You know, Cyrus, sir, I've followed Iran since I was a little kid, and collected postage stamps.
The Shah came tumbling down my first year in college, in 1978, and I've always felt badly about the way the Shah was treated, having to be shuffled from one country to another, and ultimately ending up in that pesthole, Panama. It wasn't right for the west to treat a former ally that way.
No one will disagree that the Shah was better than what Iran has now, but I've always been curious about something.
Surely he must have been aware that it was not good, all the corruption under his regime.
The only "excuse" I can think of, is that he was seriously ill the last two, three, four, years of his life, and one doesn't pay much attention to things when in that condition.
It seems to me there was a conflict, a contest, between the Shah's twin sister and the Shah's wife, that exacerbated things. He was a man torn between two women, both of them with different perspectives, different outlooks, and his twin sister won the tug-of-war.
And among other recent news about Iran, I read somewhere that the younger son of the late Shah committed suicide; is there a story behind that? I do know that the Shah-in-waiting, his older brother, had problems with his mother, the Shah's widow, trying to dominate him.
