Word: shahs
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...RECENT DEPARTURE of the Shah from Iran probably marks the end of his reign. His position is as hopeless as it was 26 years ago. Yet in 1953 he returned. Many know the CIA played a role in his restoration. But few know the details of that involvement with all its implications for Iran, the Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. foreign policy...
After arrival in Tehran Roosevelt set up headquarters in the basement of the U.S. military mission. He was visited there by General Fazhollah Zahedi, Mossadeq's disaffected Minister of the Interior once described by Soroya, the Shah's second wife, as "half swashbuckler and half Don Juan." Zahedi swashbuckled but was finally compelled to agree with Roosevelt that the prospects for a successful coup were poor. The Shah was depressed and dispirited, incapable of taking any decision, while the armed forces seemed increasingly behind Mossadeq...
...internal politics is more than just stupid, impractical and ultimately rarely successful; it is wrong. In fact, pragmatic failures ultimately have their roots in the essentially immoral nature of any such intervention. In Iran, the frustrating, tragedy-engendering contradiction that helped spark the awesome wave of opposition to the Shah lies in the conflict between President Carter's apparent commitment to basic human rights (that had raised opposition hopes that the U.S. would pressure the Shah) and the administration's continued sale of weapons to the Iranian armed forces. When U.S. attempts to restrain the opposition's goals redoubled...
...long as we saw only anarchy and cultural strangeness, our commitment to the Shah could not be questioned; he was the only game in town. Combine those blinders with a belief that the United States ought to do something to combat the indigenous forces of anarchy and superstition in foreign lands, and the result is a media urging the U.S. action to save the Shah somehow and a government fumbling to find some way of intervention that would accomplish this Herculean labor...
...press coverage of Iran, the question of whether the U.S. could directly intervene to save the Shah received significant consideration. Official actions were confused, but even Time magazine, often hostile to democratic administrations, conceded in its cover story on the entire "Cresent of Crisis," there was quite possibly very little that Carter could have done." But that article and most of the other press coverage retained, at least implicitly, the idea that the U.S. should intervene. The cultural blindness that led to press coverage that either ignored the cultural roots of the Iranian protest movement or to the belittling...