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Khomeini's ascent to power worked a remarkable change in a man who had once seemed a gentle, if extraordinarily zealous, cleric. During the upheaval that toppled the Shah, Khomeini urged his followers to remain nonviolent. In part, this was a shrewd wish to avoid harsh military reprisals, but his caution also reflected Khomeini's temperament at that time. Abolhassan Banisadr, whom Khomeini ousted as President in 1981, notes that in the final weeks of Khomeini's exile the Ayatullah "would not even kill a fly." Yet after Khomeini became Iran's ruler, he exhorted his countrymen to kill, burn and destroy.
Khomeini and his followers attempted to stifle every vestige of opposition to the imposition of a Muslim theocracy. In so doing they set standards for brutality and injustice that at least equaled -- and probably surpassed -- the worst excesses of the Shah's regime. A clergy-dominated security system soon rivaled SAVAK, the Shah's secret police, in terror and bloodthirstiness.
As the military underwent repeated purges and came under the influence of the clerics, its force was swiftly applied to suppress ethnic minorities that had supported the revolution in hopes of gaining greater cultural and political autonomy. The excesses led to nearly 10,000 executions -- some put the actual figure as high as 20,000 -- and tens of thousands of arrests. This provoked a campaign of assassination by dissident Islamic guerrillas that eliminated hundreds of top members of the Ayatullah's regime.
While he was consolidating his revolution at home, Khomeini was seeking to extend it to other nations. Iraq attacked Iran across the Shatt al-Arab in September 1980 after Khomeini called for an uprising of Iraqi Shi'ites and fomented skirmishes along the border. Iranian forces blunted the Iraqi offensive, and two months after the war began, the conflict was largely stalemated. After years of fighting, Tehran lost all hope of victory when Iraq stopped an Iranian drive for the port city of Basra in early 1987; a year later, Iraq began the offensive that eventually brought Iran to the peace table. The fighting reportedly cost both countries an estimated $500 billion. More than 900,000 Iranian lives were lost; 300,000 Iraqis died during the war.
Khomeini's ability to hold together the squabbling factions that produced Iran's revolution was one of his major achievements. After first setting the direction of the nation through proclamations and statements, Khomeini left it to his followers to forge specific policies. Still, he remained the pivotal figure of Iranian politics, even toward the end, when his various illnesses made it impossible for him to follow events closely. The dismissal of Montazeri, in the opinion of many experts, put increased power in the hands of the pragmatic Rafsanjani, who is also Commander in Chief of the Iranian armed forces. In the final months of Khomeini's life, the spotlight also turned on his son, Ahmed Khomeini, 43, who has lately been increasingly visible in public life. In his zeal and rigid ideology, Ahmed appears to be very much his father's son.