ABSTRACT
As the hostage crisis made undeniably clear, the USA was inextricably identified with the fallen imperial regime of Iran. And that identification was the consequence of the Iranian-US relationship in the cold war years. The cold war was an era characterized by superpower interventions in the domestic affairs of third states, and in particular Third World states. Iran was a classic example of a state in which the intervening power was the USA. Soviet efforts to gain controlling influence over the third state's domestic political affairs. The Iranian regime seemed to be prosperous and stable. Yet as events were to demonstrate dramatically, there was in the regime a fatal vulnerability. The Iranian revolutionary view that Iran had been the victim of a Western, capitalist and Zionist conspiracy was balanced by a parallel US view that the Iranian revolution was being victimized by an Eastern, communist, Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) alliance.
