A Gasp in Iran

...The dread threat when we did that was a populist government led by the duly elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, who had the crazy idea that Iranian oil should belong to Iranians...

...For that he was overthrown...

...Granted all that, it seems strange on the surface that the administration and the State Department continue—as of this writing—to back the affable tyrant and torturer, issuing regular pronouncements a) that the Shah is by far the best thing Iran has and b) that he is also the strongest thing, has already met and bested the crisis, will assuredly remain in power...

...If Henry VIII had had the CIA, Europe would be Brit and there would vanish about seventy percent of American reasons to travel to the Old Country...

...by a popular revolution led by that old Persian patriot, Kermit Roosevelt of the CIA...

...As things were, it was us, the Yanks, who invented the thing and are stuck with it, apparently forever...

...And if the mysterious value of "human rights" is indeed the central pillar of United States foreign policy, obviously that policy will not suffer if the world is relieved of one of the most dedicated violators of those rights as commonly understood...

...An old friend of mine used to have as her motto, "Noblesse Oblige, if you can afford it...

...The lesser folk without the law just weren't having imperiums anymore...

...At writing, his survival as a constitutional monarch, as a puppet monarch, even as a human being, all seem in the balance...

...The difference between the Greek hero's march and our own is that Xenophon's whole purpose, having got into Persia for money and fame, was to get out for survival...

...Least of all, perhaps, the purchased, subverted or conquered territories and satrapies of the CIA...

...In Iran on this question the noblesse — the Pahlevis and the Zahedis—have not been particularly obligeants...

...We have, of course, been there before...

...Should the Pahlevi "dynasty" end with him, it won't be all that great a loss to the ornaments of monarchy, despite that institution's apparently ineluctable passage to antiquity, even collectability, in the frightful distinction used by second-hand stores...

...As things have turned out, the Brits didn't drop the imperium just because they were tired or debilitated by free false teeth, but also because that number didn't play any more...

...The point to us now is that it has not worked...

...That has obviously been the administration's "human rights" policy, and clearly a policy of human rights if you can afford them is not a policy of human rights...

...But henceforth, surely, we may be spared the "human rights" rhetoric of the Carter administration...

...It would be nice to think the country can learn this from the trouble the Shah is having, but there is certainly little enough sign of such perception at the top, hence little chance for it farther down...

...Walters and the boundless supplies of caviar, we have been able to remember that the Pahlevis began, actually, with the present Shah's father, a mayor-of-the-palace military usurper who founded the 5,000-year-old dynasty in 1925...

...In the footsteps of Xenophon...

...The global meaning of the Shah's embarrassment is, of ought to be, the final collapse of that American foreign policy, which has given us the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Castro, for the matter of that, the arms race to bankruptcy and a host of other good things...

...FRANK GETLHN Commonweal: 776...

...The melodrama begins only with the stage direction, Enter The Americans...

...After all, a nation that can bring itself to the edge of ruin in Indochina and resolutely refuse to ask the question of what it was all about should have no trouble at all shrugging off the Shah's departure...

...Good grief, is nothing sacred...

...At that time, you could have bought into the present Shah's futures at zilch and, up to a month ago, it would have been the General Dynamics or Seattle Slew of political handicapping...

...Stranger things have happened...

...As must always be said in discussions of the agency, there is nothing wrong with intelligence in the Central Intelligence Agency...

...They are able to do this for two / reasons: contiguous borders...

...Not much...

...What's wrong is the CIA as foreign policy or as an excuse for not having a foreign policy or as the Rover Boys in World Affairs...

...The Shah's survival as absolute monarch seems settled: he won't survive in that favored style...

...The U.S...

...The point to them then was that it worked, or seemed to...

...We need all of that we can get...

...His passing would be no loss at all to the general cause of human dignity and humanitarianism, possibly a slight gain, depending on his successor condition...

...The question is as irrelevant to us today as it was to Kim Roosevelt, the aging Allen Dulles, the young Richard Helms, then...

...You can read all about it in Edith Hamilton...

...Good...

...The Anabasis, the March Upcountry, the Persian Expedition...

...It was a great idea whose time had come and gone roughly three to five hundred years earlier...

...Incidentally, it is worth noting that the Pahlevis and the Zahedis, like so many Islamic leaders, were true-believing Nazi-supporters from the moment they heard about them, which is why the country was occupied first by the Brits and the Russians, later by the Americans as well...

...But that's all musical comedy and personally I would adore to see Harold Prince do it...

...Ours, in pursuit of the same commodities, has been to stay and we have stayed just a shade too long...

...and a happy absence of accountability to the people.On the first count, if we wanted an empire, we should have unleashed the CIA against Canada and Mexico...

...We told ourselves that we would be a good imperium in contrast to the bad imperiums of the old days, but that didn't make any difference...

...Here come the Iranians again, wanting to run their own country...

...The Americans entered in World War II, along with their noble allies, the Brits, who had been there for some time in a variety of disguises, chiefly, AngloIranian Oil, and the Russians, who had bordered the place forever and had serious designs on whatever they could make off with: oil fields, wrist-watches, the government, girls, grub, the country...

...bought heavily and rigged the market with the CIA's murderous—just in the sense of murdering people, nothing pejorative, Dick,—intervention to bring "back" the present Shah...

...The CIA foreign policy .has been based on the assumption that the United States could and should run the world, taking up the imperial standard as it fell from the failing hands of Britain, which in turn had grabbed it from Spain-Austria and so on back to Rome...

...The predictable interpretation at State and in the press will be that it's all just another manifestation of the same old Communist plot, another reason to keep on doing what we've been doing...

...And so we shall...

...If Richelieu had had the CIA, Europe today might well be French and if you believe in the haute cuisine that would be a step forward...

...It could even be said, without mangling history too horribly, that Europe got its start, became aware of itself and defined itself in the first instance through its contrasts with Persia...

...The festivities a couple of years ago featuring Barbara Walters gave five millennia to the Pahlevi "dynasty," which then seemed to have begun with Cyrus, possibly with Mazda Himself...

...Now the Persians are doing it again...

...Perhaps he will...

...On the second, we should have elected Richard Nixon president...

...It has to be admitted that Washington social life would suffer a marked setback in opulence should the Shah be shuttled into the dustbin of history, but it is hard to think of any other single aspect of civilized living that wouldn't be enhanced by his departure...

...The Russians are running, with extreme difficulty, the last great classic empire...

...More recently, without Ms...