It took one American President, Jimmy Carter, aided and abetted by French President Giscard d’Estaing, to pull the rug from under America’s great ally in the Middle East – the man who successfully brought his nation into the 20th Century, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi – and hand it over to 7th Century, bloodthirsty, anti-women, and anti-Semitic theocratic mullahs.
It took two at best naïve American Presidents, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, supported by other equally naïve Western leaders, to hand over billions to these same mullahs in the faint hope of stopping their nuclear ambitions. Instead, this windfall allowed the regime to maintain its position as the world’s leading broker of terrorism.
It took another American President, George Bush, to lose both Iraq and Afghanistan, not understanding that successful Islamic states are almost always under a monarch who commands the loyalty of the army and is superior to the mullahs.
Now, it has taken one American President – hated by the elites and the media to an irrational degree – to do what was always within the power of the United States as the dominant Western power: to bring down that regime. Donald Trump, whom history will surely judge as being among the greatest of US Presidents, has done what his predecessors either feared to do or even did not understand they had to do.
It was extraordinary to see those who once derided him now pleading with him to move on Tehran.
In alliance with Israel, an extraordinarily advanced country and the only democracy in the Middle East, Trump has set in motion the liberation of Iran, declaring to the Iranian people: ‘The hour of your freedom is at hand.’
He will not make the mistakes his predecessors made there and in Afghanistan and Iraq. There is a growing understanding that the most successful form of leadership in many Muslim-majority countries is a constitutionalised monarchy. Morocco is an excellent example, one of the few states that neither expelled its Jewish population nor stole their property upon the declaration of Israel’s independence.
The Leader and the Plan
One leader is emerging: Reza Pahlavi, the son of the last Shah. He has already won the most essential element of any democratic contest: the battle of the slogans. As the editors of Australia’s republican national broadsheet remarked somewhat incredulously, the chant echoing through Iranian streets is ‘Javid Shah’ (Long Live the King).
The Crown Prince has just released an updated Emergency Period Booklet, a sophisticated blueprint for a stable interim government. As Danial Taghaddos – who performs so capably on television, in answering questions in a conference and in leading an assembly of supporters – insists, this plan is the only comprehensive plan currently being offered to prevent a power vacuum.
Overcoming the Iraq Disaster
The unique feature of the Pahlavi plan, which likely impresses Israeli and American strategists, is its military integration strategy. Pahlavi is the only leader who can integrate the military and overcome the disaster seen especially in Iraq. Unlike the catastrophic de-Ba’athification that turned soldiers and every public official into opponents and even insurgents, Pahlavi’s plan does not ban those who merely served the regime because they ‘had to be’ part of the system to survive. Instead, it offers a hand of reconciliation, inviting professional soldiers to take a new, secular oath to the Iranian nation.
The Afghan Lesson
The plan also corrects the American failure in Afghanistan, where the stabilising influence of King Zahir Shah was foolishly sidelined. Pahlavi understands that only a constitutionalised monarchy provides the historical and cultural anchor most Muslim countries need to transition without collapsing into tribalism or civil war.
The National Uprising Institution
To manage this, the plan establishes the National Uprising Institution (NUI). As Danial Taghaddos has argued, the Crown Prince carries the residual authority of the throne, with Reza Pahlavi’s personal strength lying in his commitment to the people’s decision.
Assuming Iran will be a secular democracy, it will be for the people to decide in an early referendum whether it will be a constitutional monarchy or a republic. Let them stress that, unlike Australia, where ‘republic’ means more power to the delinquent politicians, in the Islamic world, it means dictatorship. It is therefore essential that he be established in Tehran as soon as feasible to chair the NUI, especially to ensure a safe military presence in the liberated and stabilising Iran. Meanwhile, an important factor is that once this interim government controls the nation’s resources, the wealth once wasted on terror can stimulate what is a devastated economy.
The darkness is lifting. After the foolish mistakes of Carter, Obama, and Biden, the era of fear is ending under President Trump. With ‘Javid Shah!’ ringing in the streets, Iran is finally poised to reclaim its place among civilised nations. The hour of freedom has arrived.
