if he Shah had remained in power, how do you think Iran and the world would have look
- Thread starter HistoryLovingCat
- Start date
One thing that's important is how he stays in power since by 1979 Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi was much hated. I think the best way to accomplish a surviving Pahlavi dynasty is perhaps to have the army squash the revolution after which the leading officer forces the Shah to abdicate in favour of his son, the then 19 year old Reza Cyrus Pahlavi. A series of liberal reforms are enacted and more religious freedom is allowed to appease the clergy.
One big butterfly is that there's no Iran-Iraq War since Saddam Hussein wouldn't dare to attack imperial Iran. The Islamic Revolution caused a lot of turmoil and purges by Khomeini's regime of western trained officers weakened Iran's army. Besides, the Shah's Iran was the most important US ally in the region next to Israel. Economically, Iran would therefore be in much better shape as would Iraq be which means that Saddam won't invade Kuwait in 1990 for oil money. Iran would continue on the path of economic, military and infrastructural modernization.
I do think it would give Al Qaeda, Taliban and similar organisations even more reason to hate the US since they will be perceived as propping up a strongly secular regime. If the equivalent of 9/11 comes around, I believe the Shah would assist on the side of the US, since no doubt Iran will have experienced Islamic militants an terrorism by now. Iran will likely committ a significant amount of troops to squash Islamic militants with US approval (also, Iran is the largest military power in the region).
Also, no Iran Contra-Affair and no Iranian hostage crisis in 1981. Relations with the west and Israel remain good which means that the US will probably make less fuss if Iran decides to go for an A-Bomb ITTL. There was strong Western investment in the Shah's nuclear program IOTL. Another effect of the Shah staying in charge when it concerns Israel is that the Shah won't support Hezbollah or Hamas.
Lots of butterflies stemming from this one.
One big butterfly is that there's no Iran-Iraq War since Saddam Hussein wouldn't dare to attack imperial Iran. The Islamic Revolution caused a lot of turmoil and purges by Khomeini's regime of western trained officers weakened Iran's army. Besides, the Shah's Iran was the most important US ally in the region next to Israel. Economically, Iran would therefore be in much better shape as would Iraq be which means that Saddam won't invade Kuwait in 1990 for oil money. Iran would continue on the path of economic, military and infrastructural modernization.
I do think it would give Al Qaeda, Taliban and similar organisations even more reason to hate the US since they will be perceived as propping up a strongly secular regime. If the equivalent of 9/11 comes around, I believe the Shah would assist on the side of the US, since no doubt Iran will have experienced Islamic militants an terrorism by now. Iran will likely committ a significant amount of troops to squash Islamic militants with US approval (also, Iran is the largest military power in the region).
Also, no Iran Contra-Affair and no Iranian hostage crisis in 1981. Relations with the west and Israel remain good which means that the US will probably make less fuss if Iran decides to go for an A-Bomb ITTL. There was strong Western investment in the Shah's nuclear program IOTL. Another effect of the Shah staying in charge when it concerns Israel is that the Shah won't support Hezbollah or Hamas.
Lots of butterflies stemming from this one.
Imperial Iran doesn't butterfly away Carter's domestic FUBARing and the stagflated economy. Without Iran Ted Kennedy has a shot at denying Carter renomination since there will be no RRTF (Rally Round The Flag) effect ITTL. I still think he won't win due to structural weaknesses that were present from the outset and would definitely lose to Reagan in the general (Ted is the last Kennedy brother you want in a WWC election).
I didn't say it was likely, but Carter and Reagan were about even until "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" and after that it was voting against Carter, not for Reagan. And Ted Kennedy would be better than Carter was (not that that's hard). Reagan probably still wins though.
If Reagan is still elected on schedule, would he still continue the close relationship with Imperial Iran, especially with massive arms shipments including F-16s and F-18s as originally planned? I remember Nixon and Kissinger were especially personally close to the Shah and in terms of personal friendship.
gridlocked
Banned
I wonder if the Soviets would have still bothered to invade Afghanistan. That would of changed a lot if they decided against the invasion. Many policy analysts at the time were convinced putting pressure on Revolutionary Iran was half the reason for the 1979 Invasion.
People blame the US for interfering in Iran in1953. Given all the problems and deaths caused, maybe people should be angry at Carter not backing the generals and supporting a pro-Shah coup.
People blame the US for interfering in Iran in1953. Given all the problems and deaths caused, maybe people should be angry at Carter not backing the generals and supporting a pro-Shah coup.
Indeed, Afghanistan would have been surrounded on 3 sides by countries allied to the US and willing to lend support to the Mudjaheedin. The big question in that scenario would be whether the Mudjaheedin still have fallen apart after taking Kabul leading to the civil war which allowed the Taliban to take over.
I honestly don't see how a repeat of 1953 would have worked in 1979. There was huge discontent at the Shah's policies and the army was not willing to carry out the sort of vicious crackdown that would have been needed. Sometimes popular uprisings reach a critical mass at which the security services lose their nerve and nothing can save the regime, Eastern Europe 1989 is probably the classic example!
yourworstnightmare
Banned
The Shah would probably have fallen in the 90s, when it's not in the interest of the US to back a hated tyrannical regime anymore. With a little luck it wouldn't be crazy Islamists replacing him.
The shah was not long for this world anyway. He died of cancer the year after he was overthrown. (Whether he was "helped" or not is an exercise for the reader.) His death would have provided the perfect opportunity for instituting economic and political reforms to stabilize the country. The Ayatollah remains in exile in France. (And why in the world did the shah or the CIA allow him to stay alive? Does anyone know?)
So the young son becomes Shah and oversees the rise of a constitutional monarchy. No Iran-Iraq War, no 1979 energy crisis, likely no Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. And without the pressures created by that adventure, does the USSR survive another 10 or 20 years? Does Star Wars become a reality rather than an excuse to push the Soviets deeper into the money pit?
The butterflies would be in passenger-pigeon-sized flocks.
So the young son becomes Shah and oversees the rise of a constitutional monarchy. No Iran-Iraq War, no 1979 energy crisis, likely no Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. And without the pressures created by that adventure, does the USSR survive another 10 or 20 years? Does Star Wars become a reality rather than an excuse to push the Soviets deeper into the money pit?
The butterflies would be in passenger-pigeon-sized flocks.
The 1960s, with the White Revolution.
However, he still put dissidents in prison, so he wasn't that liberal.
It's illegal to kill a marja, a rank Khomeini was given in 1963, when he'd already inspired protests against the Shah. And the CIA probably just didn't see him as a threat.
I'm not sure what that even means. If somehow the Pahlevi line had continued to rule Iran (the particular Shah being doomed to die soon after the OTL revolution for medical reasons anyway) then probably Iran would not have been involved in the 1980s shenanigans at all, Iran having had particular carte blanche to buy all the weapons from the USA Iranian oil money could buy. Nor would the regime have been taking and holding hostages of a kind that the Reagan administration would have wanted to ransom. (If it somehow went on as it had in the 1970s and before, they'd have lots of prisoners being tortured, but I doubt our leadership, certainly not a right-wing faction of it, would have bothered to concern themselves with any of them any more than they did before.)
If Iran were not an issue in US domestic politics then I suppose if Reagan were to win in 1980 it would be over something else. Aside from the possibility the Soviets might still have intervened in Afghanistan, there was the issue of the Nicaraguan Sandinista government which the American right wanted overthrown, and related to that the issue of left-wing rebels in other Central American nations that the right wanted stopped. I suppose these would have been the hot-button issues of the '80 election then. The "Contra" part of Iran/Contra would have gone ahead just as OTL and to my mind that was always the scandalous part. The story actually broke over the Iranian connection OTL, but the story would have been there to break in some context anyway. Maybe I underestimate the importance of the Iranian part of the OTL scandal, but my impression, as someone who was already a young adult in the 1980s who cared to follow politics more than most was that it was always the Central American aspects of Reagan's foreign policy that were most controversial in the USA (well, that, and the impression he gave that he was just itching for full-scale nuclear Armageddon). It really did not look good for the Reaganauts that the kind of people they wanted to back in Central America were the kind of thugs who liked to massacre pregnant village women and gun down American-born nuns; these were the sorts of stories about the Contras and the right-wing government in El Salvador that were circulating in the USA when restrictions like the Boland Amendment were passed by Congress. That it was rather cynical to go about declaring the Iranians a focus of global evil on a par with Hitler or the "Evil Empire," and then turn around and take black funds that Congress thought were appropriated to fight our ideological enemies in the Middle East and use them to buy weapons to sell to the Iranians in exchange for hostages, was clear enough, but it did get those hostages freed after all and those of us on the left who condemned Reagan didn't look too askance at the concept of trying to create some kind of productive mutual contact with Iran, though it was still fun to point out the hypocrisy. However, one purpose of this scheme was to essentially launder American tax dollars to route resources to people that Congress had already and clearly declared we would not support, was in clear violation of laws intended to give teeth to that resolution--that was the political/procedural scandal, this flouting of due process that implied the Reagan Administration would act as a dictatorship would whenever they pleased, checks and balances and public accountability be damned. Combine that with the actual purpose of the exercise which was to support a bunch of murderous, reactionary thugs to repress one nation that had chosen another path and crack down on people in others that wanted to, and we had an ethical scandal as well. Iran was pretty much a sideshow, and while I might see it that way from just one not universal point of view I think my viewpoint was actually pretty widespread, more or less, and I challenge anyone else to show how it was actually the Iranian part and not the Contra part of the deal that was the political problem overall. My expectation would be, if Iran were still enlisted as a nominal US ally (and I see no way the Pahlevi dynasty could possibly keep control without keeping its close relationship with US policy) and were therefore not involved in this scheme, or only involved the way other right-wing US ally nations of the region like Saudi Arabia were, the scandal would take longer to break into general awareness in the USA, but be more focused on the central issues of Executive branch violations of the separation of powers and the specific inadvisability of the policy they hoped to further by these illegal means, thus conceivably the consequences would be to shake up the nation more, not less. The alternative is that the story never breaks at all, but it was leaking out along various channels anyway, so it would be necessary to show how a "rag in Beiruit" got listened to OTL by the mainstream American press, at long last, while in another timeline with no Middle Eastern connection the protests of the Nicaraguan government, the on the ground reports of Americans and other Westerners in Central America, and the word of Central American refugees would never get the same weight eventually.
Well, when I put it that way all these news sources did exist long before 1987 and were to an extent ignored and trivialized--not by everyone, but by the mainstream ruling consensus. So probably some third angle would have been needed to crack the story open as OTL.
For some reason Iran/Contra is suddenly flaring up on several threads tonight; check out my cynical take on it here on this thread.