The January 14 ouster of Ben Ali’s regime in Tunisia set off a wave of popular uprisings in the Middle East, the most significant change in more than thirty years. The last time the Middle East saw such monumental shifts was in 1979, when the ouster of the Shah in Iran, the Soviet invasion of […]
Tag: Shah
Iran’s Pyrrhic Victory
The one persistent feature of Iranian foreign policy since the toppling of the Shah in 1979 was its rather grandiose optimism about its own ascendance to a hegemonic role in the Middle East. The ayatollah’s Islamic Republic never considered the revolution it had kidnapped to turn inward. Instead, the leaders of the Islamic Republic of […]

