[Poohbah]

not so. 1921 was ancient history and irrelevent.

The treaty was still in force. Sorry, it was very relevant. It caused us no small amount of anxiety during Operation Eagle Claw in 1980.

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.

The violent street protests would not have gotten traction without the support of LOTS of the population.

Carter told the military to do nothing, so they did nothing.

Whose military? The Iranian military?

eventually all top 150 generals were killed in the revolution that followed.

That's what tends to happen to close political cronies of the head of state when there's a revolution.

The Shah was a modernizing Shah who gave the women the vote, which pissed off the local Bin laden-types.

Yeah. He also pissed off a lot of other people, and he looked to be too much of a foreign lackey for many people's taste. You have to know a bit of Iranian history--the dynasty was incredibly recent (1920, IIRC), the last popularly elected government had been bumped off by the CIA and MI6, and the Shah was dragging the whole damn country into the 20th century faster than Iranian culture wanted to get there.

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...

With much popular support.

What would you have done differently?

[WOSG]

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!