Word: shahs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...that any fault lies not with the truck driver but with them, for leaving a toddler with a 5-year-old. It doesn't matter. The driver is still hauled off to prison. He is held because we are Americans, and the U.S. has signed an accord with the Shah known by Americans as the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), and by Iranians as the capitulation treaty. In 1964, when it was signed, the Ayatullah Khomeini railed against the legal inequities of the agreement, which gave American military immunity on Iranian soil: "If someone runs over a dog belonging...
That night, my father spends hours at the police station, arguing until the truck driver is released. My dad is a law professor, not a military man, but Isfahan's finest aren't taking any chances, this being the season of the Shah's 2,500-year anniversary of the Persian empire. Just months before, the world's royals and Presidents had flocked to Persepolis - the stone city in the desert built by King Darius and sacked by Alexander the Great - to watch costume parades of ancient Persian soldiers, down Château Lafite-Rothschild 1945 and sleep on Porthault...
Three childhood memories, three moments in modern Islamic history, all hanging on the childish belief that foreign-born solutions will work for the region. The West has spent decades hoping for and plotting a neat trajectory of Middle Eastern modernization. But whether vested in peace treaties or the Shah's imported pomp, those plans have never quite worked out. Not a SOFA agreement, not the Shah's speechifying about modernization, not a party in desert tents stocked with marble baths and champagne could sustain Jimmy Carter's mirage of an Iran that was "an island of security in a troubled...
...tensions of the greater Middle East today are born of a willful ignorance of history and culture. Tehran's current belligerence against the U.S. is a result, in part, of the Shah's supine relationship to Washington, which had reinstalled him in a 1953 coup. In the 1980s, America's gung-ho support for Afghan "freedom fighters," waging war against the communists, sowed the seeds of al-Qaeda and other extremist groups. (See pictures of heartbreak in the Middle East...
...Shah and the Soviets both paid dearly for ignoring history. The Shah's equation of modernization with Westernization proved folly. Like the Soviets, he ignored the strength of religious and indigenous mores. Harnessed to grievances (the Shah's repression, Soviet imperialism) and to technologies (U.S. Stinger missiles, in the case of the Afghan war), those sentiments became strong enough to defeat the Soviet forces and send the Shah into exile. Importing foreign ideologies or language can create bitter historical ironies. The nuclear program that the Shah championed as a symbol of his Westernization and modernization is now, in the hands...