Replies

When you post PS like calling Mossadegh the "last poplularly elected leader" I cant take the rest of our post seriously.

As others have noted, that guy was doing what Chavez is doing today. He had dissovled the popularly elected bodies, moved against the constitutional monarch, and was centralizing power, all the while relying more and more on Communist party (Tudeh sp?) ... Without US intervention in 1952, it was going into USSR orbit.

You've bought into the 'sour grapes' inevitability thesis on 1979. These kind of Mullah incited insurgencies happen in the 1920s, the 1960s and were handled well enough - the difference is before they didnt have Carter telling them what to do. For one, would not have let Ayatollah Khoumeni land. HE was in exile, let him stay there. For 2, I would *not* have praised AK as a "saint" like Andy Young did, but I would have publicly laid out his anti-Americanism to our own country and the world.
Lots more but that's a start ....

I point out again - under carter, several countries fell to anti-American regimes. THis is NOT an accident!

When you post PS like calling Mossadegh the "last poplularly elected leader" I cant take the rest of our post seriously.

Sorry, that is a fact. Like it or not, it is a fact.

As others have noted, that guy was doing what Chavez is doing today. He had dissovled the popularly elected bodies, moved against the constitutional monarch, and was centralizing power, all the while relying more and more on Communist party (Tudeh sp?) ... Without US intervention in 1952, it was going into USSR orbit.

Quite true. But irrelevant.

The PERCEPTIONS of the Iranian people in 1979 were, by and large, not in sync with your views. And perception is reality in this case.

You've bought into the 'sour grapes' inevitability thesis on 1979.

It was inevitable because of Shah Reza Pahlavi's fecklessness in the decade before the revolution. You had a monarch who didn't know whether he wanted to restore the the absolute monarchy of the Sassanid Empire (and pi$$ off the rest of the world in the process), or an enlightened constitutional monarch on very nice terms with the West (and thus looking like an American sock puppet to his subjects). He alternately ran a police state and coddled his political opposition (and he was doing this long before anyone was even asking "Jimmy who?" in 1976). He tried to sit between two stools, and fell on his a$$ for his trouble.