Ethics

A Thug's Widow Reinvents the Past

By Ed Brayton

I read this little blurb in the NY Post and my jaw nearly dropped to the table.

THE widow of the Shah of Iran, Empress Farah Pahlavi, is still around to remind us how bad Jimmy Carter was as president -- long before his recent Israel-bashing and his calling Obama detractors racist. If Carter hadn't let the Shah be overthrown in 1979, "there wouldn't be this problem in Afghanistan, nor would there have been the Iran-Iraq war," Pahlavi tells Avenue magazine. "Iraq would never have dared to even send a plane over our country. The Gulf War wouldn't have happened, nor would any of the problems of the past 30 years, including the exporting of religious fanaticism." In the intro to the interview, Bob Colacello talks about his and Andy Warhol's 1976 visit to Iran: "The fact that the empress would invite Andy Warhol, fresh from Studio 54, to the Imperial Palace . . . showed just how open-minded, not to say hip, Her Imperial Highness was." Unlike, say, the Ayatollah Khomeini.

Full post as published by Dispatches from the Culture Wars on September 28, 2009 (boomark / email).