Iran "Death to Just About Everything"

By Pico Iyer

The country is an international pariah, isolated from much of the world and at odds with both superpowers. Its ruler is an 86-year-old cleric who lives in near seclusion. For almost six years, it has been mired in a grinding and inglorious war that seems to drag on without end. Reduced to using 20-year- old technology against an enemy that boasts six times as much combat aircraft and four times as much artillery, it has lost an estimated 250,000 lives and still spends $7 billion a year to keep up the fight.

Yet for all its problems, Iran under the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini seems increasingly confident and active. Earlier this month Tehran persuaded its partners in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to limit oil production and thus push up the price. Last week it received two high-level envoys from Syrian President Hafez Assad, the most influential power broker in the Arab world, who called the alliance between the two countries "invulnerable." Now Iran is negotiating with France for the return of $1 billion in Iranian funds that were frozen by Paris after the Ayatullah came to power in 1980.

On the military front, Khomeini's forces remain fiercely motivated after two crucial victories this year against the troops of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Iran recently launched a new drive to create 1,000 new battalions of Revolutionary Guards. Many experts say Khomeini is preparing an all-out assault against Basra, Iraq's second largest city, in an effort to break the deadlock in the war. Says a senior international-relief official who has worked on both sides of the marshy trenches: "The Iranians are certainly beginning to act as if victory is now within reach."

At home, however, the Khomeini regime is increasingly harassed by the People's Mujahedin guerrillas. Last week a car bomb exploded in the bustling heart of the capital during rush hour, leaving 20 people dead. Three days earlier a similar explosion took 13 lives in the holy city of Qom. By week's end the government claimed to have crushed two Iraqi-sponsored "terrorist networks," made up of both monarchists and leftist guerrillas, that Tehran held responsible for the bombings. In London, another bomb shattered a video store belonging to Reza Fazeli, a vocal Khomeini critic. Tehran and the mujahedin blamed each other for the blast, which killed Fazeli's 22-year-old son Bijan.

Iran's conflicts at home and abroad have only inflamed popular zeal for Khomeini's Islamic revolution and its militant embrace of Muslim fundamentalism. When Parliamentary Speaker Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani delivered his latest call to arms last week in the northeastern city of Mashad, thousands of cheering young men seemed ready to lay down their lives for the cause of their homeland. "Every day," reports a Western visitor to Tehran, "there are parades for people going to the front. People are still chanting, 'Death to America! Death to Saddam!' Death to just about everything."

In Washington some observers believe the heralded Iranian attack on Basra could turn out to be a false alarm. "Every year we hear the same thing -- now | comes the final offensive," says Thomas McNaugher, a Persian Gulf watcher at the Brookings Institution, "and every year it peters out." Nonetheless, the prospect, however faint, that Iran could begin to extend its control deeper into Iraq and then through the gulf is too serious to be ignored. Windows in Kuwait already rattle from Iranian artillery bombardments just 15 miles away. Saudi Arabia and other neighboring states are growing increasingly nervous. "Complacency can be fatal," says Gary Sick, a former National Security Council staffer who has kept a close eye on Iran. "The ramifications of a possible Iranian victory are just so enormous that we've got to think them through."

The momentum in the seesaw war has increasingly swung in Iran's favor. In February, Tehran staged its most sophisticated assault of the long and bloody conflict. Named Val Fajr (I Swear by the Dawn), the attack seized the Iraqi oil port of Fao. Iraq recovered briefly by capturing the Iranian border town of Mehran in May, only to lose it again in June. Though it enjoys an enormous advantage in equipment, its reliance on rigid defensive tactics makes its soldiers vulnerable to the night attacks and lightning raids of its enemy. "Remember," says a senior U.S. official, "the Iranians are chess players, and the Arabs are basically not."

But in spite of its growing confidence and successes, Iran remains hobbled by a failing economy. This year's collapse in the price of crude, which accounts for 90% of the country's foreign exchange, has cut its projected 1986 oil revenues from $17 billion to less than $7 billion. That could prove devastating to a nation whose import budget this year is $10 billion. In recent months, stores in Tehran have been chronically short of such staples as butter, rice and lamb. Even economic hardship, however, can serve the regime's interests. Authorities promised one man who was desperate to obtain a TV set that he could have a place on the waiting list -- provided he attend three prayer sessions and three progovernment demonstrations.

For his part, Khomeini remains determined to continue the costly war "to the frontiers of martyrdom." The only other resolution would come from a decisive victory by one side or the other. But even in the event of a Basra offensive, military analysts predict, Iran will still prove unable to win the war and Iraq unlikely to lose it. The only certainty is more blood, and then more.

With reporting by Scott MacLeod/Cairo and Bruce van Voorst/Washington