On Oct 23, 2007, at 5:30 PM, Shane Mage wrote:
> In
> 1979, after the Shah abandoned ship, the Majlis elected the leader of
> the Mossaqeq party, Shapur Bakhtiar, as prime minister. His "regime,"
> nationalist, democratic, and progressive in program, was overthrown
> in days by the Khomeinists.
It was a bit messier than that, wasn't it? The early stages of the revolution contained many tendencies. Much of the left deferred to the clerics, but it took some time for Khomeini to consolidate his power (i.e., jail and shoot a lot of the people who made the revolution).
It's funny to hear Charles Brown characterize Yoshie's current thinking as fresh, since it sounds a lot like a recap of the stuff much of the Iranian left thought in the late 1970s. (I posted chunks of Val Moghadam's essay on precisely that topic here a few weeks ago.) I.e., the clerics were ok, anti-imperialism trumps all, liberals are fellow travelers of imperialism, etc.
Doug