Iran Death to Just About Everything

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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."