True, the Shah was a dictator, but I don’t think he killed over 30,000 in a week.
The Shah was human, and therefore imperfect. But during the height of the cold war, he was our strongest ally in the region.
He was also an Iranian patriot.
Therefore, he was good for Iran, and he was good for the USA.
Remember, this is the middle east we are talking about. What other leader there was a Jeffersonian? Assad of Syria? The Ibn-Saud clan of Arabia? Nasser of Egypt? Al Bakr or Saddam of Iraq?
And with a cold war going on, the Shah had to deal with KGB, which operated terrorist training camps in Syria, arming brainwashed Iranian Marxist subversives. KGB also infiltrated student activists in Iran and in the US.
Ultimately, the Shah had to thread the needle between multiple conflicting forces: complying with US humanitarian values, his own nation’s religious values, his patriotic vision for a modern Iran, confronting subversive pan-Arabists, Islamists, and Marxists, always wary of a Soviet Union just to his north.
Corruption within his own family - particularly his reputed nymphomaniac twin sister - didn’t help.
But given the geopolitics of the time, Nixon understood how valuable the Shah was to the US, and remained his ally to the end.
Ultimately, in 1979, Carter betrayed the Shah, and the world is a far, far worse place because of it.
But now, if Iran is liberated, this nation of 90 million, whose population loves USA, will become our ally again.