Ah, my friend, it is a pleasure to be back on the blog. I take being compared to Bluto as a compliment since I spent the first 30 years of my life emulating that great American scholar. Your modern Persian/Iranian history, however, if you pardon my saying so, may be slightly flawed and omits some very important details. This is the politically incorrect version that is not taught in the public schools or universities. Read at your own risk.

In 1951 Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, came to power with the intention of nationalizing the oil industry in his country and kicking the British Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and other British interests out. This policy was also encouraged by Iran's large, Moscow-backed Communist Party. The fact is that there would have been no Iranian oil industry without the British and no Iran either. It was British military and economic power that kept the Russians out during the first years of the 20th century, when Russian imperialism reached out to embrace its Persian neighbor with a fraternal bear hug, covetous of its warm water ports and rich petroleum reserves. It was one of the first coups of British MI-6 under the legendary Mansfield Cummings, who became the model for "M" in Ian Fleming's James Bond novels. Thanks to the maneuvers and intrigue of the urbane and completely amoral British secret agent Sydney Reilly, born Sigmund Georgievich Rosenblum in Odessa, Ukraine in 1874, Britain secured those oil rights and developed the Iranian oil industry to the great benefit of all concerned, a prize that was of incalculable value in both world wars. So, Iran's postwar Anglophobia is a case of ingratitude at best and Communist influence at worst, a move that was no doubt celebrated by Stalin and Party members all over the world at that time.

In the summer of 1941, the Shah of Iran Reza Pahlavi, who saw Germany as the winning side and a friendly power, sent diplomatic feelers out to Berlin that he might take his country into the Axis alliance. Britain and the Soviet Union acted in the only significant Western/Soviet joint military operation of the war and occupied Iran with the Soviets controlling the northern provinces and the British controlling the south with the majority of the population and most of the oil. The Shah was exiled to South Africa, where he spent the rest of the war, abdicating the Peacock Throne in favor of his playboy son Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, who would reign as Shah for the next 38 years. During the war, Iran served as one of the principal supply routes for delivering Lend Lease food, munitions and material from the West to the Soviet Union.

Both Britain and the Soviet Union signed an agreement to withdraw their forces from Iran within six months after the end of the war against Germany. The British complied and promptly pulled out, but the Soviets stayed and showed no intention of leaving. The Russians created two separatist republics on the Soviet police state model: the Autonomous Republic of Azerbaijan and the Kurdish People's Republic. The Shah appealed to the United Nations Security Council in January 1946, precipitating the first real crisis of the Cold War. President Truman threatened to send American forces into Iran and hinted that atomic weapons might be employed to drive the Russians back to their own border. Harry was not the kind of American President that Stalin was used to dealing with and backed down from the brink, leaving the separatist republics to their own devices; they did not survive a month without Soviet backing. And believe it or not, Harry Truman was a Democrat!

Iran had once more been saved from the Russian bear by the Western imperialists, but the country remained a target of Soviet penetration through the Tudeh, or the Masses, the Stalinist Communist Party of Iran. The charismatic Mossadegh was not a Communist, merely a willing tool of the Reds, rather like our own President Obama. His anti-imperialist world view failed to recognize the most voracious imperial power on Earth was centered in Moscow, not London. The British were in the process of gracefully retreating from the burdens of Empire, a great loss to civilization and world order from which mankind may never recover.

Mossadegh's Leftist turn seemed to presage a replay of Colonel Gamal Nasser's coup against King Farouk in Egypt in 1952. Another Soviet client state in the Middle East would have been a serious defeat for the West and a triumph for the Soviet bloc. Dwight Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles, his Secretary of State, understood this too well and dispatched CIA officer Kermit Roosevelt, grandson of Teddy, to Iran to engineer a coup against Mossadegh. The CIA in the 1950s and early 60s really knew its business and its business was the containment of Soviet expansion in Europe, Asia, Africa and Central America. Sometimes they had to play rough and dirty to keep freedom alive and the free world safe and sound. The coup against Mossadegh in 1953 was one of those times and it was a tremendous success, a bloodless coup in which no one was executed and the Monarchy secured. Mossadegh died of old age as a comfortable exile in Egypt. Eisenhower's top priority was always the national security of the United States. We were truly a great power in those days and we acted like one. America was not universally liked, but we were universally respected, even by our enemies. I am not sure that is so true today.

After the removal of Mossadegh, Iran experienced a two decade golden age under the Shah, the most enlightened ruler of Persia since the death of Alexander the Great. The Shah's White Revolution transformed Iran from a feudal backwater into a regional great power with economic and military clout. Pahlavi emancipated the women of Iran and made them the most liberated women in Islam, much to the chagrin of the clerics who never forgave him. He expanded educational opportunities and vastly improved literacy for both men and women throughout Iran. His land reform program seized land from the religious clerics and parcelled it out to the peasant farmers, another reform that the clerics never forgave. The Shah became the first Islamic leader to formally recognize the State of Israel and cooperated with the Israelis on a clandestine basis against their mutual enemies in Iraq, Egypt and Syria. Wirtes will tell me that he was a despot, but by the standards of the Middle East and the emerging world, his authoritarian rule under the veil of a constitutional monarchy was mild indeed. There were never any massacres or Gulags under the Shah. His secret police, the notorious SAVAK, did indeed arrest Communists, radicals and subversives and practiced torture, although nothing to the extent as it was practiced in Egypt, Syria, Iraq or Castro's Cuba. Indeed the Shah was more prone to exile his enemies than he was to shoot them, which may have been his undoing. How much better would the world be today if the Shah had been more ruthless and shot or hung Khomeini instead of sending him into the comfortable exile of a Paris suburb.

Far from being an American puppet as Wirtes suggests, the Shah was one of the architects of the OPEC oil cartel and pursued his own national ambitions without regard to American desires. His oil, which remained nationalized after the 1953 coup, sold for a very high price indeed. A staunch anti-Communist and pro-Western leader, the Shah's powerful armed forces provided an formidable barrier to Soviet expansion in the region. Every American President from FDR to Jimmy Carter paid court to him and counted him a good friend of the United States. In the end, to our everlasting shame, we abandoned him and forced this great man in his dying last weeks to become a wandering exile, until finally granted a safe haven by his old friend Anwar Sadat, an act of common decency that probably led in some way to Sadat's own assassination less than a year later. It was a sad commentary on America under doom and gloom Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s.

The best outcome for Iran after the madness of the Ayatollahs passes would be the return of the Shah's son to the Peacock Throne to bring Iran back into the society of civilized nations. There is some movement in that direction and I would hope that it grows in the years ahead. Most of the support the clerics and Ahmadinejad receive comes from rural areas and the least educated of the populace. The Shah's educational reforms have largely disappeared, the only legacy of them being that Ahmadinejad can thank the Shah for his literacy, not that he has put it to good use. The young Shah would be welcomed back to Teheran like a liberator as indeed that is what he would be.

That is why I love the Shah of Iran and lament the fact that he was too benign and decent a ruler and a man to order a massacre on the streets to stay in power as his successors have done without apology. And, yes indeed, I am proud to be a neo-con in the tradition of Allen Dulles and Milton Friedman. These great men represent freedom, Mr. Wirtes, freedom from onerous taxation and regulation at home and freedom from totalitarian tyrannies abroad.