Enterprise in Iran

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THE political affairs of men and nations have always been profoundly affected by water. This has been conspicuously true of the waters of those great rivers that flow from their mountain sources through the vast plains and highlands lying to the north of the Persian Gulf, into which these rivers empty.

More than five thousand years ago it was the skillful use of the great rivers in what is today known as the Khuzestan region of western Iran that provided much of the sinews of military strength and political skills making possible, first, the Elamite kingdom so familiar to readers of the Old Testament, and, later, the Persian Empire, the first world government. Because they nourished the governmental centers and the granary of an empire that at one time ruled the civilized world, from Greece to India, the rivers of the Khuzestan region have left their influence upon political events and thought, from that day to this; their heritage lives on, too, in the art and the humanistic values, the language and the poetry of the whole Western world.

The Persian Empire of ancient days declined; the extensive system of water conservation in the Khuzestan region was impaired or destroyed, by invasion or neglect; the green plains and wooded uplands, once the seat of plenty and power, became what Lord Curzon described as "a desert over which the eye may roam unrested for miles." The great irrigation works gone, the abundant waters of the rivers of Khuzestan flowed uncontrolled and largely unused to the sea; periodic floods inundated vast areas, infecting more and more land with the poison of salinity. Khuzestan became a region of poverty, disease and despair.

Then, after centuries of obscurity, Khuzestan emerged early in this century as one of the world's richest oil fields and a principal supplier of petroleum to Europe. These mineral riches, however, did not restore the basic strength of this strategic region. For the rivers continued to flow unused to the sea and the land remained barren; despite the riches of oil, the condition of life of all but a small fraction of the people remained as it had for centuries--at a very low ebb...