I am thinking the people of Iran would take the Shah in a heartbeat over their current regime.
The Shah got in trouble with Jimmy Carter because he had hundreds of political prisoner which Carter thought was awful. Of course the first thing the Ayatollah did was execute all of the Shah's prisoners.
Your apologizing for evil gets old. I know, ANY act the US ever does isn't as bad as the holocaust, so you can just say that and dismiss any criticism. Your apologizing is the reason for Godwin's Law.
There was a list of tyrants in a discussion about Iran, and the Shah was not mentioned, a glaring ommission (and the 'random' samping wasn't so random, not mentioning a single US-backed tyrant).
Your apologizing is like confronting a drunk driver who says others have driven drunk more, confronting a thief who says others steal more, and so on. You refuse to just take any responsibility for 'your side'.
You minimize the Shah's repression - because of two things, your ignorance, and your willingnmess to just make up the history that fits your ideology instead of learning the actual history.
I'm not familirar with the prisoners you mention (as I set an example for you, say if you don't know something) but let's say you're right. Let's even say the current regime is a lot worse.
That doesn't change a thing about how bad the Shah was - and you fail to note how the history with the Shah, the US installing a tyrant, was essential to the radical clerics ever being able to get into power.
As with many countries, there's a common pattern to the US role historically - putting in a tyranny for selfish reasons of power, often overthrowing a far better government, while demonizing the government it overthrew and painting the tyrant in a positive light, but the tyranny leading to big problems and the fall of the tyrant - sometimes replaced by another terrible regime.
Examples: China, with Chiang Kai-Shek's US-backed corruption replaced by Mao; Cuba, with Batista's US-backed corruption replaced by Castro; Nicaragua, with Somoza's US-backed corruption replaced by the Sandanista rebels;Venezuela, with the US-backed corrupt regimes replaced by Chavez; Vietnam, with the corrupt US-backed Diem replaced by other bad US-backed regimes and eventually the communists (as well as the US destabalizing of Cambodia's government directly leading to the Khmer Rouge being able to take power); our current topic of the corrupt Shah replaced by Khomeini and many others.
I'll digress a moment for another example to say this was a constand theme for JFK - his foreign policy was filled with these situations, where a moderate, independant, sometimes left-leaning faction in a country was opposed by the right in the US, by the military, who were used to siding with corrupt right-wing tyrants who would be 'loyal' to the US. He faced this in Laos where Eisenhower had rejected the moderate, ion Africa where the moderate was rejected by the US and assassinated, in North Afrcia where countries like France and Portugal expected the US to support their right-wing colonization, in South America and more.
You being ignorant of the history is no excuse for your posting apologetic excuses for wrongs.
I'm sympathetic to your pointing out how bad the current Iran regime is - but not to your selective cherry pickikng and even distortion and minimizing of the history where the US made mistakes.
If you could acknowledge the history good and bad, there could be a discussion about how to improve things, but you are just advocating to repeat history.
'Hey, better a right-wing tyrant keeping power with a US-supplied secret police torturing and killing political dissidents than the Ayatollahs, so let's go for it'.
No, let's not. Let's not siupport either and recognize the mistake of oujr own corrupt behavior in some situations and support GOOD government even if it's not our corrupt puppet.
Fucking Iranian.
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