Word: shah
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Saddam Hussein has every reason to be worried. Five years after the revolution that toppled the Shah Ayatullah Khomeini's theocratic regime has consolidated its power at home, settled most of its international debts and demonstrated that it is willing to hurl a virtually limitless number of young volunteers against Iraq in kamikaze-like assaults (see following story). In three separate offensives last week, tens of thousands of Iranians, some of them barely nine or ten years old and armed merely with rifles and grenades, tried to break through Iraq's defenses, only to be cut down...
Each side, curiously, feels that the odds favor its opponent. Iran is apparently convinced that Iraq now has the edge in military equipment. Both the Soviet Union and France are keeping Baghdad well supplied, while the Khomeini government cannot replace or repair the U.S. equipment it inherited from the Shah. Many of Iran's naval vessels have either been lost or are out of service because of a shortage of spare parts. According to Washington analysts, Iran now has only 25 working F-4 fighter-bombers out of a prewar total of 190; just 30 operable F-5 fighters...
...period characterized by student dissent--Harvard students protested the appearance of Shah Muhammed Reza Pahlevi of Iran, interrupting his speech several times in an overcrowded Sanders Theatre...
...conflict to its own political advantage. At the time of the outbreak of the war Iran was in a state of anarchy; the Khomeini regime, though officially in power, had very limited control over the country. The various political groups that had united to oust the Shah were in the midst of a power struggle that had taken the country to the brink of civil war. Khomeini shrewdly used the war to restore unity to the country by redefining the struggle between the two nations as a battle in the eternal war between good and evil forces. In short...
...tool for political repression and the war as a justification for national crises--political, social, or economic--the regime has managed to eliminate all its rivals. Today, the only threat to Khomeini's power comes from within the army--that gigantic military establishment built by the late Shah. For four years the Khomeini regime has used the war to keep the army out of the capital and thus avert the possibility of a military coup d'etat. In order to prevent the emergence of military heroes, it has tried to attribute as few military victories as possible...