PREMIER MOSSADEGH of Iran has become a dictator overnight. For six months he is the state. Parliament has abdicated in his favor for six months. If he wants a new law, he writes it himself and passes it himself. If he can get obedience from public officials, the army, and the law enforcement agencies, he can make any changes that are practically possible. He can’t make barren, poverty-ridden Iran a rich country; but he can institute basic reforms the absence of which has brought Iran to the brink of collapse and disaster.

And the surprising thing is that he seems to be in earnest about instituting such reforms. During the year and one-half when he was premier but not dictator pro tem, he pretended that no reforms were needed—that all Iran’s troubles were the fault of Britain, and would end after the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. was nationalized and the British driven out. The wealthy landlords whose feudal rule was the real cause of Iran’s poverty and backwardness liked that line. But now that Mossadegh has all the power in his own hands, he is moving quickly to break the grip of the landlords. It is not true, despite Lord Acton, that all power corrupts. It has apparently sobered Dr. Mossadegh and given him a deep sense of responsibility.

His land-reform decree, judging by news reports, is the most forward-looking law adopted in the Middle East since Kemal Ataturk modernized Turkey. Its effect will be to destroy the abuses of the old landlord system under which the Iranian peasant was a hopeless serf, paying 80 per cent of his crop to absentee landlords and struggling against a lifelong load of debt extracted by usurers charging up to 300 per cent interest.

The Mossadegh decree strikes at the heart of the old system. Increasing the peasant’s share of the crop is the least of it. It sets up a clear, practical system of enforcement with landlord representation but under majority control of the peasants. It adopts the Scandinavian system of cooperatives to take care of such essentials as clean water, vocational education, sanitation, and low-interest loans. It ends the subservience of the villages to the federal government by providing for decentralization and local autonomy.

This is precisely the sort of program which American Point Four officials in Iran have incessantly preached. Under it, they can make every dollar count for the salvation of Iran. If it goes through without a hitch, the six months of Mossadegh’s dictatorship may prove to be the most revolutionary and constructive in Iran’s history.