Wasn't there that chap Mossadeqh (sp?) in the late '50's or something who seemed like a decent chap but got the smackdown?
Well, a lot of third-world leaders seemed decent chaps at first but ended up dictators of one sort or another. And if Mossadeqh actually tries to play nice, he might get overthrown and replaced by someone more radical.
I'd say one of the _better_ outcomes looks a bit like Egypt: an essentially one-party republic with rigged elections and a series of presidents-for-life-whether-natural-causes-or-assasination, but a good bit wealthier (the oil, but also because Egypt's economy has been unusually crappy even by the standards of oil-poor Arab countries).
Of course, there's always the Shi'a fundamentalists, and you can bet Khomeni won't be happy with a republic that allows women to take off their veils and toys with socialism and actually tries to do some land reform. Whether a balance of power can be achieved or whether the first genuine election has as unhappy a sequel as that in Algeria, I dunno. However, I'd say even as unrepresentative a republic as the one described has more legitimacy than the Shah: _not_ being installed by an Islamicist coup, less harking back to Darius and Xerxes, nationalizing the oil, playing footsie with the USSR and the NonAligned movement, saying bad things about Israel. (A safe way of gaining points, since geography means they don't actually have to fight a war with them).
Bruce