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homes and sprayed the inhabitants with machine gun bullets.
The new Iranian leaders called their harshness "Islamic justice."
Just a short time earlier, these same leaders had condemned far more
humane behavior as tyranny. When the Ayatollah had cried out
steadily for the Shah's ouster in the sixties and seventies, one of the
inhumanities he'd denounced was the Shah's execution of Iranians on
drug charges. And how many did the Shah put to death? A handful.
Under the Ayatollah, on the other hand, 200 Iranians were killed for
drug trafficking or drug use.198 Many of these were executed after
trials in which the evidence was flimsy at best. When the Shah had
done it, it was an atrocity. When the Ayatollah did it, it was justice.
Justice, then, is a very relative term.
Four years into the Iranian revolution, its first premier, Mehdi
Bazargan (about the only man in Iran who could voice a complaint and
live), said the government of Islamic clergymen had done nothing but
create an "atmosphere of terror, fear, revenge and national
disintegration." "What has the ruling elite done in nearly four years,"
Bazargan asked, "besides bringing death and destruction, packing the
prisons and the cemeteries in every city, creating long queues,
shortages, high prices, unemployment, poverty, homeless people,
repetitious slogans, and a dark future?" What the revolutionary
government had done was simple. It had rearranged the Iranian
pecking order, removing the dominant beast--the Shah--and replacing
him with the Ayatollah. Along the way, Khomeini had moved the
Islamic clergymen to the top of the hierarchical heap. Just as in the case
of Vercingetorix, one man's freedom had meant another's oppression.
That principle applies not just to the pecking order within a
country, but to the pecking order without. The Iranian clerics had not
only wanted to move up in the domestic pecking order, but to climb in
the international hierarchy--the pecking order of nations.
In the days of the Shah, Iranian revolutionaries had lectured
constantly about the evils of foreign domination. But once the
zens with suspicious faces. Gangs of revolutionary thugs broke into
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