Word: shahs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...plainly to extract advantage for the Soviet Union and embarrass the U.S. as much as possible. From the beginning, U.S. protests were to no avail, as Soviet broadcasts into Iran encouraged the captors to keep the Americans prisoner. Pravda said that the U.S. had invited retaliation by restoring the Shah to the throne in 1953 and then, when he was overthrown, refusing to return him to Iran. When the U.S. rescue raid failed last April, the Soviet press burst out in triumphant indignation: "An abortive provocation," "a violation of international...
...impulse to understand what has happened to the U.S. in the past 14½ months may offer the only way out of a blind rage. Blindness has been a metaphor throughout. The U.S. was blind not to see the extent and temper of the Iranian revolution against the Shah; blind fanatics seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran; the Ayatullah Khomeini's blind sense of vengeance sanctioned the seizure; and the hostages suffered their own blindness, held in solitary and the dark. All year long, photographs of American heads in blindfolds became icons of the crime. Now the U.S. itself...
...Iranians to seek Soviet protection. He could not easily negotiate in secret, and for a long time it was impossible to negotiate at all. The Iranians had what they wanted. They did not seek the moral approval of the world; they wanted only to see the U.S., the Shah's great friend, tied to the ground like Gulliver. The result was a standoff between rage and outrage, and both persist, the U.S. outrage now informed by tales of harassment of the hostages and by the uniformity of their bitterness...
...there are three fairly concrete lessons that may be learned from this experience, and they all have to do with the proper interpretation of events. The first is simply that the U.S. did not pay enough attention to what was happening in Iran once the Shah was deposed, or perhaps that it was paying attention to the wrong Iran, the middle class. The Iranian revolution was revolution in the streets. Iran was in the streets -and that is where U.S. intelligence ought to have been looking. Had it done so, it would have seen itself as the new country...
...second lesson, related to the first, is that the U.S. seems to have dangerously little historical or cultural perspective when it comes to making diplomatic decisions or entering into diplomatic relationships. It was one thing to see how immediately valuable the friendship of the Shah was to American military and economic interests. But it was quite another not to see how and why the Shah's modernizing reforms, his agrarian reform in particular, were alien and menacing to an ancient religious culture. Not for nothing did those millions of Iranians demonstrate and strike in the schools, factories and oilfields...