The Shahs Are Back!

For an Iran that just got pounded and whose leader was removed, as it has been put, by "decapitation," the question of what comes next is both late and premature. Premature, because though Ayatollah Khamenei has been killed, the regime hasn’t (as I write on March 1) been toppled. Late, because somehow the CIA and everyone else in the US and UK governments seem to have cornered themselves into a return of the Pahlavi dynasty, which ruled Iran with an extremely spotty record from 1925 until ejected by the Ayatollahs and their students in 1979, as American hostages were taken and Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi fled, eventually ending up in the US for cancer treatment.

The Shah's son, also known as Reza Pahlavi, has been on a whirlwind propaganda tour, what the CIA books when it's pursuing its traditional projects of regime change. For some reason, The Washington Post lent him a column which appeared simultaneously to the bombardment, declaring that "the hour of freedom is at hand."

"Mr. President, thank you," Pahlavi added, in a sort of pre-emptive gratitude strike. (You may recall Volodymyr Zelensky's near-fatal gratitude lapse. JD Vance: "Have you said, 'thank you' once?") The Post—again, I think, following CIA guidelines—describes Pahlavi as "a leader of the Democratic opposition," which is a surprising role for a traditional monarch, as though we were going to lean on Prince Harry to muster the anti-monarchical forces of the UK. But sometimes you have to go with what you've got, because you've got nothing else. As the bombs began to fall, News Nation put Reza Pahlavi's spokesman on its air to talk about Iran's future. Alternatives didn’t appear.

I think MI6 may have been active in the Shah's restoration as the CIA, given the nice media placement the Pahlavis are getting over there. The New Statesman, with no possible journalistic justification, gives Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi's granddaughter, Noor Pahlavi, plenty of space for raw propaganda, under the sub-head "the Pahlavi plan to save Iran."

"I come from a family that dreams boldly," she begins, and from there we descend into contentless, possibly intelligence-agency sponsored fantasizing. About her father, she says, "Against decades of propaganda and imprisonment, and facing the constant threat of death, the Iranian people saw him clearly. They saw my father not through an imposed lens, but for who he is: an honest man of noble intent, defined by his love of country, willing to sacrifice everything—including his life—for Iran to become a free, democratic and sovereign nation."

It's odd that Noor Pahlavi speaks for what the Iranian people want, because though she's lived on Instagram, she hasn’t lived in (or, I think, even visited) Iran. Her father hasn't been in 47 years. And yet the dynasty continues generation after generation and is poised to return. I think the reason is because... that's all the CIA can really envision. Or, because it has developed no alternatives.

It’s boilerplate, but every American official will say that it’s up to the Iranian people to pick their form of government. I fear that "the Iranian people" have already chosen to restore the Pahlavi monarchy, which the US and UK intelligence services have for over a century installed, reinstalled, futilely tried to prop up, or sheltered in exile. Originally, perhaps, we ditched the Pahlavis when they seemed sympathetic to the Nazis, and reinstalled them when they seemed unsympathetic to the Soviet Union. But why we're wedded to them now, it seems to be by default. Perhaps this time the Shahs will be less corrupt and self-serving. Perhaps they really are the leaders of the democratic opposition. I don't see enough reason to think so.

But the route from pounding Iran with bombs and killing their leaders to installing a new Pahlavi Shah is very long though Noor Pahlavi seems to think it’s already accomplished, but there doesn’t seem to be an occupation force poised to pour out of Bahrain, subdue Tehran as we subdued Baghdad, take over the state media, and install a puppet. And that, or an organic and overwhelming upwelling of pro-Shah sentiment, are the only way that the Pahlavi princes return.

The Pahlavis believe, or at least say, that they have huge domestic support. I doubt it, but then again I haven't done the polling. No one has. And also, no one seems to be doing a survey of possible alternatives. We often get these things catastrophically wrong, favoring someone who lives near Langley as the only possible alternative, because he's more or less the only guy we know with even a strained connection to the country we are targeting.

We never did install Ahmad Chalabi in Iraq, for good reasons (though Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos, amazingly, now leads the Philippines). But if the Shahs ever arrive victoriously at the soon-to-be-renamed Imam Khomeini airport in Tehran and are greeted by seemingly adoring crowds, maintain a healthy skepticism about the long-term implications.

—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell