The fall of the Shah was an epic, a morality play or a Greek tragedy if he had been a truly great man rather than just another American satrap, complete with US fighter aircraft, a swamp of corrupt officials and a sadistic intelligence service. When one of my colleagues suggested that the Iranian revolution could be compared to the fall of the Bastille and of the Tsar – he quoted Charles Fox's line about “how much the greatest event it is that ever happened in the world” – I thought his trust in Ayatollah Khomeini's liberal intentions was born of wishful thinking.
When Khomeini's prime minister, Mehdi Bazargan, appeared on television to condemn the revolution's bloody kangaroo courts as a disgrace to “a wonderful revolution of religious and human values” and appealed to the Ayatollah to set new rules for the trials, Khomeini agreed, then forgot his promise. The size of the street demonstrations in Tehran – a million one day, one and a half million the next – gave the Iranian revolution a mesmeric quality. It was anarchic, animalistic, ritualistic, very definitely Shia, but, in its earliest days, strangely moving.
I was then working for the pre-Murdoch Times, which was temporarily closed by a printing dispute, and made my way to Iran to report for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. But I still have the notes I sent back to my then news editor, Ivan Barnes. The Shah's acolytes, I said, had been insufferably arrogant, but “I found that this arrogance had disappeared with the revolution. I was treated with courtesy and kindness almost everywhere I went and found Iranians much more aware of the implications of world events than ... the inhabitants of Arab countries. There was a straightforward quality about Iranians in the country as well as the towns that I couldn't help admiring. They were thirsting to talk about anything.
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