When I was at Lackland AFB in 1975, I had a base pass and watched a baseball game in one of the baseball fields next to the BMTS barracks row. There were at least fifty Iranian cadets male and female there watching the game and they were very outgoing and friendly with me. I could clearly see that they treated each other as equals with no Islamic clothing at all.
The Shah’s secret police were clearly oppressive to communist subversives, but the rule of the repressive Mullas has been oppressive to all. More so to those who had a taste of freedom before the senseless downfall of The Peacock Throne.
Iran and Turkey are not Arab nations. The Persians and the Turks were Westernized especially since WWII, but this new-age Islamic proselytization is a dangerous retrograde force against freedom.
I am well aware of their culture.
We had Naval cadets at our school. Some of the cadets were the children of high level military and state department officials. Those were the people who were swept up by the secret police and murdered. They were then dropped off at the families homes.
The culture itself was quite western. When they got kicked out of the US in March 1980, many of them skipped out on their naval commitments to stay in the US. Those that went back, only to escape later had nightmarish stories about the Revolutionary folks.
I think you mistake my point. The Shah’s regime was a dictatorship—benevolent most of the time—but one off hand comment to the wrong person could get you killed. Not exactly a government you want back.
We should provide arms to the people of Iran. Let them decide whom they want in charge. And we should keep our nose out of it. We don’t need the buffer against Russia anymore.
The main problem for the Shah was that after the elected prime minister was deposed in 1953, he was easy to paint as a foreign puppet. While he changed many things the West found praiseworthy, he was imposing a liberalism on the people at the time who often didn’t want it. With Western affluence came Western decadence, and that is easier to impose on poor communists than poor Muslims.