This can't be right; I was led by Party of Defeat to believe that Jimmy Carter held sole responsibility for the fall of the Shah of Iran:
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.To be clear, I think that there is far too much focus on the role of the United States in this discussion, and too little on dynamics internal to Iran. Moreover, Nixon and Ford were hardly the first Presidents to influence Iranian domestic politics. Still, the report does serve to further dispel the absurd-but-tightly-held-in-Greater-Wingnutistan-notion that Jimmy Carter is entirely responsible for the Iranian Revolution, the rise of Khomeini, 9/11, etc.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.
--Robert Farley
