Brace for Impact - Part III
Few countries in the world had come closer to outright revolution than Iran in 1977-79; indeed, instability there had been a major factor in heightened oil prices during the late 1970s recession, even if events in Panama, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia had arguably contributed just as much if not more. By late 1981, however, the country was, largely, at peace, with the Islamist and Communist Tudeh forces largely reduced to simmering but fairly controllable insurgencies in the countryside (though their continued open cooperation concerned the SAVAK and the West), and the spirit of reform under the new "Young Shah" was in full bloom.
To the frustration of Iranian liberals and even a great many soft-Islamist conservatives, however, the new era of Iranian openness seemed to them to look a lot like previous "false springs" of the past. A great deal of noise was made by the government about new, more dynamic leadership, but longtime interrogation chief Parviz Sabeti was made head of the SAVAK, and the Chief of the Army Staff was Fereydoun Djam, a career soldier and ambassador who had retired out of disputes with Mohammed Reza but was not considered particularly threatening to the clique of officers who were viewed as being largely in charge behind the scenes via the National Moderation Council, the new name for the old "Regency." Sabeti and Djam were not the same thugs who had helped nearly end the Iranian monarchy through their ineptitude, but they were not exactly the kinds of fresh faces that the protestors of 1978 had hoped for. Nor was the new Prime Minister appointed in late October 1981, Jafar Sharif-Emami, who was perhaps even more of a backwards-looking choice - after all, not only had he briefly served as Prime Minister for nine months in the early 1960s, but after that had spent 14 years as President of the Iranian Senate and was by the time of his first retirement in 1978 regarded as one of the former Shah's most trusted and reliable confidants. As a near-septuagenarian henchman of the despised late Shah, turning the page, he was not.
[1]
It would be remiss to suggest that the young Shah Reza did not understand how much Sharif-Emami was a creature of his father's regime when he appointed him, or that he was an obvious favorite of the military officials who were trying to rebrand Pahlavism while keeping its benefits to them intact. But what such analysis misses is that Sharif-Emami was nonetheless a clever man, who with fifty years of experience in the Iranian government was easily the most decorated civilian official who had the trust of the murkiest corners of the establishment but who had not held real formal power in two decades. Nor does it consider, for that matter, that despite being close with Mohamed Reza personally and politically, Sharif-Emami had also always been one of the few people in the late Shah's inner circle who was willing to tell him things he did not want to hear, including when he thought he was wrong. In that sense, Sharif-Emami became the surprising man of the moment, and in his nearly six years as Prime Minister he would surprise to the upside in what he was able to accomplish.
Indeed, his reforms starting in the last months of 1981 and the first months of 1982 came fast and furious. One of the things that spoke in his favor was that he was a social conservative who was close to the clerics who had sympathized with the attempted revolution of 1977-79, but only those who had not themselves fomented it, and as such he held some sway with mullahs who in their sermons would in the end decide the fate of the regime if they decided to follow the hardliners dotted throughout the Iranian mountains into the brink at some point. He announced the closure of all the country's casinos from the holy city of Qom, and cultivated an image of a frugal grandfather who lived in his own one-bedroom flat in central Tehran and spent much of his time traveling to the Iranian countryside to meet ordinary citizens, albeit always with copious bodyguards. Crucially, Sharif-Emami took the step that his predecessors Amir-Abbas Hoveyda and Jamshid Amouzegar had refused to countenance and dissolved the Rastakhiz Party that had ruled Iran for decades, which while on its own not ushering in liberal democracy nonetheless signaled the end of the old Pahlavist order and something approaching a constitutional monarchy.
[2]
The transition from 1981 to 1982, and an improving Iranian economy with falling unemployment but also lacking the supply bottlenecks and inflation that had plagued it in the late 1970s, thus marked a major opportunity not just for the regime but the opposition, and here the more confident Sharif-Emami government that was composed of conservative, pro-Western technocrats were blessed by a serious split emerging between the more moderate Mehdi Bazargan of the Freedom Movement and the duarchy of Shapour Bakhtiar and Karim Sanjabi at the National Front. The eminently pragmatic Bazargan had always harbored more monarchist sympathies and was, with the dissolution of Rastakhiz, finally seeing that which he had demanded for years being fleshed out; after the near-collapse of 1978, he was unwilling to too aggressively test Iran's capacity for social cohesion again so soon and thus saw the changes being made as largely responsive to the protests of that year, and pledged to work closely with the regime moving forward, hopefully with an eye towards one day being appointd PM himself over a truly liberal, reformist Cabinet. Bakhtiar and, especially, Sanjabi were less convinced, and the latter maintained his firm republican convictions and even began advocating that the National Front, which dated its founding to Mossadegh, start to collaborate more thoroughly with communist-sympathetic clerics, which deeply alarmed Bakhtiar to the point that he considered abandoning the National Front in favor of Bazargan's Freedom Movement. In his view, a clerical-communist alliance would rip Iran to shreds, as he highly doubted that the Islamists and Tudeh could collaborate long after overthrowing the military.
[3]
Comprehensively, then, late 1981 saw Iran's democratizing but still-autocratic, military-steered government begin the process of opening up the economy and society while conceding to the desires of many of the more conservative protestors who had rocked the country in 1978, while the opposition debated internally about how to proceed and figures who had once worked hand-in-hand started to find new paths forward. Beyond mere domestic politics, this meant Iran was stable and secure at a critical moment in Middle Eastern history and became the point of reliance for the West more than ever as events began to spiral out of control in the start of 1982...
[1] This is all true, fwiw
[2] This largely maps to Sharif-Emami's actual program in his brief four-month stint as PM in late 1978 OTL. The one thing I'm missing here is repealing the Imperial calendar that Mohamed Reza (who was a seriously weird guy) instituted, which my thinking is that they wouldn't have waited until 1981 to do that
[3] It's really remarkable how similar 1979 in Iran was, with both Bazargan and Bakhtiar thinking they could work with Khomeini initially, to Russia in 1917 and Kerensky, Guchkov, etc assuming the same of Lenin
