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Meanwhile, corruption persisted. Commissions of 10% on arms sales regularly went to generals, ministers and others in the Shah's court and government. The total prohibition of the right to dissent and documented reports of torture led Amnesty International in 1975 to conclude that "no country in the world has a worse record in human rights than Iran." The Shah's instinctive dislike of democracy led him that same year to end the country's two-party system and establish the Rastakhiz (National Resurgence Party) as Iran's sole political organization.
Amir Abbas Hoveida, Premier from 1965 to 1977, now concedes that it was a mistake to neglect political freedoms. Says Hoveida: "It was more important to have a four-lane highway than to show an interest in political institutions. Economics was our No. 1 problem. Politics was subservient to the economy. But we have been able to get this country out of the orbit of underdevelopment. Now how do we get our spaceship to enter the orbit of developed nations?"
Many American observers agree that the Shah created his own problem in failing to forge a democratic system of political participation. "The Shah has been imaginative and flexible in his economic and foreign policy, but not politically," says Professor J.C. Hurewitz, director of Columbia University's Middle East Institute. "He's given no freedom to the Iranian intellectuals. The result is that Iran suffers from a political vacuum: the people feel left out of things." One hopeful sign may be that the opposition does not have a common ground. Thus for their own purposes, both left and right would probably be satisfied if they were given a greater voice in government and if constitutional restrictions were placed on the Shah's absolutism.
Washington does not believe last week's violent eruptions mean that the Shah is likely to step aside — or be ousted. "It could get nasty or it could settle down," says a U.S. intelligence official. "But we don't feel that he is threatened or has lost control." Still, the U.S. is concerned over the recent events and the dangers they pose for the West. The Administration has been careful not to upset what one State Department official calls "our most complex relationship." The reason is simple enough: few countries in the world are as important to the U.S. strategically and geopolitically. This is because of Iran's pro-Western stance, its location on the Soviet border, its relations with its important but far less stable neighbors, and its moderating role in the Middle East. The Shah is, in short, a bulwark of anti-Communism at the confluence of the Persian Gulf oil routes (see following story).
It is a hopeful sign that in recent months the Shah has begun to make visible reforms in the political and human rights affairs of the nation. He fired the head of SAVAK, who had been identified with that agency's most notorious terror tactics, freed a number of prisoners, and promised to allow dissidents to be tried in civilian rather than military courts. But some specialists in the region blame those small liberalizing measures for the present turmoil. Says one: "Many Iranians took these changes as a sign that the Shah was weakening and responded with almost total cynicism."
Deeply wounded by events spawned from his own dream for Iran, the Shah last week was searching for ways to calm his troubled people. His son, Crown Prince Reza, now in advance fighter-pilot training in Texas, telephoned his father and suggested that he try a dialogue with his opponents. It may have been good advice. With his country under martial law, the Shah's best hope now is to turn forthrightly toward the elusive, and in his case potentially hazardous, goal of democracy. If he sticks to his own target date for parliamentary elections next June, he may still be able to guarantee his future by yielding some of his absolute rule and compromising on a constitutional monarchy. At the same time, he would enhance the stability of a region that might turn to chaos in his absence. If the Shah falls — and that is now something even his most loyal subjects consider at least conceivable — the end of his long rule will not have come at the hands of a foreign power, or the dissidents, or the army, but from social forces that he simply failed to perceive as he tried to modernize his historic remnant of the Persian Empire.