REVOLUTIONARY DISINTEGRATION

By LARA MARLOWE/TEHRAN

How potent is Iran's variety of militant political Islam? To Bill Clinton and Warren Christopher, it is one of the most dangerous forces on earth. But listen to what an Iranian housewife named Hafezeh has to say. Earlier this month, just before the sixth anniversary of the death of Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, she sat on a carpet inside his gold-domed mausoleum. Under her loosely draped chador she wore blue jeans and a bright turquoise blouse.

"I was 16 when I joined the Revolutionary Guards [in 1979]," she said. "I used to go out in the patrol car with the sisters [female Revolutionary Guards]. They were looking for women who weren't wearing proper Islamic covering. They threw acid in their faces or said, 'Let me take off your lipstick,' and cut their lips with a razor hidden in a Kleenex." She also recalls the early lure of plunder. "The government offered my husband and me a villa in north Tehran. It was incredible, like a palace. My husband said, 'No, we can't take it.' But there were many other Revolutionary Guards who drank alcohol and took people's houses. It sickened us, and we both quit. Now my husband is a truck driver. He drives to Germany. When he comes home I have a bottle of whisky waiting, and we drink it together. I dress like the loose women in Europe for him. I don't think God minds."

In Iran today, many men and women like Hafezeh maintain their faith in Islam but have distanced themselves from the revolution and its strict way of life. Pervasive corruption and a troubled economy have deepened disillusionment, and in recent months serious riots have broken out in several cities. Meanwhile, the U.S. and Israel regard Iran as a rogue state that seeks to export terror, build nuclear weapons and sabotage the Middle East peace process. When the Clinton Administration recently imposed a complete economic embargo, the rhetoric was harsher than that against any other country. But however real the threat from Tehran may be, one factor is not widely understood: the revolution is decaying. Iran is already severely undermining itself.

The schism between a diminishing core of loyal revolutionaries and the rest of Iranian society is growing. The divide is religious, political and especially cultural. "When I came back from the war with Iraq, I was disgusted," says a Revolutionary Guard commander. "I saw my friends martyred, and here all the young people wanted was to be like Madonna and Michael Jackson." By their way of dress, Iranians signal where they stand in the cultural divide. Devout revolutionaries wear dark colors. Men favor baggy trousers, long-sleeved shirts buttoned to the neck and several days' growth of beard; women wear layers of Islamic clothing known as hijab, including the magneh (a headdress) and the chador. On the other side, the garbzadeh -- literally, "those poisoned by the West" -- wear jeans and colored short-sleeved shirts if they are men; the women wear a raincoat-like "uniform," or manteau, and tie their scarves loosely.

"Uniforms" far outnumber chadors in Tehran. "We don't sell chadors anymore," says Hossein, a clerk in an Islamic dress store on Vali Asr Street, the capital's main thoroughfare. "Most of the ladies in Tehran wear 'uniforms.' If they said women could wear what they want, we'd start making miniskirts tomorrow." Then he turned serious. "People don't need this kind of Islam. They need to live decently. Only old men go to the mosque now. We heard too many lies there."

If Iran's citizens are indifferent about the values of the revolution, many of the country's officials are deeply cynical. Corruption permeates Iranian society. Nothing can be accomplished in Tehran -- from booking an airline seat to sending a fax abroad to extracting goods from customs -- without paying a bribe. Even the Revolutionary Guards who run the morality-enforcing komitehs can be bought. When parties are busted for playing loud music or serving alcohol, guests are still taken to local komiteh headquarters. So are women who show too much hair under their scarves, and unmarried couples caught in public together. But in Tehran such cases now rarely end up in revolutionary courts. Once they are paid off, the Revolutionary Guards let the offenders go. What used to be a system of enforcing strict religious rules about behavior has devolved into an excuse for a shakedown.

Everyone has a story about how the Imam's principles have been corroded. Tehran newspapers have reported the arrest of dozens of bank officials, oil company executives, provincial mayors-even a member of parliament-on charges of bribe taking and embezzlement. A young woman in a clothing store in the shantytown of Islam Shahr, where riots occurred in April, gives a gruesome example. Pretending to examine merchandise, she whispers anxiously, "My neighbors buried their 16-year-old son last week. The government made them pay 8 million rials [$2,700] to get back his body. We don't know if he was killed in the riots or later."

While the corrupt get richer, the rest of the country gets poorer. In just five years, Iran has accumulated nearly $40 billion in foreign debt. Prices for staple items have doubled or tripled so far this year. Sixteen years after the revolution, the average per capita income is just a quarter of what it was in 1979. How does the world's fourth largest oil-producing nation, with the second largest gas reserves, drive its economy into the ground? Officials blame reconstruction from the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war and needed infrastructure projects. The country is also in the throes of a painful transition from a controlled to a free-market economy. But the government made colossal errors. From 1990 until 1993 the central bank depleted reserves by selling dollars for rials to government companies, ministries and the powerful, autonomous Islamic foundations at just 5% of the dollar's real cost.

The owner of a kebab restaurant in poor south Tehran surveys the bedraggled unemployed men outside. "People are so hungry they're stealing," he notes. His restaurant is empty, but the men hear him complaining and come in. They nod agreement while he continues, "The riots in Islam Shahr and Akbar Abad spread like wildfire. Down the road in Shush, people broke windows. In the Shah's time, rice was 70 rials a kilo; now it's 7,000. If the government hears me say this, they will shoot me as a counterrevolutionary."

America's actions have added to the economic problems. When Clinton announced the embargo on April 30, the rial collapsed. No other country has joined the embargo, and Iran will find other buyers for the $3.5 billion worth of oil that the U.S. purchased in 1994. But the boycott may hurt nonetheless: most of Iran's oil-production equipment is American, and badly in need of spare parts.

Iran's economic crisis may be endangering its nuclear energy program, which the U.S. fears is a stepping-stone to the development of nuclear weapons. Negotiations for Chinese reactors are stalled over lack of money. Russia is selling Iran a light-water reactor -- despite U.S. objections -- for $1 billion, but Tehran is half a billion dollars in arrears with its payments for other Russian imports.

Compounding Iran's difficulties, the government is divided and weak. President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and his allies have often been called pragmatists and their opponents hard-liners, but the labels do not convey the multitude of factions vying for power. "Only personal interests and family interests are priorities-for all of them," says a longtime diplomat. Though himself a mullah, Rafsanjani would like to weaken the clergy's grip on Iran's domestic affairs. But he lost control when a conservative, hostile parliament was voted in three years ago. "Rafsanjani is Iran's Gorbachev -- he wants to, but he can't," says the diplomat.

The U.S. calls Iran's assistance to such radical Islamic groups as Hizballah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad "support for terrorism." These groups say they are fighting Israeli occupation. Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati asserts that the government "is against any kind of terrorism" and implies that hard-liners trying to sabotage Iran's relations with the West are responsible for the many assassinations of Iranian opponents in Europe.

As for the nuclear program, the U.S. and Israel say that Iran could possess nuclear weapons in five years. The Iranians respond that the Shah spent billions on nuclear power, and that as signatories to the nonproliferation treaty, they have a right to develop nuclear technology for peaceful uses. "You use nuclear technology in medicine, in agriculture, in genetic engineering," says Velayati. But the large number of Iranians being trained as nuclear specialists, the country's huge energy reserves and the very long odds that biotech companies will be cropping up in Iran all inspire suspicion.

For all that, Iran is still a much less fervid, single-minded country than it was under Khomeini. Suffering as it does from a discredited ideology, unbridled corruption and a ruined economy, it most nearly resembles the Soviet Union in its last years. At the moment there is no realistic alternative to the revolutionary institutions that govern Iran, but in the Soviet Union in the early 1980s there was no obvious alternative to the Communist Party, and still it collapsed. Moreover, Iran is threatened by the pull of Western culture and democracy. Iranians crave the prosperity they see in the West- but especially the West's freedom to think, live and speak as they wish.