Word: shah
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...SHAH'S LAST RIDE...
Despite his commiserative subtitle, The Fate of an Ally, William Shawcross does not allow the reader to forget that Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the late Shah of Iran, was a pathetic symbol of a corrupt and repressive regime. His fate was to be thrust, ill-suited by temperament or training, into the leadership of a nation whose strategic geography and petroleum resources dictated a major role in the 20th century. Publicly he professed a grand vision, a White Revolution that would modernize his nation. Privately he played the Oriental potentate, surrounded by toadies, pimps and the kitschy trappings of new wealth...
...Shah celebrated his reign with a $300 million extravaganza. The Pahlavi "dynasty" had just started its sixth decade, the outcome of a coup mounted by the Shah's father, Reza Khan, an army officer whom some regarded as the Bismarck of Persia. Flying high on his magic carpet, the Shah seemed out of touch with the forces gathering against him. Resentment of his Western ways was fanned by the Muslim clergy. Intellectuals, students and professionals thought the figure posing in Ruritanian uniform and a Disneyland crown was not Western enough. These dissenters frequently attracted the attention of the security police...
Shawcross briskly recounts the Shah's decline and fall, from the first wobbles of the Peacock Throne to the restrained dash to the airport with Queen Farah Diba, their entourage and pets. But unlike luckier deposed billionaires, the Shah did not have a soft landing. He had cancer and was coming down with an acute case of political leprosy. Switzerland, France and Britain, concerned about oil and terrorism, rolled up the welcome mat. Despite entreaties by the Rockefellers, who handled the fallen Shah's finances and provided him with a live-in public relations man, and Henry Kissinger, President Jimmy...
...assure the survival and the success of liberty" was translated into policy as the Viet Nam War -- an unambiguous and, as it turned out, disastrous exercise in containment. Under the Nixon Doctrine of 1969, the U.S. deputized friendly potentates to defend Western interests. The star example, alas, was the Shah of Iran. In that case, as in others, this latest form of containment led American policymakers to rely excessively on the dubious principle that the enemies of our enemies would make good enforcers of the Pax Americana...