U.S. policies may have contributed to Iran revolution, study says(Nixon & Ford)

BEIRUT -- A new report based on previously classified documents suggests that the Nixon and Ford administrations created conditions that helped destabilize Iran in the late 1970s and contributed to the country's Islamic Revolution.

A trove of transcripts, memos and other correspondence show sharp differences over rising oil prices developing between the Republican administrations and Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi in the mid-1970s, says a report to be published today in the fall issue of Middle East Journal, an academic journal published by the Washington-based Middle East Institute, a think tank.

The report, after two years of research by scholar Andrew Scott Cooper, zeros in on the role of White House policymakers -- including Donald H. Rumsfeld, then a top aide to President Ford -- hoping to roll back oil prices and curb the shah's ambitions, despite warnings by then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that such a move might precipitate the rise of a "radical regime" in Iran.

"The shah is a tough, mean guy. But he is our real friend," Kissinger warned Ford, who was considering options to press the monarch into lowering oil prices, in an August 1974 conversation cited by the report. "We can't tackle him without breaking him."

Analysts and historians often contend that President Carter, a Democrat, fumbled Iran, allowing the country to eventually become one of the chief U.S. opponents in the region. But the report suggests that his Republican predecessors not only contributed to the shah's fall but also were inching toward a realignment with Saudi Arabia as the key U.S. ally in the Persian Gulf.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-shah17-2008oct17,0,7636765.story

Surprise, Surprise!

Iran was democracy BEFORE we installed the Shah. In fact, we caused the deaths of many top pols in both Iraq and Iran in the 1950s. We also helped Saddam with intel, first to take over the country, then second, to attack Iran.

and what was it about OIL! For 30 years we have been held captive by OIL.


And our supplying of weapons and training to the Taliban against the Russians during that war created Osama Bin Laden!

The pre-revolutionary Iranian CIA. Unfortunately, SAVAK was highly infiltrated by the very people who would perpetrate the Iranian Revolution. They knew the role of the US in maintaining the regime of the Shah and when the revolution came, the regime collapsed from the inside-out.