojahedin-e Khalq (People’s Freedom Fighters) justified, in the eyes of the regime, more brutal campaigns of repression.⁸⁶ Elsewhere, the regime also continued to squelch centrifugal forces, such as Kurdish groups and other ethnolinguistic minorities. Likewise, tribal communities were pushed to the brink of extinction, due to gendarmerie policies and pastoral nationalization.⁸⁷

As the ultimate sentinel of the Peacock Throne, the military grew rapidly during the White Revolution. As table 6.1 illustrates, defense spending mushroomed from under $200 million in 1963 to over $1.8 billion in 1973 and nearly $10 billion in 1978—figures that correspond to 26 percent, 22 percent, and 19 percent of government spending. Manpower rose from over two hundred thousand in 1963 to nearly four hundred thousand on the eve of the revolution.88 Army officers continued to receive training through U.S. exchange programs. Most spending, however, went to arms purchases. In 1973, the shah announced a campaign to upgrade the army and air force, using oil revenues to expand its military as expected by the Nixon Doctrine.⁸⁹ The doctrine was conceived when U.S. policy makers, reacting to the Vietnam debacle, began to withdraw further overseas security commitments. However, this stoked another fear—the looming shutdown of Britain’s military bases in the Persian Gulf, scheduled for completion by 1971.⁹⁰ Its imperial moment gone, London no longer had the resources to preserve what had been two centuries of hegemony over the waterway. Given fears of Soviet intrusion, the Nixon administration called for Iran to fill the post-British vacuum and, alongside a heavily armed Saudi Arabia, maintain collective security in the Gulf. Those “twin pillars” would preserve Western hegemony over its rich oilfields, only this time by proxy.⁹¹

Such expectations also embodied Iran’s continuing importance in Washington’s grand strategy. First, industrial expansion engineered by the White Revolution had greatly increased demand for American goods, from wheat shipments and farm tractors to motor engines and drill pumps. By 1965, the United States had become the country’s second largest trade partner for civilian goods. The shah’s grandiloquent promises of urban modernization led many U.S. policy makers to believe that Iran would soon become one of the largest import markets for American banking and consumer products outside of Europe.⁹² Second, the country remained an irreplaceable energy producer, especially after the 1973 oil crisis. At the time, with U.S. domestic oil reserves waning, strategic projections held that by 1975, a hypothetical oil import cutoff would cripple America’s ability to run even a skeletal wartime economy.⁹³ By contrast, the Soviet Union had become one of the world’s largest oil producers. Third, Iran still hosted various American intelligence activities dedicated to monitoring the Soviet Union, continued to grant territorial concessions in the form of overflight and landing rights, and maintained amiable ties with Israel—all in line with American geopolitical interests in the region.

TABLE 6.1   IRAN’S GROWING DEFENSE SECTOR IN SELECTED YEARS, 1963–1978 (IN $U.S. MILLIONS, HISTORICAL)

*Does not include budget allocations for SAVAK and Interior Ministry

Sources: Hurewitz (1982); ACDA (serial); Central Bank of Iran (serial)

Yet the Nixon Doctrine called for Iran to become something else—a military power in its own right. In accordance, the Pahlavi regime began purchasing some of the most advanced aircraft, missiles, and weaponry in the U.S. arsenal. It could do so without congressional oversight, a privilege no other ally enjoyed. From 1973 to 1978, Iran spent over $16 billion for this purpose. As table 6.1 shows, 1974 was an especially expensive year, with defense expenditures consuming nearly 41 percent of the national budget. It also purchased weaponry from Britain in exchange for oil. American military advisers and technicians arrived in droves, charged with implementing new systems and training their Iranian counterparts on the ground. So confident was the shah of his American ties that he even suggested U.S. officers take direct operational roles in his military, although Washington demurred.⁹⁴ MAAG continued to play a supervisory role, counseling the shah on military issues, while various officials and private agents connected him to eager U.S. firms hoping to ride the Iranian bonanza. From 1972 to 1976, the number of American residents increased from fifteen thousand to thirty-one thousand, more than half of whom were civilians.95

This should not imply that from the early 1960s onward, the United States never criticized Iran. Many diplomats bemoaned the repression and inequality they observed. However, the Iranian lobby had a strong presence in Washington. Iranian officials enjoyed access to the president and secretary of state during every administration, assuring them that America had no surer ally in the region. Based upon his own dealings with the White House, by 1977 the shah had every reason to assume that U.S. support “was unqualified and unquestioning.”⁹⁶ By contrast, it was support from Iranian society that would prove vacuous in the coming years.

THE REVOLUTIONARY CLIMAX

From the first scattered protests of late 1977 to the shah’s departure in January 1979, the Iranian Revolution ranks among the most accessible episodes of dictatorial overthrow in Middle Eastern studies. Within a decade of the new Islamic Republic, explanations for the Pahlavi dictatorship’s fall abounded: declining economic conditions due to high inflation and relative deprivation; the cultural appeal of Shiʿa Islam as a unifying ideology; the leadership and organizational capacity of the cross-cutting opposition; decision-making paralysis by an overcentralized state; the shah’s personal vacillations and illness; and Western pressures against the regime.⁹⁷ As Charles Kurzman’s more recent account notes, equally vital in understanding the revolution were highly contingent “moments” when subjective perceptions shifted on the ground—that is, when previously apathetic or wavering citizens began feeling that opposing the regime had become a “viable” behavior and was therefore worth doing.⁹⁸ The analysis here supplements these thoughtful arguments with the reminder that the revolution’s sweeping breadth, which entailed thousands of protests with millions of participants, only became apparent after it had ended. The revolution started as a very minor crisis, and only in late 1978 did observers believe the end was near. The problem was that given its prior coalitional narrowing, the Pahlavi regime aggravated the crisis at every stage due to its inability to find peaceful solutions, creating a self-propelling momentum that produced ever-larger waves of opposition. It not only refused to compromise from the start, it also did not know how to do so—that is, how to bargain for survival—because it had never done so in the past.

The first protests in late 1977 gave little clue to the coming tempest. They included intellectual manifestos and student strikes that encompassed just a few hundred participants. They did not call for regime change but instead advanced specific issues of reform such as desires for greater literary freedom and better educational facilities. Tensions rose in January 1978, when the army smashed a clerical gathering in Qum; memorial processions held for those killed resulted in bloodier clashes the next month. For the next year, different groups—clerics, merchants, shopkeepers, students, workers, professionals—held marches and strikes calling for political change. These protests and riots grew larger and more obdurate despite the imposition of martial law. By Black Friday of September 1978, when a huge march numbering over a hundred thousand was bloodily suppressed, the “wall of fear” had been shattered.99 What began as moderate reformism had hardened into the maximalist goal of unseating the shah. By November and December, Tehran and other cities were witnessing constant protests, with several million demanding the regime’s end. With the economy at a standstill and crowds refusing to disband, the shah left Iran on 16 January 1979. A new political order followed not long after.

Why could the regime not stop the crisis from escalating into revolution? For one, having dismembered its coalition without gaining new constituencies, the Pahlavi monarchy had ceded a huge space by which Khomeini and other opposition entrepreneurs could gain followers. Those hurt the most by Iranian state-building were most active in mobilizing. Of nearly 2,500 documented protests, leaders associated with the bazaar and ʿulama groups led two-thirds.100 Bazaar markets led mass strikes, distributed information, protected demonstrators, and by virtue of their central locations stood as unifying spaces of dissent. Though less involved early on, the ʿulama came to harness their religious network to coordinate protests, pioneer religious symbolism, and politicize holy days and mourning rites. By the late 1970s, these were not small actors. The bazaar sector encompassed 725,000 workers and owners, or nearly 7 percent of the national labor force.¹⁰¹ The religious sphere encompassed hundreds of seminaries and over five thousand mosques utilized by ninety thousand clergymen, including fifty jurists holding the rank of Ayatollah, five thousand prayer leaders, and over ten thousand students.¹⁰² They could utilize their social capital to reach other groups, such as teachers, university students, factory workers, and bureaucrats. On the ground, they provided leadership and organization.

By contrast, the White Revolution left no class or group bound to Pahlavi perpetuity. On the one hand, landowners and peasants played little role in the revolution, with the shah making almost no outreach to them. Urban workers, on the other hand, flocked to the opposition. Even if many did not mind Pahlavi rule, there was no organizational framework that could coordinate activity and channel it into opposition strongholds in cities like Tehran, Esfahan, and Mashhad. Rastakhiz’s anodyne framework meant that at most, liaisons could call up a few hundred students for short rallies. Most tellingly, Rastakhiz’s many branch offices became popular targets of looting because so few members were ever present to defend them. That civil servants were still outside the party’s purview became lucid in the fall of 1978, when many public-sector employees joined the opposition, among them electricians, oil workers, journalists, doctors, and postal workers.¹⁰³ This hampered many government functions. Finally, the new capitalist elite created by the White Revolution had little political role. They instead funneled considerable wealth out, accounting for much of the $2.5 billion that left Iran during the last three months of 1978.¹⁰⁴

Consequently, the regime could not counterpunch with supporters. It did not have cadres who would counteract even minor acts of resistance, such as covering graffiti and images with pro-Pahlavi symbols or spearheading university events to explain the shah’s position. What it mustered instead, by November 1978, were thousands of police-hired hooligans.105 Some engaged in pro-shah demonstrations, while others assaulted opposition protesters, bazaar shops, and neighborhoods. However, such violence was opportunistic rather than systematic, and the perpetuating thugs were ill-trained and without leadership.¹⁰⁶ They carried out paid assignments rather than binding political commitments and as a result all but abandoned the regime by December.

At the same time, the Pahlavi monarchy could not demobilize the protests using violence alone. As Benjamin Smith has argued, given his distance from Iranian society, the shah could not “‘reach into’ the opposition to assess the scope of demands and respond to them . . . with means other than raw force.”¹⁰⁷ The regime was, however, willing and able to repress until the end. SAVAK and the military consistently fired on demonstrators and continuously arrested and maltreated oppositionists. Total casualty estimates of the revolution vary, but at least several thousand people were killed and several times more were maimed. The record is not gorier because by November 1978, when crowds had grown impossibly large, the shah realized that ordering all-out coercion would result in murder on a scale that even the United States could not ignore. Yet had that order come, the coercive apparatus would have carried it out. Likewise, the army did not disintegrate until after the monarchy abdicated.¹⁰⁸ Most enlisted soldiers did not heed Khomeini’s call for desertion, and the officer corps remained ready to fulfill directives from above. Simply put, repression did not work because every abuse drove more participants to the opposition and radicalized their demands. Citizens continued protesting despite the possibility of coercion.¹⁰⁹ From lyricized slogans to the black humor of body counts, few could claim ignorance about the potential for injury or even death by mobilizing on the street.¹¹⁰

Neither did a reformist strategy work. During the summer of 1978, with growing crowds no longer afraid of bullets, the regime tried to bargain its way out. Spirited hunts for scapegoats netted the arrest of high-ranking officials, such as former Prime Minister Hoveyda, and numerous SAVAK officers as evidence that the shah would prosecute those responsible for past deaths. In August, he appointed his trusted deputy Sharif-Emami to the premiership to signal the sudden move toward liberalization. The regime loosened censorship and released political prisoners; increased salaries and housing subsidies for striking workers; closed casinos, nightclubs, and theaters criticized by the clergy and restored the old Islamic calendar; and promised new elections and the closure of Rastakhiz. In November, the shah appeared on television, apologizing for past brutalities and promising democracy.

Clerics and bazaaris had little incentive to believe such concessions because they came after not just a year of carnage but decades of estrangement. The bazaar was still smarting from the repercussions of the anti-profiteering campaign. For the ʿulama, initiatives like the Religion Corps signaled that the state could never respect their hierocracy. The shah brought no trustworthiness to the table. Thus the biggest strikes, protests, and riots occurred after the shah began making concessions. During Sharif-Emami’s three-month premiership, nearly a hundred cities and towns gave rise to antiregime activities, with the largest marches now drawing hundreds of thousands. This surprised the shah and his advisers, who believed that such mollifying tactics would work, and that in just six months normalcy would return.

Finally, American support had little effect. Some analysts have lamented how the United States “lost” Iran by withdrawing its support for the shah.111 Under the Carter administration’s goal to promote human rights, policy principals allegedly refused to give the shah encouragement to exterminate his enemies.¹¹² In reality, while the Carter White House differed from previous administrations in its liberal rhetoric, in bilateral terms it embraced the Pahlavi regime as warmly as its predecessors. President Carter famously toasted the shah in Tehran on New Year’s Day of 1978 and delivered many communiqués that Iran was, as always, the linchpin of U.S. regional interests. During the protests, while liberal voices in the State Department pressed for peaceful negotiations, they were overruled by a White House desiring a strong and stable autocracy led by the shah.¹¹³ In November 1978, National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski told the shah that he should use whatever means necessary to restore order with Carter’s blessing. The ruler was hardly “paralyzed” with fear of offending America: though discouraged with setbacks, he never refrained from violence because of worry about U.S. abandonment.114

In truth, the United States did not lose Iran, because its fate was never Washington’s to decide in the first place. Given the millions of Iranians mobilized by January 1979, it would have taken something far more than another Operation Ajax to quiet the streets. The Pahlavi regime was trapped by its own choices, confronted by a burgeoning opposition front with neither committed supporters nor the means to defuse the situation peacefully. The shah faced an untenable dilemma: to “either overhaul entirely the structure [he] had so painfully created over nearly four decades or to launch a bloody, repressive campaign. He was unwilling to do either. Instead, he temporized and maneuvered on the margins, hoping for a break that never came.”¹¹⁵

.   .   .

This chapter investigated the process of state-building in modern Iran. Geopolitical substitution rooted in American intercessions after 1953 resulted in a narrowing coalitional logic that produced exclusionary economic and political institutions. The elimination of communist and nationalist movements had an intoxicating effect: without having to make any concessions to win over enemies, the Pahlavi regime never learned how to bargain with social groups. From the White Revolution to political parties, new institutional investments signaled the ambitious vision of modernization espoused by the shah. However, such initiatives only further detached the Iranian state from its own society. Traditional allies in landowners, bazaar, and ʿulama were greatly harmed by new policies, and their interests discarded by ruling elites. Worse, the autocracy made little effort to reach into society and carve out new ties with constituencies that benefited from its developmental push, from urban workers to rural peasants. Insulated from popular interests and reliant upon violent coercion, the Pahlavi leadership created an increasingly personalistic state that lacked institutionalized ties with social forces.

This climaxed in the Iranian Revolution. As the evidence suggests, the onset of street demonstrations and other urban resistance by 1978 presented the regime with a decisive test of its past coalitional commitments. Had it carried more popular support, it could have more effectively addressed grievances, made reform concessions, and crafted other compromises in order to contain opposition from spreading. Its nonexistent bases of societal loyalty, however, combined with the hollowness of state institutions meant that the dictatorship had neither the social knowledge nor the institutional mechanisms to do so. It still assumed, until far too late, that violent repression and American support would secure its future.

Not all autocracies that become clients of outside powers suffer such remarkable destruction, of course. Often found in other countries that reap foreign support to win domestic conflicts are confounding factors that compel at least some coalition to form after leaders stand triumphant over a repressed society. The case of Jordan, delivered in the next two chapters, speaks to this point. In this kingdom, communal tensions around a demographic split generated fear and mistrust that impinged upon the regime’s decision-making calculus; this resulted in a modest coalition, a larger marginalized majority, and a costly recipe for longevity.