Iran: The Shah

Thirty-three years ago today, the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, abdicated the Peacock Throne.  Gravely ill from the cancer that would kill him eighteen months later, his flight from Tehran set off a chain of events that continues to this day.  It had been building up for some time of course, but this was a day that would alter the Middle East forever.

Fun Factors:

• His father, Reza Shah, had been installed by the British in 1925 only to be deposed in an Anglo-Soviet invasion in 1941 for perceived pro-Nazi sentiments, after which the son was placed on the throne in 1945
• The election of Mohammad Mosaddegh as prime minister in 1951 largely based on his opposition to the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which we know today as British Petroleum or BP
• Mosaddegh nationalized the company resulting in his overthrow by a CIA-led coup d'etat in 1953
• In the 60s, the Shah began an aggressive program of industrial development paid for with oil revenues, which ramped up considerably after the 1973 oil embargo, in an effort to become not only a regional power but a global one as well
• One effect of this development was to limit the commercial participation of the lower economic classes of Iran, a country in which the majority of the population was still agrarian 
• He also oversaw a huge military buildup courtesy of the US looking to take advantage of Iran's strategically advantageous border with the USSR as well Iran serving as a de facto cop in the region
• This also led to Iran being part of a US proxy with Israel, especially relative to their mutual enemy,Iraq
• The $300 million celebration thrown in 1971 in honor of the 2500th anniversary of the Achmaenid dynasty as well as the implementation of the Persian calendar over traditional use of the Islam calendar fostered the perception that the shah was antagonistic to the concerns of most Iranians
• And in the fifteen months leading up to the abdication...
• The murder of Khomeini's son Mustafa, widely thought to be the work of SAVAK, the shah's brutal security service in October 1977
• Riots in Qom in January 1978 after the publication of a government sanctioned article attacking Khomeini, resulting in the deaths of 70 protesters
• Black Friday, September 8, 1978:  Confusion over a curfew after a protest that saw over a million people in the streets of Tehran led to a follow-up demonstration at which over a thousand protesters were killed

The shah attempted some moderate efforts to quell the growing anger of the citizens of Iran, including the appointment of Shahpour Bakhtiar, who had previously been seen to oppose the shah, to prime minister.  But the damage had been done.  He would bounce around the world for the rest of his life, from Egypt to Morocco to the Bahamas, Mexico, the US and finally back to Egypt where he died on July 27, 1980.  His stay in the US for medical treatment in October of 1979 is thought by some to have had a hand in causing the takeover of the American Embassy in Tehran a few weeks later.

Khomeini would return from his exile in Paris a few weeks later and by April, the revolution would be complete.

(Note:  this post, as will be the case with subsequent posts on the Middle East, is indebted to David Lesch's excellent 1979: The Year That Shaped the Modern Middle East.)