Posted on 07/03/2016 1:07:47 PM PDT by freedom44
In 1979, after a long campaign of political pressure applied by the Carter administration in the United States, the Shah of Iran fell to the Islamic Revolution, ending a tradition of monarchic rule that had persisted in Iran for thousands of years since the rule of Cyrus the Great. The stage was set for the rise of the Ayatollah, and the establishment of a theocracy in Iran that, today, most Iranians do not even want. But what if none of that had ever happened? While a momentous departure from actual history, it is not nearly so far-fetched as it sounds. It isn't difficult to imagine that, beset by strife as the Shah was at the time, the opposition of a major world power like the United States was the final straw that brought the monarchy to an end, and it is not even clear why President Carter chose to engage in such opposition. While there were some human rights concerns taking place under the Shah, as Carter noted, these pale in comparison to the atrocities committed by the sorts of Islamic extremists that have since risen to power in Iran and found a more conducive environment in the Middle East generally. Let's see what else would have been different had Carter relented, and the Shah remained.
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Iran did not join the oil embargo.
“Carter is Satan incarnate.”
So now we’ve hasd one Satan of each color as President! Looks as though Carter is trying to reclaim his posltion as our worst president ever. But he won’t make it! Obola is winning going away!
Nothing contemporary about it.
The 1976 Reagan campaign was also a glaring example of both media bias and the country’s division, if the Vietnam War was not.
>>Being world police brought Pax Americana. Handing off that role to others will result in tyranny and war, so be careful what you wish for.
Then we should have chosen Bush as our nominee. You need to look at America as a system and not as independently functioning blocks.
Non sequitur. No Bush is a foreign policy hawk; no hawks would undermine our military as they have done (policies shared with open doves such as Obama et al), nor support other leftist causes such as illegal immigration.
In 1976, Gerald Ford, a better man than Jimmy Carter in so many ways, made the tactical mistake of not simply stepping aside after the pardon he gave Nixon, and allowing Ronald Reagan to assume the race for the Presidency four years sooner than was actually the case. Reagan would have found much more common ground with the Shah than Jimmy Carter ever would have, and the Shah would never have allowed the situation that brought Saddam Hussein to power in Iraq, and the seemingly endless border war between Iran and Iraq that festered for so many years.
Jimmy Carter shall forever have the legacy attached to his name of making the Sunni/Shi’ite schism within Islam the world problem it has grown to in the past 40 years.
It did not help Carter’s case one bit that after stirring up the commotion between Sunni and Shi’ite, he embarked on a program of making America even MORE dependent on foreign sources of petroleum, by shutting down the exploitation of the vast quantities of relatively cheap domestic natural gas, as an applicable substitute for petroleum in industrial use.
I’m not defending Carter or the Iranian Revolution, but in 1979 the Shah was dying and there was no legitimate successor to the Shah who could have held on to power.
Short of the U.S. Military occupying Iran to prop up the next Shah, thus causing nuclear war with the Soviets, there was little that could have been done.
Major General Hoyt S ‘Sandy’ Vandenburg Jr. (USAF) (Ret) agrees with you and said so to his military chain of command when he was the Chief of Military Training Mission in Iran. Unfortunately the Ambassador found out and stopped his career. Otherwise the USAF would have been the first service for both father and son to Chief of Staff. The USAF finally did it but had to wait until Mike Ryan.
The last oil refinery with significant downstream unit capacity in the USA also opened under Carter, in his first year.
>>Iran did not join the oil embargo.
Didn’t say it did. It didn’t fight us in Vietnam or indict Nixon either. But those events damaged our psyche as a nation for those crucial years when the Shah was being deposed.
>>The 1976 Reagan campaign was also a glaring example of both media bias and the countrys division, if the Vietnam War was not.
As I said, we still had elections. But the three years in between elections, we were pretty well united—especially in light of the Bicentennial and all. That was a Big F’n Deal that brought everyone together for a few years.
The USSR never would have instigated nuclear conflict with the USA. They were pretty nihilistic, but never as nihilistic as the Mullahs prove to be now.
Washington warned us against cultivating a “reputation of weakness” in his Fifth Annual Message to Congress, and also said that “religion and morality are indispensable supports” to our society.
At that time, an American occupation of a country that bordered the USSR would have increased tensions and I don’t think the American people would have favored such an occupation.
Well, I did.
I was working in the audiology department of New York Hospital when he died in same. The howling mob baying for his blood is not something I will soon forget.
Why is Carter still with us? Even God turns his ahead aside from that evil bastard.
I cannot recommend to your notice measures for the fulfillment of our duties to the rest of the world without again pressing upon you the necessity of placing ourselves in a condition of complete defense and of exacting from them the fulfillment of their duties toward us.We sure did fall rapidly from what we were in WWII.
The United States ought not to indulge a persuasion that, contrary to the order of human events, they will forever keep at a distance those painful appeals to arms with which the history of every other nation abounds.
There is a rank due to the United States among nations which will be withheld, if not absolutely lost, by the reputation of weakness. If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it; if we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be known that we are at all times ready for war.
The documents which will be presented to you will show the amount and kinds of arms and military stores now in our magazines and arsenals; and yet an addition even to these supplies cannot with prudence be neglected, as it would leave nothing to the uncertainty of procuring warlike apparatus in the moment of public danger.
Reminds me of two old sayings, “the devil takes care of his own” and “it’s hard to kill a bad thing”.
Reagan once said something along the lines of how some former Shah’s security people told him that they told the Shah one time that if he were to give them the green light to arrest a few hundred people, namely the most corrupt politicians and businessmen in Iran, then most of the protestors would have been mollified, and they could have prevented the revolution. But the US told the Shah to do nothing.
Ah, yes! Very wise sayings. But why, I wonder, is it so hard to kill a bad thing? Because it has more strength than good?
“We sure did fall rapidly from what we were in WWII.”
After the war, with the rest of the industrialized world destroyed, America, untouched by the destruction of war was on top.
However, after a couple decades in which Europe and Japan could rebuild and re-tool, the US was left with an old manufacturing infrastructure.
Had we modernized our factories in the 1950’s and 1960’s we would have remained a manufacturing power.
I think
a tradition of monarchic rule that had persisted in Iran for thousands of years
is a vague enough construction to be more or less unfalsifiable.
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