Iran will not unclench its fist, Mr President

On the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Shah of Iran, Con Coughlin says that Iran’s rulers today are devoted to the same militant objectives that drove Ayatollah Khomeini

The heirs to Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic revolution have much to celebrate as they prepare to mark next week’s 30th anniversary of the fall of the Shah of Iran’s detested regime.

The last nails were hammered into the Pahlavi dynasty’s coffin on the morning of 11 February 1979 when the makeshift government that the Shah had set up under his reluctant prime minister, Shapour Bakhtiar, finally collapsed.

The Shah, who was already stricken with the cancer that would eventually claim his life 17 months later, still clung to the hope that the social unrest that Khomeini had managed to stir up from exile in Paris would subside if he took the pragmatic step of graciously withdrawing from Tehran’s turbulent political scene.

It was, after all, a tactic that had served him well the last time the Pahlavi dynasty had stared into the abyss of political annihilation, which was during the nationalist agitation of the early 1950s that was spearheaded by the anti-British populist Mohammed Mosaddeq. On that occasion the young Shah simply decamped to Rome with his Empress while Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, ably backed by Kermit Roosevelt, the CIA’s resourceful hitman, sorted out the mess. When news of Mosaddeq’s fall finally reached Rome, the Shah exclaimed to his Roman dinner guests: ‘I knew it, I knew it. They love me!’

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The trauma of his near deposing only added to the young monarch’s paranoia, which in turn prompted him to create one of the most repressive autocracies of the modern age. But even as Khomeini’s campaign for the overthrow of the Shah’s despotic regime acquired an irresistible momentum, the Shah still entertained the hope that his American backers would somehow save the day.