Forty years ago on Friday, a great nation changed for the worst. It was Feb. 1, 1979. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini sat in the first-class compartment of a chartered Air France Boeing 747 flight from Paris, accompanied by dozens of reporters. He was returning to Iran, the country from which he had been exiled for more than 14 years. When the plane entered Iranian airspace, Peter Jennings, then a correspondent for ABC News, asked Khomeini how he felt about coming back to Iran.
"Hichi," the ayatollah responded, his face unmoved, like stone. "Nothing."
Did the bearded 78-year-old cleric, wearing a black robe and turban, really not care? No doubt the response seemed strange to those on the jet, and it still seems strange 40 years later. Critics have argued that Khomeini's remark suggested he was apathetic about Iran and its people. Others say he wanted to distance himself from human emotions and focus on the will of God. Either way, the leader of Iran's Islamic Revolution was creating a future for the country that did not care about the Iranian people.
Khomeini landed in Mehrabad International Airport in Tehran, where millions of enthusiastic Iranians came out for his arrival, many viewing him as a divine figure. From there, Khomeini oversaw the complete overthrow of the monarch of Iran, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, and with it the collapse of Iran's 2,500-year-old monarchy. The ayatollah then engineered the formation of the Islamic Republic, which he ruled as its first supreme leader until his death in 1989.
During those 10 years in Iran, Khomenei managed to make his country a pariah, increasingly isolated both politically and economically. Iran's great civilization was forced by the barrel of a gun to submit to a murderous Islamist theocracy. The ayatollah showed unmatched disdain for Israel and the United States, which he dubbed the "great Satan." He supported a group of young radicals who stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and held more than 50 American diplomats hostage for 444 days. He refused to accept a ceasefire in the brutal Iran-Iraq War, subjecting the Iranian people to unnecessary misery, in part because of an absurd notion about taking Jerusalem. He oversaw monstrous human rights abuses, most notoriously ordering the mass execution of thousands of political prisoners in the summer of 1988. Countless Iranians fled their home country, leading to a massive brain drain. The legacy of Cyrus the Great was drowning in the blood of innocent Iranians.
Iran was of course no paradise under the shah, an authoritarian who in the 1970s became a certifiable megalomaniac. He also hated Iranians like the ruling ayatollahs do today. Yet the shah took important steps to modernize Iran's economy and society, and he was a strategic, albeit difficult, ally of the United States. Moreover, human rights abuses under the mullahs only became worse than during the shah's reign. In short, Iran went from being a respected but troubled power to being a revolutionary mess.
Under Khomeini, Iran also went from an authoritarian ruler who liked the West to a tyrant who despised the West. Indeed, the ayatollah implemented the Islamic Republic's core foundation: velayat-e faqih, or guardianship of the jurisprudent, Khomeini's concept of an Islamic system of clerical rule that gives the supreme leader ultimate political and spiritual authority until the Twelfth Imam returns as a messiah figure. Which is worse?
Regarding Iranian foreign and defense policies, the main issues of concern for Washington, some argue that Iran's aggression in the Middle East today is simply the continuation of 2,500-year-old Persian imperialism. Yet the shah was only interested in hegemony in the Persian Gulf; he could care less about the Levant and elsewhere in the region. If someone told the shah that, after he was deposed, Iran would create a paramilitary force in Lebanon called Hezbollah, which it gives $700 million a year as part of its drive for preeminence across the Middle East, he would have slapped his palm to his forehead in befuddlement. The key difference between Iran's foreign policy under the shah and under the Islamic Republic is that the latter introduced ideology, which drives decisions that otherwise make no logical sense as most Americans understand it. Does Iran really need to entrench itself in Syria to form a military front against Israel? What strategic interest is at stake without factoring in anti-Western, anti-Semitic ideology?
So what is Khomeini's legacy? The anti-imperialist created an imperialist war machine that tries to disguise its raw brutality in the cloak of religious piety. And he created a wannabe-totalitarian state that hangs homosexuals in public and terrorizes minorities but still cannot stop the Iranian people from protesting against the regime's brutal rule. In the most twisted of ironies, Iran is the only place on earth where Iranians do not excel.
This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Islamic Republic of Iran. One can hope that next year does not mark the 41st, and that Iran can remove the first words of its name and just be known as Iran, leaving its dark chapter under Khomeini's theocratic project in the garbage where it belongs.