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IRAN: The Rhythm Recurs

12 minute read
TIME

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Whenever the Lion is in trouble the Bear takes a poke at Iran. Thirty-five years ago, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Sazonov made a formula of it: “The English, engaged in the pursuit of political aims of vital importance in Europe, may, in case of necessity, be prepared to sacrifice certain interests in Asia. . . . This is circumstance which we can, of course, exploit for ourselves, as, for instance, in Persian affair

The formula was in full application last week. Britain no longer aggressively expanding her empire could scarcely count on firm U.S. support so remote a corner of the world as Irans northwest corner, Azerbaijan. Because the Russiansknew this well the men of the Red Army who occupy northern Iran were appointed by Moscow as paladins of self-determination. Benevolently, they looked the other way while the new Communist-inspired “Democratic Party” led a revolt. The crooked streets of Tabriz, Iran’s second city, were clouded with dust and excitement as the National Assembly prepared to proclaim the province an autonomous state, with only the most nominal allegiance to Iran’s capital Teheran. A new National Assembly for Azerbaijan was ready to meet and Jafar Pishevari, whose enemies said he came from Russian Baku, was ready to tell the Assembly what to do.

The revolt had made rapid progress since it welled up less than two months ago. Most of Azerbaijan (see map) was already in rebel hands. Rebel columns sped along the swampy Caspian littoral to seize the town of Bandar Shah; they headed east toward Iran’s sacred city of Meshed.

The Iranian Government complained that the Red Army had blocked its military units sent to put down the revolt. Aloofly, Moscow announced that the Red Army was merely maintaining order while Azerbaijanis demonstrated, as they had a right to do.

Iranian protests to London and Washington evoked diplomatic notes to Moscow as strongly worded as Teheran could wish. But words had no great weight last week in the wooded hills and fertile valleys of Azerbaijan. The Teheran Government temporized by appointing a commission made up largely of former premiers to investigate the situation in the northwest. It was a weak expedient, but Teheran had probably heard that Washington’s unoffi cial attitude was “What more can we do?”

Iran stood on its dignity as a full-fledged member of UNO. But its intrinsic weakness was that of many small states, sovereign in name only, which became pawns of the great powers. It happened that Iran had a ruler whose amiable, feckless personality symbolized perfectly the political vacuum his once-great country had become.

The Old Man. All his life (26 years) sallow, dewy-eyed Mohamed Reza Pahlevi, Shah of Iran, had been anxious to please, an attitude largely conditioned by his autocratic father, the late, tough Reza Shah Pahlevi. Like his ten brothers and sisters, Mohamed Reza grew up in awe and admiration of the domineering old martinet who rose from the soil to root a dynasty in nothing more substantial than the high, dry air of Teheran’s political intrigue.

Old Reza Shah came from a family of small landholders in Mazanderan Province, rose to be colonel in the Iranian Army. When the decrepit regime of Ahmed Shah tottered after World War I, Reza Khan became successively Commander in Chief of the Iranian Army. Minister of War, Premier, finally Shah of Shahs—all in less than five years.

Young Mohamed Reza was brought up in a palace atmosphere of despotic splendor. From Iran’s jewel-studded Peacock Throne his father grimly ordered his enemies murdered or jailed, ruled his “court with a caprice that ranged from slapping ministers in the face to kicking subjects in the crotch. (Once, rumor had it, the young Prince himself felt the royal boot and landed in a palace fountain.)

In 15 years the old Shah’s splenetic energy also bulldozed medieval Iran into building an 860-mile railroad to span the country from north to south, erecting schools and factories, changing the country’s name from provincial Persia to national Iran, abandoning the veil for women, accepting movies and traffic lights.

This blend of barbarism and benevolence had its inevitable effect on the Crown Prince. He grew into a meek, friendly youth, given to expressing any inward effervescence by racing along the streets of Teheran in fast cars. The better to equip him for his royal duties, the Shah gave the boy five years of European schooling. The Shah had learned to read & write Persian only after becoming Minister of War; the Crown Prince became proficient in French, English and European manners in one of the most expensive private schools in Switzerland. But Mohamed Reza was not allowed to finish. The Shah, suddenly bitten with suspicion that his son was wasting his time, ordered him home for a more rigorous personal preparation in the duties of kingship.

The Kingdom. In 1941, when Germany’s attack made aid to Russia through Iran an essential of Allied victory, the Allies took a long, hard look at old Reza Shah Pahlevi. They suspected some of his hangers-on of intrigue with Germany and, in any case, Reza Shah was too strong a character to be left athwart the Lend-Lease supply line to the U.S.S.R. So he was deposed, last year in far away Johannesburg died, full of bitter memories. Mohamed Reza, the wavy-haired young playboy, ascended the jeweled Peacock Throne of Iran.

Since the days of Darius and Cyrus, the kingdom had descended far. It was still large (a fifth as big as the U.S.) and its mountains and desert contrasts were still dramatically scenic. But of Mohamed Reza’s 15 million subjects a few thousand lived in lavish luxury, and almost all the rest in ragged poverty. At least eleven million of them had venereal disease. Most of the adults were opium addicts. Four out of every five children born died in infancy. Three out of every four who survived never learned to read or write.

And Fawzia, Too. The old Shah saw to it that Mohamed Reza on his return to Teheran had a plentiful supply of mistresses. When the time came for the Crown Prince to marry, nothing was too good for him. His bride was Fawzia, 17-year-old sister of Egypt’s King Farouk, as beautiful a princess as a prince could wish. They had only one child, a daughter called Shahnaz (“the pet of the Shah”), born in October 1940. Thereafter, it became apparent that the Shah’s tastes were quantitative rather than qualitative Fawzia, whose family with a century of rule be hind it looked upon the Iranian dynasty as an upstart, was enraged when her husband publicly brought other women into the Gulistan Palace. She consulted an American psychiatrist in Bagdad, and then came back to Teheran with a stern message for her husband. Things were better for a little while, but the young Shah soon relapsed. Last May Fawzia went home to Egypt on the pretext of ill health; last week she was still there. Court circles gossiped that an Egyptian divorce had been secretly granted. But the Iranian marriage was yet to be dissolved.

King in Crisis. Preoccupied by these personal problems and pleasures, the Shah, Mohamed Reza, was scarcely the man to steer his country through a crisis. His Majlis (Parliament) of feudal landlords was not much help. Many of the abler members were instruments either of Britain or Russia, both of which continued to encourage the corruption of Iranian life. Both, too, disrupted Iran’s economic life throughout the war. The British (with the Americans) monopolized the country’s inadequate transportation system for Lend-Lease shipments to Russia; the Russians prevented shipment of grain from food-rich Azerbaijan to Teheran and other deficient areas. In the capital there were food riots that lasted three days. Inflation soared. By last year the cost of living had risen tenfold, preparing the way for Communist agitation.

As for the Iranian Army, a story gives its quality. Not many years ago a battalion refused to obey orders. The commander disbanded it, sent the men to their homes. They came to the Shah to request an escort with the plea, “there are bandits on the roads and we are only a hundred men.”

So the Shah, Mohamed Reza had to do his diplomatic best. In occasional interviews he spoke hopefully to British and U.S. correspondents of democracy and postwar progress. When cabinets fell (a not infrequent occurrence), he labored dutifully to find a premier who would satisfy the conflicting requirements of the outspoken, hardheaded Russian ambassador, Mikhail A. Maximov, and the reticent, equally hardheaded British ambassador, Sir Reader William Bullard. At palace parties the balance was preserved with similar delicacy. U.S. Ambassador Wallace Murray would be invited to hear an American soprano, the Soviet ambassador, a Russian pianist, the British ambassador, a British actress.

The Politics of Oil. But the niceties of palace protocol were surface symptoms. Beneath them stirred the tides of history. As a well-read Iranian, the Shah doubtless recalled the words of the Arabian Poet Abul Ala al Ma’arri: “History is a poem in which the words change, but the rhythm recurs.” For Iran the rhythm of history was almost metronomic.

Russia, in search of markets and warm water, has been in & out of Iran since the early 17th Century. The British were there before them. In Iran the thin, red line of British west-to-east imperialism crosses the north-to-south axis of Russian expansionism. In Peter the Great’s famed “testament” (even if he did not write it, historians call it an accurate expression of Russian policy), he exhorted his countrymen to “excite continual wars in Turkey and Persia.”

Iran had become a plaything of the powers through an accident of geography: now it bounced the faster between them through an accident of geology. Iran had oil.

Iran’s oil was part of the greatest known oil reservoir on earth. Only in the south had part of its riches yet been tapped, by the British, but the results were impressive enough. From the oil area around Masjidi-Suleiman and the great refinery of Abadan at the head of the Persian Gulf, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. drew 350,000 barrels a day, with indicated reserves of six to seven billion barrels. Few oilmen doubted that the untapped fields north of Iran, especially round Lake Urmia and Samnan, held oil as well.

The Shah’s powerful friends were thirsty for his oil. Eager applicants for concessions had been sitting around in Teheran for months. Least pressing perhaps was the U.S.: Washington’s concern with declining reserves had not yet reached the stage where it called for the use of aggressive oil diplomacy in Iran. The British thirst was sharper. Dependent entirely on oil from abroad, Britain could not afford to pass up any opportunity. She had played the politics of oil longer, more successfully than anyone else. Now she was ready to play again.

Biggest thirst of all was Russia’s. Until World War II her production (some 240 million barrels a year) and her reserves (some six billion barrels) had been enough to cover her prodigious economy. (Twenty years ago she had not even bothered to exploit a Russian-controlled oil concession in northern Iran.) The war had taught her a burning lesson: when she came closest to losing her oil, she came closest to losing the war. Now the Red Army was grabbing oil in Poland, Rumania, Hungary, Austria—wherever and whenever it could. At home, Russia was stepping up her own production. Abroad, she was searching for it with a determined eye. And abroad meant, currently, Iran.

The U.S.S.R. took full advantage of the peoples in its southern states whose cousins live across the border in Iran. Azerbaijan’s knife-wearing Kurds and ebullient Armenians spill over into adjoining countries (see map). Its 700,000 Kurds have kin in Turkey and British-controlled Iraq. Its 65,000 Armenians identify themselves with Armenians in Turkey and in the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic. Precept and propaganda had already aroused a strong separatist urge among Iran’s Armenians. At any moment blood might call to blood across the boundaries. In skilled Soviet hands, this interplay of nationalisms would be a potent instrument of policy. Recently, in Azerbaijan, a pro-Russian Democratic Kurdish Party significantly burgeoned into being.

Possibly Russia contemplated annexing Iranian Azerbaijan to the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic across the border.

Possibly, too, she planned a sphere-of-influence solution like the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907, which solved nothing. More likely was the less ambitious aim of a Communist-controlled, autonomous Az erbaijan with a pro-Soviet Government in Teheran. These would be enough to secure her exposed southern flank.

In Iran, last week were three foreign armies — Russians in the north, British and Americans in the south. All were there by agreement; all by agreement should leave not later than next March 2. The U.S. contingent of nearly 4,000 men, smallest of the three, was preparing to depart by the end of the year. The other two would stay until due date, presumably to buttress their Government’s diplomacy.

If the U.S. did not back Britain against Russia, the Shah, Mohamed Reza Pahlevi, with the fatalism of his race, might well ponder the philosophy of inevitability. Without much help from the Shah, Iran’s fate would probably be decided at Mos cow’s Big Three meeting. Nor was it likely that sweet reason would play much part in the settlements.

The gentle Omar had said it well enough : Myself when young did eagerly frequentDoctor and Saint, and heard great argument About it and about: but evermoreCame out by the same door as in I went.

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