    66

    citi

    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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