ABSTRACT
Both the British and the Americans hoped that the states in the Gulf region would themselves devise some sort of regional security arrangement. Prior to 1971, Great Britain had maintained the peace and security of the Gulf region for 150 years. On November 30, 1971, Iran occupied three tiny but strategically important islands in the narrow entrance to Gulf. In 1972, President Nixon announced a policy of relying on "twin pillars" to provide local and regional security in the Gulf region. The twin pillars were Iran and Saudi Arabia. The ideology of the Islamic Revolutionary Movement, which brought Khomeini to power in Iran in February 1979, like the ideology of the Bolshevik Revolution, has an external as well as an internal dimension. Internally, the ideology is used to keep the masses in subjection to "the iman's line."
