Editor’s Note: This book review by IRD President Mark Tooley of Andrew Scott Cooper’s “The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran” was originally published by The Hill in its entirety. Read the complete book review here.
During his troubled final days, the Shah of Iran was interrupted during a state dinner for China’s leader by an urgent phone call. Guests were stunned when he left the banquet table, later returning to summon two of his officials.
Saddam Hussein was on the phone, the Shah quietly told them, and he wanted the Shah’s consent for liquidating Ayatollah Khomeini, then exiled in Iraq and a nuisance to both their secular regimes. The Shah plaintively asked them both how he should respond. But they demurred, prompting the sometimes passive monarch to remark that it seemed wrong.
So instead, the Ayatollah was forced to leave Iraq for Paris, where he could more effectively orchestrate the Shah’s downfall and the creation of Iran’s Islamic Republic.
There are many such exasperating moments in Andrew Scott Cooper’s “The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran,” an amazing new account of how a modernizing monarch of 37 years led his country from impoverished obscurity into prosperity and power, only to be toppled by reactionary and murderous Islamists, whose theocracy still torments the Iranian people and the world. …
Cooper’s mesmerizing story of the Shah’s defeat doesn’t specifically offer counsel for addressing Islamist political threats today. But any appearance of retreat or appeasement in the face of revolutionary terror only stimulates and encourages further terror. Promises of liberal democracy will be treated contemptuously. Mideast republics generally aren’t prone to moderation, and the region’s monarchies are always replaced by far worse, from Afghanistan to Iran, from Iraq to Libya.
Continue reading this book review of “The Fall of Heaven” here.
Comment by Joseph O'Neill on February 26, 2017 at 1:20 am
US destroyed Iran to grab oil.
US Muslim-killing wars, including funding of genocide of Palestinians, was cause of 9/11.
US and Israel are the worlds leading terrorist states .
Comment by AndRebecca on March 5, 2017 at 4:23 pm
I read somewhere that the “liberalization” that the shah was forced to do by the Carter administration in order to receive American funds caused the downfall of Iran. Now, I wonder if we can expect the same type of downfalls of other nations as we force them to accept and promote the LGBT lifestyle in order to get U.S. dollars…The promotion of indecency in America seems to be a part of the “change” promoted by the left and seems to be having a real negative effect on the country. George Bush “the first” declared LGBT month about 24 years ago. And the promotion of Planned Parenthood and abortion has been championed by the Rockefeller Republicans, now called RINOs. Of course, our steep moral slide started after WWII and most in Washington have been all for it, or so it appears. As long as an act conforms to their standards of indecency, whatever that may be, they are all for it. We’ve gone from standards of decency to standards of indecency and it is not only sad but scary.