The Betrayal of the Shah

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Jimmy Carter greatly admired the Ayatollah Khomeini, but he was ambivalent about the Shah of Iran: “When the Shah came here to visit in November of 1977, my first year in office, I knew that he had been an intimate friend of six presidents before me and a staunch ally that provided stability in that region of the world. But I knew also that SAVAK, his secret military service, had attacked some student demonstrators.” The human rights president would not and could not support such a regime.

The Shah, quite understandably, felt betrayed. “The fact that no one contacted me during the crisis in any official way,” he recounted later, “explains everything about the American attitude. I did not know it then—perhaps I did not want to know—but it is clear to me now that the Americans wanted me out.”

As The Complete Infidel’s Guide to Iran explains, the Americans did nothing as the situation continued to deteriorate. The day after Black Friday, workers in Tehran began going on strike; other workers followed suit, and the strikes quickly became a nationwide phenomenon, while demonstrations also continued. Crowds chanted, “Islam, Islam, Khomeini, we will follow you.” As the chaos spread, the Shah’s government increased pressure on Iraq to exile Khomeini. Saddam Hussein was only too happy to be rid of the charismatic Shi’ite cleric, and so on October 5, 1978, Khomeini left, only to be turned away by Kuwait and to settle ultimately in France, despite his reluctance to live, “so to speak, among heathens.” Among those heathens, he became a darling of the Western media, which began eagerly shining light on events in Iran, thereby hastening the demise of the Shah’s regime.

On November 5, 1978, which came to be known as “The Day Tehran Burned,” rioters, egged on by mullahs who preached about the evils of the West, targeted symbols of Western power such as the British Embassy, as well as outposts of secular pleasures such as movie theaters, along with Iranian government and police installations.

The next day, the Shah appointed a military government, but addressed the nation in conciliatory terms on television, saying:

I, too, have heard the message of the revolution of you, the Iranian people. I am the guardian of the constitutional monarchy which is the divine duty entrusted the Shah by the people. After all the sacrifices that you have made, I pledge that in future the Iranian government will be founded in the Basic Law, social justice and the people’s will and know nothing of despotism, tyranny and corruption. …You should know that in the revolution of the Iranian people against colonialism, tyranny and corruption, I am beside you; and in the defense of our territorial integrity, national unity and Islamic religious observances, in the establishment of basic freedoms and the realization of the wishes and ideals of the Iranian people, I will be by your side…this revolution cannot but be supported by me, the king of Iran.

Humbling himself, he used the word for “king,” not “king of kings,” shahanshah, which he had preferred up to this point.

Khomeini, however, was in no mood for conciliation. He compared the Shah to a cat trying to lure mice out of their hiding places with soothing words, only to kill them when they emerged, and he renewed his call for the Shah to be overthrown. He could be confident that few Iranians would be taken in by the Shah’s speech. The Shah had been in power since 1941 and had never—at least since the removal of the ill-fated Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh— respected the limitations of constitutional monarchy. Why should anyone believe that he was going to start now? He denounced colonialism, and yet he had been the chief architect of America’s influence in Iran, for which Khomeini had been skewering him for years; tyranny, although his regime had grown increasingly authoritarian since the early 1950s; and corruption, although he and his family had been among the primary beneficiaries of the sharp rise in oil prices in the early 1970s.

And so from France, Khomeini continued to lead the opposition to the regime, sending a steady stream of cassette tapes of his sermons into Iran—sermons that preached the duty of Shi’ites to revolt against oppressors. He called for protests during the Islamic sacred month of Muharram, which fell between December 2 and December 30, 1978. On December 2, two million protesters heeded his call and took to the streets of Tehran, demanding that the Shah step down and Khomeini be allowed to return to Iran.

The protests grew quickly. Within a week, nine million protesters had taken to the streets. On December 28, 1978, the Shah appointed secular opposition leader Shahpour Bakhtiar prime minister, and announced that he and his family would be going on “vacation” outside Iran, with a referendum scheduled for three months hence on whether Iran would keep its shah or become a republic.

On January 4, 1979, Jimmy Carter traveled to Guadaloupe in France for a summit meeting with French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing, British Prime Minister James Callaghan, and West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt. Carter told the three that the U.S. was withdrawing all support for the Shah and backing Khomeini. “I was horrified,” recalled Giscard, at this abandonment of an ally. “The only way I can describe Jimmy Carter is that he was a ‘bastard of conscience.’”

On January 16, 1979, a tearful Mohammed Reza Pahlavi and his family left Iran. Their promised return never happened; after two and a half millennia, the Persian monarchy was over.

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons.