Word: shahs
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...been a bad year for right-wing dictatorships-and for the U.S., which has often supported them. First Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi of Iran, then General Anastasio Somoza Debayle of Nicaragua were swept into exile by largely home-grown revolutions. Each had long been taken for granted as the absolute ruler of his country and as a friend of the U.S. Yet in the end, Somoza's national guard, cloned from the U.S. Marine Corps, was as ineffective against the Sandinista guerrillas as the Shah's army and secret police-the best that petro-billions could buy-were...
...spectacles in Iran and Nicaragua did not fit the pattern that Americans have grown used to in watching the rise and fall of client dictators. Far from propping up the Shah and Somoza, as the U.S. had so often been accused of doing, the Carter Administration seemed to be helping topple them, or at least undermining them with criticism of their human rights abuses...
...vehemently reject Kissinger's complaint that they overthrew Somoza. The Sandinistas did that themselves. All the U.S. did was to administer a diplomatic coup de grâce in order to end the civil war. To preserve the status quo in Iran or Nicaragua-i.e., keep the Shah or Somoza in power-would probably have required direct military intervention, with G.I.s fighting alongside the Shah's imperial troops and Somoza's national guard. Even then, the Islamic and Sandinista revolutions might well have triumphed, leaving American prestige and strategic interests far more badly damaged than they...
...Administration, in defending the sale, pointed out that Iran needed the oil quickly because of sabotage on pipelines near the big Iranian refinery at Abadan. The White House also argued that the sale could have important advantages for the U.S. in paving a new relationship with post-Shah Iran...
...immediately closed down 44 papers and magazines, and expelled five more Western correspondents (bringing to eleven the number deported thus far). In a particularly provocative move, it evicted a leftist Islamic group, the people's Mujahedin, from its headquarters in the former offices of the Shah's Pahlavi Foundation. Mujahedin leaders claimed Khomeini himself had assured them that they could keep their headquarters if they engaged only in normal political activity, but the authorities in Tehran did not budge...