foucault-and-the-iranian-revolution-janet-afary

Appendix 193
The more the disturbances increase, they told me, the more the government,
in an attempt to maintain order, is being forced to call on soldiers who
lack both training and the willingness to follow orders. And these troops have
the opportunity to discover that they are not dealing with international communism,
but rather with the street, with the bazaar merchants, with workers,
with the unemployed, men like their brothers, as they themselves would be
if they were not soldiers: "We can make them shoot once, but not twice; in
Tabriz eight months ago, 18 it was necessary to change the entire garrison; and
even though we brought regiments to Tehran from remote corners of the provinces,
it will still be necessary to change them rapidly." It was confirmed to
me that on Black Friday at least one officer had been killed by his soldiers
when he gave the order to shoot at the crowd, and also that some of the·
soldiers had committed suicide the next day.
As agitation develops under the banner of this Islam, to which the whole
army adheres, 19 the soldiers and the officers discover that they do not have
enemies in front of them, but rather masters above them. And when an army
learns, at the moment of combat, that instead of enemies it has masters, what
does it do?
"Does not a Nasser or a Qaddafi emerge from its ranks?"
The officer hesitates a second.
"If this Qaddafi is patriotic, legalist, democratic, and religious, I would
accept him, and I believe that we would accept him."
"Yes, of course, he would be all of that on the day he comes to power. But
the next day?"
"As popular as he is, his popularity would cease at the very instant that
he became a dictator."
And he added: "Do not forget that there is nothing in the army that is
intended to make it popular. We would accept a democraticleader that would
emerge from it, but not a dictatorship emanating from it."
I remembered, then, what lots of others had said to me, that the large
size of the Iranian army could not be justified by national defense. Apparently,
it would be swept away by a Soviet attack within eight minutes. Its
sale task, according to this hypothesis, would be to practice a scorched-earth
strategy-in other words, to destroy the country. Therefore, such a dispropor­
tionately large force only has meaning insofar as it ensures internal order or
policing at the regional level. One of its most recent military interventions
was in Afghanistan shortly after the coup d'etat. 20 It has the potential to attack
from the rear the entire battlefield of the Middle East. It is a regional
intervention force throughout Southwest Asia. In short, it is too brittle and
divided to impose, with or without the shah, the American order in Iran; it is