Small fry in Iran's big picture By Paul Sheehan -The Sydney Morning Herald

With the welcome news that David Hicks will soon be back in Australia and free by the end of the year, it is a good time to reassess the gravitational force that engulfed him, a force that is spreading wider and growing stronger. Nobody saw it coming. The revolution was unforseen and unheralded.

As usual, the Central Intelligence Agency did not see it coming. Nor did the secret services of the Middle East. Or the academic community, or the media. Not even those who espoused the revolution saw it coming until the day it arrived.

That day was January 16, 1979. There was no election, no war, no coup.

Suddenly, the most loyal client of the US in the Muslim world, the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, left the country his military and vast secret service could no longer control. He was soon replaced as national leader, by the sheer weight of popular will, by an old man living in exile, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

The great majority rejoiced at the fall of the shah. Even the revolutionary leftists who dominated dissent. Few in the intelligensia took these primitives seriously. Anti-American imperialism trumped everything.

The first sign of what was to come arrived within days of the mullahs and their followers taking control of government. Women were "invited" to wear the veil. Those who declined found themselves beaten and abused by the gangs of self-appointed revolutionary guards who roamed the streets.

The revolution reserved its most brutal behaviour for the universities.

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