Opinion of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi

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I recommend this book:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shah_of_Shahs

Basically, he was a weak and incompetent fool, who missed chance after chance and is fully responsible for his downfall. Also, with a huge body count and the fact his successor wasn't a very nice fellow either is not a justification.

[MASHED POTATOES. VOTE!]

I suppose FF, but only compared to the alternatives that existed to him (namely, the Tudeh Party and the government that took power in the 1979 revolution).

Mosaddegh?

He's not the only one who believes Mosaddegh was a comunist. A lot of idiots at the State Department believed it as well.

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The Shah's biggest mistake was hoping the countries oil wealth would sustain them, and he used the petrodollars to take out massive loans. My Dad was in Iran in the 70's and said the decadent wealth was  beyond garish

He was not only spending much (on a borrowed money indeed), but he was also spending like an idiot. It's quite telling that his country struggled with accepting shipments because there were no suitable port facilities to unload and no suitable roads to transport.

Also, he bought a s**tload of weapons which were then laying in magazines, because his army was not trained for this. His solution? Train his people? No, just hire foreign contractors to operate it. It's almost as funny as Gaddafi purchasing a lot of anti-aircraft missile launchers just to have them stand by the coast, unmanned.

[MASHED POTATOES. VOTE!]

Pure HP, I don't even see how he's a better alternative, only liberalism tells us that.

Under the Shah, people could generally live as they pleased, as long as they weren't seen as a threat to the government.  The same cannot be said of the the theocracy that followed.

That does not excuse the Shah's brutality.  He was bad, but the Ayatollah was unquestionably far worse.

I assume you mean Khomeini and I'm inclined to agree, especially with him plunging the country into a devastating war (I don't want to excuse the Iraqis here, but the Iranian regime did a lot to provoke the war and then prolonged it for years after already expelling Saddam's forces). However, it's interesting that Iranian people got more political freedom after 1989 then they had under the Shah.

I'm not sure though if the new regime's secret police was worse than SAVAK. I mean, it's really hard to top the SAVAK.