Word: shahs
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...ROMANS never made it to Persia. Twenty centuries later, the Germans couldn't break through either. But by 1953, American agents managed to move directly to the heart of Iranian politics, placing Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi on the throne his father had fled in 1941. And once he disappeared behind the awesome symbols and deadly trappings of autocratic power--the Peacock Throne and the phantom jet--both the Shah and the United States lost sight of any Iran beyond the central court and the romantic exotica of ancient Persia...
...though the romance crumbled and the Shah now enjoys what promises to be an extended vacation, the American press has presented nothing but the exotic--the strange--in the opposition to a man both the U.S. government and press has tried to maintain. American press coverage throughout the current crisis has reflected western cultural biases, and a belief that the United States could and should mold the political affairs of another nation--the most persistent moral and pragmatic error in U.S. foreign policy development...
...cultural bias appeared in subtle ways throughout the news columns of magazines and dailies. Islam and its prescriptions proved most difficult for editors to swallow. Particularly during the fall, press reports in this country regularly juxtaposed the image of a progressive, modernizing Shah with intransigent religious fanatics whose opposition to the Shah was based on medieval social concepts. The Islamic religion is so clearly alien as to arouse the fear of press writer and reader alike. References to the veils worn by women and Ayetollah Khomeini's orthodox beliefs reinforce this vision of difference, and hence, subtly, inferiority. Newsweek...
Some editorials made the American impression even more clear. The San Fransisco Chronicle, asking what kind of government Iran could possibly have lacking the Shah concluded that "it would be hard to convince us that any modern state as large and economically advanced as Iran could conceivably be ruled successfully or for long by the kind of fanatic priesthood that Khomeini symbolizes...
Egyptian President Anwar Sadat managed to hog the rug, but Gerald Ford didn't seem to mind not getting the full red-carpet treatment on his first visit to the Middle East. In Egypt, the former President stayed at the Aswan Oberoi along with another tourist, the Shah of Iran. Ford, accompanied by his wife Betty, also stopped off in Israel. "I came as a private citizen," he said, and hence felt little compunction about beating a hasty retreat from a dinner with Premier Menachem Begin. After all, Private Citizen Ford had a date to watch the Super Bowl...