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In discussion of the Iranian revolution a few things come up over and over again. One was that the Shah did not want to go down in history as a bloody tyrant (although if he had qualms about blood on the streets, he had no problem with blood in the prisons), others point out inept handling of the regime's instruments of oppression in the face of the growing Khomeini movement. These remarks imply, and people like Zbigniew Brzezinski maintain, that a sufficiently competent, and forceful (and thus brutal) crackdown by the Shah against the movement could quite likely have preserved the Iranian regime and stopped Khomeini's takeover. Others point to social changes in Iran and backlash they caused and the genuine popularity of Khomeini to pretty much imply or say that once Khomeini was able to communicate with the media from Paris and circulate his sermons on cassette tapes, the old regime did not have a chance.

By regime surviving, I don't necessarily mean the Shah himself (although a cancer-free Shah may well act differently), but ensuring continuity of government under a regency with possible evolutionary but not revolutionary political change in Iran's government, society and foreign relations.

Assuming a Shah and circle of loyalists willing to do whatever it takes, could they crush the revolution?

Would the cost in Iranian lives have been more or less than the cost in lives of the Hama massacre in Syria in 1982, or the Algerian civil war, or the Syrian civil war of the 2010s?

Or would harsher repression still fail within a year or so, allowing the revolution to proceed as OTL just slightly delayed?

I also humbly request participants in this thread do *not* branch this out into a discussion of impact on the US election in 1980. That's been talked to death.
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