ABSTRACT
On 16 January 1979 the Shah fled Iran in his self-piloted Boeing 707.1
Commentary from inside Iran in the wake of his ignominious exit reported the prevalence of US-made M16 rifles amongst the ‘Islamic Guards’.2 The ‘Made in America’ stamp was evident everywhere in Iran, from the USsupplied telecommunications equipment to the cutting edge jet fighters of the Iranian Air Force. From 1969 to 1979, Iran had been built up as an antiSoviet bulwark in the Persian Gulf, an important pillar of the regional Nixon Doctrine tripod which included Saudi Arabia and Israel. A major component of the rationale forwarded for Iranian militarization was Iraq and the closeness of Iraqi-Soviet relations. The analytical lenses trained by US policymakers on the Persian Gulf provided a distorted view of the region which impacted on US policy towards Iraq and in turn contributed to the deposition of the Shah and the renegotiation of the balance of power in the Middle East. The two lenses which yielded these distortions were a realist-inspired reductive focus on the US-Soviet balance of power and an over reliance on the Shah of Iran to provide regional stability.
