Will the Shah be toppled from his shaky throne? After the months of rioting and arson, Charles Douglas-Home asks whether there is still room for compromise in Iran Only one Shah of Iran has died naturally on his throne in the last 200 years. Thus the crisis which engulfs Mohammed Reza Shah today-though the most serious of his reign-is no new condition to Iranian history or to his owvn 37 years on the Pea- cock Throne. Since he became Shah in 1941, when his country was occupied by Russia and Great Britain, he has been wounded by a wvould-be assassin in 1949, nar- rowvly escaped death by machine- gunning in 1965, and fled the country completely for a few davs in 1953. In between these violent punctuation marks he conducted an incessant war of political manoeuvre until, dur- ing the last 15 years, he seemed to achieve total ascendancy w.ithin Iran. Starting in the early 1960s wkith major land and educational reforms, he gradually stretched his prerogatives to their limits -and beyond-to override the opposition to his plans to deve- lop Iran. He was determined to bring Iran into the twentieth century regardless of its absorp- tive capacity for new techno- logy, or its collective, psycholo- gical and cultural readiness for such a manic pace of change. He was a not-so-young man m a hurry. The oil revenue, he was told, would run out soon enough. In the limited time available he wanted to create a modern state to hand over to the son born to him in 19O- a highly personalized view of his duties perhaps, but one in- duced by years of absolutism, surrounded by sycophants and technocrats who indulged his almost infantile determination to play around with his country as though it was a piece of per- sonal equipment. In destroying the traditional structure of Iran- ian society-or trying to-they also destroyed their ability to listen in to the strains and ten- sions of that society which would eventually explode. This year, the explosion came. Now, after months of rioting and arson, thousands of deaths, two changes of government, martial law, an unprecedented personal confession by the Shah of past misdeeds like torture and cor- ruption committed, after all, in his name-Iran is pausing for breath. Is it too late for com- promise between two extremes ? The first extreme prospect facing Iran is the ' Khomenim" solution, called for by the Paris. based preacher who insists that the Iranian people must remain organized - in revolt until the Shah is toppled. -Strikes should continue until the, country col. lapses and the army responds to the call from the. mosque not to shoot at demonstrators, but to join in the creation--of an "Islamic republic ". - It is: more likely that the army,'faced with defections, los- ing control -at- the operational level: rather than the level of' senior generals, would perceive that its choice -was to remain intact by jettisoning the Shah, or else to fight to a bitter end with the Shah at its head. There is no other organized power in Iran. 'If the army disintegrates, the country 'disintegrates- too. The second,- and opp'osite extreme, is that the Shah sits it out, and the army remains loyal. Strikes, arson, country- wide rioting would all take their toll, but in the end the anger would have been exhausted. The Shah would remain on his throne, battered and discredited. But would he then try to put things right in time to hand over to his son ? Would- this in turn provoke the people into using such a hand. over for one further attempt to- reject the monarchy once and for all ? Either of these extremes could occur. Material factors are now no longer relevant to the struggle. An unrepentant will of the Shah on the one hand, on the other the anger of the people-it would simply be a contest in which the greater will would prevail, Between' these two bloody' extremes, is there a middle way which' throws out any hope? Even in the Mosque, under the canopy of Khomeini's abso- lutism, more moderate and thoughtful influences are at work. But they have to cope with the fact that in the 1mosques, in the bazaars-even in' the intelligentsia-the appetite for Khomeini's solu. tion, irrational and short- sighted though it may be, has grown out of a collective rage with the Shah. He is a symbol of all that has gone wrong. As he person- alized and personified Iran's successes, so he is now the symbol of breakdown. Thus Iranians are prepared to. swvallow the Khomeini solution regardless of its consequences. The overriding objective is the Shah's removal. The official political opposi- tion like the National Front has no obvious general support and thus finds it difficult not to play along with most of what Khomeini says. It must hope for evidence of rbore moderate influences emerging from the Mosque. Mr Sanjabi's capitula- tion to the old Ayatollah in Paris is deplored by his col- leagues in Tehran, and- is almost certainly regretted by the Iran-based church leiders as well. - Within the constitutioiial opposition people recognize that the consequence of the Shah's departure now would not actually be an Islamic republic -in any sense other than that the generals would invoke Islam as the Libyans and Paki- stanis do, to legitimize the rule of the gun. So two strands of thinking have emerged: those who believe that some reconciliation can be achieved with the Shah on the throne, and those who believe that the monarchical U, structure can best be preserved without him. This is the area -where the search for a solution is now being made. The most concilia- tory plan is for the Shah to remain on the throne but to concede enormous reductions in the areas of his prerogative. Though the students wvho shout " we will never forgive him" may mean it, they may come to forget him instead. The stick- ing point is that the Shah insists on retaining direct command of the armed forces and possibly even the security set up as 'vell. There are those, however. who feel that the monarchy cannot survive with the Shah on the throne if only because his predominance over the last few years cannot be ironed out of the system while the very man who was so dominant is still there. These quarters believe that the Shah's monarchical fanctions should now be tak-en over by some kind of council of the realm, either until the Crown Prince is ready to take over in two years' time, when he will inherit a much-reduced and circumscribed office, or else until the people have been aslced in a referendum whether they are still in favour of a manarchv. What is incalculable is the capacity of the Shah to respond in time to the need for conces; sions, not just of speech, as in his "mea culpa" statement or in the spectacle of his former advisers being thrown to the wolves of anti-corruption, but in substance-as with his powers over security apparatus, and his evident authority over ministers and generals. He is tense, depressed on the defensive. He needs personal help to coax him rather than to force him into these most difficult decisions of his life. The second incalculable is- the capacity of the religious leaders to -vean their followers away from Khomeini's rhetoric, and recomend and endorse a settlement within the constitu- tion. When I asked the most moderate Shia leader Ayatollah Shariat Madari whether or not he thought the two funda- mental tenets of Iran's 1906 constitution-Islam and the monarchy-should remain unchanged, he said the people should decide in a referendum. The third incalculable is the capacity of the army to go on holding the ring,..-,vithout either souring the opposition beyond redemption with brutality on the streets and persistent arrests, or developing a taste for power themselves on the grounds that, since the Shah has hitherto been the provider and guarantor of their privi- leges but now appears to be shaky, they had better assume power to secure those privileges before somebody else takes them away. The fourth incalculable is the capacity of the people, the strikers, the students, demon. strators, to keep up enough pressure on the Shah to force concessions out of him while stopping short of so crippling Iran that worse is bound to follow. The strikes have to make it clear to him that only a real, visible and irreversible change in his position will take the pressure off. This time the token concessions of previous crises, which he has always managed subsequently to exploit to regain his position, rill not be enough. Will the Shah be toppled from his shaky throne?