Word: shahs
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Meanwhile, the U.S. was trying to find a way to help calm the continuing upheaval in Iran. Even as the White House was assertively supporting Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, George Ball, an Under Secretary of State in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, now acting as a special consultant to Carter, was reportedly recommending that the U.S. encourage civilian rule. Finally, Carter was getting ready for a Western summit Jan. 5 and 6 on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe with British Prime Minister James Callaghan, French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing and West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt...
...missed deadline was especially unfortunate because a peace pact would have brought a welcome measure of stability to the Middle East at a time when the troubles in Iran threaten to plunge the entire region into turmoil. With the Shah's crown slipping and Sadat's peace initiative stalling, the moderate Arab camp is becoming increasingly vulnerable to attacks from radicals. A defeat of the Middle East's moderates would be a monumental setback for Western interests...
Limited though the discussion may have been, the option of sending in U.S. troops has been considered in the Government-but not favorably. There are contingency planners on both sides of the Potomac River who would have dearly loved to design an American military intervention to prop up the Shah or seize the Iranian oilfields, but they lacked the pretext that they would be protecting Iran from outside interference. "Hell," says one military official, "we would have been the outside interference...
...doubts that outside forces, inimical to the Shah and the U.S. alike, have been stirring the broth in Iran. But they neither cooked the broth nor lit the fire under it. True, the KGB has a big station in Tehran. True, some Iranian leftists have been trained by the Palestinians. But the inescapable fact is that Communist and Arab agitation do not begin to explain the extent of opposition to the Shah, and there fore do not begin to justify a superpower confrontation...
...dilemma in Iran has been illustrated in numerous conversations with supporters of the Shah, both in the Government and out. A theme in such conversations goes like this: "There is no alternative to the Shah." All right, fine. But what if, even though there is no alternative to the Shah, there should be no Shah tomorrow? Or next week? Then what? Such questions usually elicit a stubborn repetition of the statement: "There is no alternative to the Shah." That argument, which is beginning to sound like a slogan, really means: There is no acceptable alternative to the Shah...