Rise Of Shah Essay

Another deciding factor in the fall of the Shah’s rule during the revolutionary period was influenced by the reliance of the Shah on American intelligence and intellectual support. The effective mismanagement and misreading of the situation by the Central Intelligence Agency resulted in misperceptions on the Shah’s grip on power, as well as the true magnitude of Khomeini’s power, intention and influence on his followers both in Iran and in exile. Ofira Seliktar sums up the underestimation of Khomeini’s power in “The Crystal Ball test”, stating “In retrospect, the revolutionary potential of the cyclical disturbances and Khomeini's strategy should have been more obvious to the Shah's government and to American Iran watchers”. The CIA’s overestimation of the Shah’s ability to retain power went hand in hand with the notion that the Iranian opposition could not effectively mobilize in order to topple the regime and instill a new government, with the CIA possessing the belief that “‘Iran was not in a revolutionary or even a pre-revolutionary state" and that the “Shah …show more content…
"Available documents about U.S. policy in this phase are contradictory and reflect the self-delusion of the policymakers. The U.S. foreign policy establishment, having for so long supported the Shah, was sluggish in adjusting to Iran's revolutionary situation." In this context ‘Phase’ refers to the revolutionary period and the ambiguity within the Carter administration on what stance to take during the pre-revolutionary political situation. Under the Carter administration, less time was spent analyzing the close movements of the opposition, unlike the analysis of the opposition in other nations previous to the Carter administration by the agency, such as in the Democratic Republic of the Congo during the year of