He said, No I didn’t, but I should have. After we all helped create this mess, we were not doomed to have the Islamic Republic. And in a sense, he was right. There was a very brief period, between the time the Shah left on January 16, 1979, and Khomeini’s return to Iran on February 1, when one of the nationalist leaders, Dr. Shahpour Bakhtiar, had become the prime minister. Bakhtiar was perhaps the most
