Perhaps there is more oil than attar in Iran’s latest explosion, just as in some of the other crises that have shaken the country in recent years.

Yet in the struggle over the return of Shah Mohammed Riza Pahlevi from his brief, voluntary exile and the difficulties in which deposed Premier Mossadegh is embroiled there is fresh evidence of the part age-old longings are playing in politics everywhere. [Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Mohammad Mossadegh]

The oil which lies under the arid land of Iran in a fabulous layer of “black gold” is of itself comparatively unimportant to most of the people of Iran. They do not want it to run cars and furnaces and industrial plants, or for tractors in fields which still are scratched by hand plows, or for planes and the other vehicles of a vast war machine.

But by now there are few peasants in villages so remote that they do not realize what oil can buy. And that made them fertile ground for Mossadegh’s impassioned screeds against Britain and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and his charge that the Empire of Darius was being exploited by foreigners and robbed of its most precious possession.

But Mossadegh hasn’t been able to better the lot of the people of Persia. He refused to dicker with Britain for a bigger share of the profits. But when he took over the oil, there was no money or knowhow in Iran to refine it. He did not get the help from the United States, which he had promised his people in his optimism over the cleavage which he thought oil rivalry would bring between the English-speaking nations. The loss of about one-third of the government revenues which had been the fruit of the hated arrangement between Iran and Britain could not be made good and the country has been plunged into economic difficulties.

As Iran scraped a hole in the bottom of its government resources, Iraq—next door—sold to the world about as much oil as Iran used to sell. And with the proceeds Iraq is modernizing its cities, instituting land reforms, and providing hospitals and schools. As Iraq Parliament member Arkan Abadi pointed out in Boston yesterday, his nation felt that the new arrangement with Britain for a 50-50 cut in the net profits from oil was much better than the proud independence which was driving Mossadegh into the arms of the Soviet controlled Tudeh party.

Nor is it likely that Mossadegh endeared himself to the 90 percent of the country’s 15,000,000 people who are ill-fed, ill-housed and illiterate by his action on land distribution this Spring.

The young Shah undertook to transfer the immense estates of the Iranian imperial family to the local peasants. His aim was to make it possible for the people to own the land they worked by paying for it on favorable terms over a long period.

His brother, Harvard-trained Prince Abdul Reza Pahlevi, has headed a seven-year program aimed at raising Iran’s living standards. [Abdol Reza Pahlavi] Mossadegh, however, claiming that the division “upset orderly relations between the other big landlords and their tenant” last May forced the Shah to transfer his privately held estates to the Mossadegh government. He promised that the income would be divided among the ministries, without designating any in particular.

Since some 300 landowners control most of the arable land of Persia this appears to be putting the welfare of the few ahead of the good of the many—and turning the clock backward.

But people everywhere have begun to be stirred up by the hope that they may own land, perhaps the oldest and most precious of man’s economic aspirations. It is possible that the Shah, modern as an American undergraduate, but with his understanding and feeling for the attar-flavored culture of ancient Persia, is closer to his people than the emotional, dictatorial Premier.

There are new ways everywhere—but they serve old dreams.