The Shah made it clear that he could not imagine being on the losing side. In the U.S. government, too, hardly anyone could imagine that the Shah might fail. For Washington, any alternative was virtually unthinkable. After all, Iran’s powerful monarch had sat on his throne for thirty-seven years. He was courted throughout the world. He was modernizing his country. Iran was one of the world’s two great oil powers, with wealth far beyond anything it had known only a few years earlier. The Shah was a critical ally, a regional policeman in a crucial area, the “Big Pillar.” How could he possibly be
...more