No, my impression of the Shah is that he was a typical aristocrat, more along the lines of Prince Rainier of Monaco than a tyrant. He was full of himself, but had some right to be.
He was trying to modernize Iraq, educate people, get them into western clothes, get the burkhas off the women, bring them into the twentieth century, and so forth. One of the criticisms at the time is that he was trying to Americanize the people too fast, and they weren't ready for it yet.
The Iranians are Persians, not Arabs, and he wanted them to remember that, too.
Naturally all that modernizing, the clothes and movies and music, scandalized the Mullahs, and they used charges of westernizing corruption against him. But I think he would have survived the troubles if Carter hadn't pulled the rug out from under him.