In retrospect, the collapse of the shah of Iran in 1979 and the rise of a radical Islamic regime in his place have to be classed among the great strategic disasters of American foreign policy in the latter half of the 20th century.
Was this debacle inevitable, or could the U.S., under President Jimmy Carter, have taken effective action to prop up our ally?
Zbigniew Brzezinski was national security adviser to Carter at the time and about all this he wrote something quite wise in his memoirs:
I felt strongly that successful revolutions were historical rarities, that they were inevitable only after they happened, and that an established leadership, by demonstrating both will and reason, could disarm the opposition through a timely combination of repression and concession.
But, of course, despite the efforts of Brzezinski and others serving Carter, the shah did not succeed in disarming the opposition, either via repression or concession. In the end, the Persian king of kings was toppled by an Islamic revolution, and after this happened, it too became “inevitable” when we look back at it.
Could the U.S. have kept our ally in power by some means? History cannot be rewound to answer that question (except perhaps via Hillary Clinton’s favorite television show, The Time Tunnel). But what can be demonstrated to an absolute certainty is that decision-making in the U.S. government in that period was catastrophically disordered. Read More
