I strongly recommend reading this. Gary Sick is someone to listen to; note bio below.
“Musharraf and the Shah” by Gary Sick, Intenational Herald Tribune (26 October 2007)
Excerpt:
What is happening today in Pakistan takes me back to the time when the Iranian revolution was brewing, when I was the desk officer for Iran on the U.S. National Security Council.
The ultimate reason for the U.S. policy failure at the time of the Iranian revolution was the fact that the United States had placed enormous trust and responsibility on the person of the shah of Iran. He – and not the country or people of Iran – was seen as the lynchpin of U.S. strategy in the Persian Gulf.
Everything relied on him. …
A brief biography of Gary Sick
Professor Gary Sick is a senior research scholar at SIPA’s Middle East Institute, and an adjunct professor of international affairs at SIPA. He is the author of All Fall Down: America’s Tragic Encounter With Iran (Random House 1985) and October Surprise: America’s Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan (Random House 1991). Professor Sick served on the National Security Council under Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan. He was the principal White House aide for Iran during the Iranian Revolution and the hostage crisis. Sick is a captain (ret.) in the U.S. Navy, with service in the Persian Gulf, North Africa, and the Mediterranean. He was the deputy director for International Affairs at the Ford Foundation from 1982 to 1987, where he was responsible for programs relating to U.S. foreign policy. He is also a member of the board of Human Rights Watch in New York and the chairman of the Advisory Committee of Human Rights Watch/Middle East. He was the executive director of Gulf/2000, an international research project on political, economic, and security developments in the Persian Gulf, being conducted at Columbia University from 1994 to 1995 on behalf of the W. Alton Jones and Rockefeller Foundations.
