Word: shah
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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None of these trends could match in power and drama, or in menacing implications for the future, the eruption in Iran. A year ago, in its cover story on 1978's Man of the Year, Chinese Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping, TIME noted that "the Shah of Iran's 37-year reign was shaken by week upon week of riots." Shortly thereafter, the Shah fell in one of the greatest political upheavals of the post-World War II era, one that raised troubling questions about the ability of the U.S. to guide or even understand the seething passions of the Third...
Almost to the very end, the conventional wisdom of Western diplomats and journalists was that the Shah would survive; after all, he had come through earlier troubles seemingly strengthened. In 1953 the Shah had actually fled the country. But he was restored to power by a CIA-inspired coup that ousted Mohammed Mossadegh, the nationalist Prune Minister who had been TIME'S Man of the Year for 1951 because he had "oiled the wheels of chaos." In 1963 Iran had been swept by riots stirred up by the powerful Islamic clergy against the Shah's White Revolution. Among other things...
...denounced the land reform as a fraud and the Shah as a traitor to Islam. In 1964 Khomeini was arrested and exiled, first to Turkey, then to Iraq, where he continued to preach against the idolatrous Shah and to promulgate his vision of Iran as an "Islamic republic...
...preachments seemed to have little effect, as the Shah set about building the most thoroughly Westernized nation in all of the Muslim world. The progress achieved in a deeply backward country was stunning. Petroleum revenues built steel mills, nuclear power plants, telecommunication systems and a formidable military machine, complete with U.S. supersonic fighters and missiles. Dissent was ruthlessly suppressed, in part by the use of torture in the dungeons of SAVAK, the secret police. It is still not clear how widespread the tortures and political executions were; but the Shah did not heed U.S. advice to liberalize his regime...
...Shah had alienated almost all elements of Iranian society. Westernized intellectuals were infuriated by rampant corruption and repression; workers and peasants by the selective prosperity that raised glittering apartments for the rich while the poor remained in mud hovels; bazaar merchants by the Shah-supported businessmen who monopolized bank credits, supply contracts and imports; the clergy and their pious Muslim followers by the gambling casinos, bars and discothéques that seemed the most visible result of Westernization. (One of the Shah's last prime ministers also stopped annual government subsidies to the mullahs.) Almost everybody hated the police terror...