Not so. Iran had been sending students to the US for a long time under the Shah. At one point, they had nearly 50,000 students in the US, the largest number from any country.
It wasn't our democracy they despised. It was our very casual, recreational approach to sex and sexuality. They described us as decadent beyond anything they had imagined possible, and they were horrified that the Shah was bringing our depraved ways back to their own country. If they had not returned to Iran to help create the Islamic state there, I have no doubt that some of them would have started murdering Americans at random.
The students in the US were part of the coalition of forces outside and within Iran that formed the revolution. The mullahs, led by Khomeini, hijacked the revolution away from the intelligentsia and the bazaaries. The Shah was not liked by many because of the corruption, Western ways, and Savak, the secret police. I don't think sex and sexuality played that big a role except among the poor and illiterate. It is too simplistic an explanation. At one time, there were more women in the Iranian parliament than in the US Congress.
I can second that. I know people who lived there during the time of the Shah, and he was hated for his dictatorial powers and secret police, not for anything to do with Western cultural influence. And the witnesses I'm talking about were secular, engineer types who never set foot in a mosque.
The numbers increased rapidly as the Shah's regime became increasingly repressive. From Migration Information Source (online):
In the 1977-1978 academic year, about 100,000 Iranians were studying abroad, of whom 36,220 were enrolled in US institutes of higher learning; the rest were mainly in the United Kingdom, West Germany, France, Austria, and Italy. In the 1978-1979 academic year, the number of Iranian students enrolled in the United States totaled 45,340, peaking at 51,310 in 1979-1980. According to the Institute of International Education, more Iranian students studied in the United States at this time than students from any other country.Most of the students I taught during that volatile period expressed both fear and hatred of the Shah's regime. They also expressed horror at what they perceived as America's depravity. Did these young men--for almost all of them were men--visit strip bars and the like? A lot of them did. Seeing the worst of American culture made them hate us at least as much as they hated the Shah.