Without Jimmy, the Shah would never have fallen.Actually, if we'd thrown everything into keeping the Shah in power, the net result would have been that the Shah had fallenp--and that the USSR would have occupied Iran under the terms of the 1921 Treaty of Friendship between the USSR and Iran.
There is a philosophical principle known as Ockham’s (Occam's) Razor which postulates that when multiple competing hypotheses are put forward as possible solutions to a question, the simplest answer is most likely to be the correct one. (Before you can proceed to the improbable, you must first rule out the obvious.) The simplest answer to the question “Are Pat Buchanan and his paleo-con cohorts anti-Semitic?” is that based on all the evidence, yes they are.
When they speak of neo-conservatives you can almost hear them spitting out the word "Juden!"
not so. 1921 was ancient history and irrelevent. in 1979, the shah was ill, but there was no reason for him to step down except that the Mullahs had engaged in violent street protests. Carter told the military to do nothing, so they did nothing. eventually all top 150 generals were killed in the revolution that followed.
The Shah was a modernizing Shah who gave the women the vote, which pissed off the local Bin laden-types. A good US President would have stood behind the Shah and it would have been enough to maintain the peace in that constitutional monarchy, but Carter stabbed him in the back and a virulently anti-US theocracy took over.... Same story in Nicaruagua - it's NOT an accident! Taking advice from Carter is poison, unless you're a communist.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/829119/posts
A post on this:
"maybe you're too young to remember, but the Ayatollah's plane actually turned back one day while Carter coerced the Shah,(or whatever interim set-up with a guy named Bani-Sadr existed as the government), to let him land. Then a vicious attack on the army began. They were surrounded in their barracks and literally butchered. Many TV pictures of the time of eviscerated corpses of Iranian Army officers, who could have defended themselves, except for the fact that Carter had decided to sacrifice our friends. Fitting it was then that Carter's ultimate political fate was determined largely by what he had brought on himself."