THE SHAH AND US….Here’s a bit of interesting historical work on the roots of the Iranian revolution:
A new report based on previously classified documents suggests that the Nixon and Ford administrations created conditions that helped destabilize Iran in the late 1970s and contributed to the country’s Islamic Revolution.
….The report, after two years of research by scholar Andrew Scott Cooper, zeros in on the role of White House policymakers — including Donald H. Rumsfeld, then a top aide to President Ford — hoping to roll back oil prices and curb the shah’s ambitions, despite warnings by then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that such a move might precipitate the rise of a “radical regime” in Iran.
….Analysts and historians often contend that President Carter, a Democrat, fumbled Iran, allowing the country to eventually become one of the chief U.S. opponents in the region. But the report suggests that his Republican predecessors not only contributed to the shah’s fall but also were inching toward a realignment with Saudi Arabia as the key U.S. ally in the Persian Gulf.
….We should get credit for what happened at [OPEC’s Doha summit in December 1976],” Kissinger told Ford. “I have said all along the Saudis were the key. . . . Our great diplomacy is what did it.”
But it would prove to be a Pyrrhic victory….The shah’s government, shaken by the loss of oil revenue, imposed a harsh austerity budget that threw thousands out of work, collapsed investor confidence and panicked middle-class Iranians. Economic chaos and unemployment quickly spread.
Within a year of the Doha summit, the first mass demonstrations that grew into revolution broke out on the streets of the Iranian capital.
The collapse of oil prices in the mid-80s, also engineered by the Saudis, was one of the key factors in the disintegration of the Soviet Union. So apparently Saudi Arabia can claim at least partial credit for both the rise of the Iranian revolution and the fall of communism. Not bad for a country with a population of 20 million or so.
