Dead End in Mideast Owes to Blunders of President Carter, When He Threw Out the Shah ‘Like a Dead Mouse’

Israel would be justified now in destroying Iran’s missile-launching platforms, defense production capabilities, oil production, and nuclear military program.

Via Wikimedia Commons
President Carter, far left, with King Hussein of Jordan, the Shah of Iran, and Shahbanou of Iran at Tehran's Niavaran Palace. Via Wikimedia Commons

We have now reached the dead end of the disasters of successive Democratic presidents in dealing with Iran. President Carter, as his national security advisor, Zbigniew Brezinski, remarked, “threw the Shah out like a dead mouse” in 1979. This has not received the attention it deserved as one of the greatest strategic blunders in the history of the United States.

The distorted vision that produced that terrible reversal in the correlation of forces and interests in the Middle East was echoed by President Obama‘s apologies for the secondary role played by the United States in the removal of the bumbling, Russian-influenced populist leader of Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953. This was in fact, chiefly a British enterprise, sponsored by Winston Churchill, and supported by President Eisenhower.

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