The Deep State’s Next Hero
It’s getting a little old at this point, but as the Deep State log rolls for another U.S. attack on Iran, it is promoting a new Iranian national savior, one with a familiar name.
Here’s a graphic seen on X, much like others showing up on social media, championing Reza Pahlavi as “the legitimate national leader of Iran.”
Because Pahlavi calls for more U.S. intervention in Iran including airstrikes, his champions are a midnight choir of failed voices from prior regime change calamities: Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen, James Woolsey. He is featured frequently in the warmongering of the Empire’s lapdog press, in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and on Fox News.
Pahlavi’s only claim to legitimacy is that he is the son of the late-Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi who was driven from Iran in the 1979 revolution.
So here we go again. Another “enlightened” leader courtesy of the Deep State. The same machinations are at work that installed al Sharaa, the terrorist head chopper formerly known as Julani, as the president of Syria. It is already slipping down the memory hole that until recently al Sharaa carried a $10 million dollar US bounty on his head. He was a State Department “Specially Designated Global Terrorist.” But now the new president of Syria, having been sanitized and empowered by the Deep State, is fêted by Trump in the Oval Office.
Don’t forget the execrable bank embezzler Ahmed Chalabi, the man the neocons wanted to head Iraq after that regime change. Chalabi’s group received a reported $100 million from the CIA as he helped lie the American people into the Iraq war.
Before easily persuaded member of Congress jump on the Trump war and Pahlavi bandwagon, they should familiarize themselves with the record of his father, installed by a CIA coup in 1953. His misrule is detailed in my new book THE EMPIRE OF LIES: Fragments from the Memory Hole.
In what has become a familiar precedent, the CIA paid for weapons, hired thugs and mercenaries to swarm the streets, and bought off military leaders for its Iran coup. Then, at the moment of maximum chaos, CIA head Allen Dulles personally accompanied Reza Shah Pahlavi to Tehran to occupy the Peacock Throne.
Isn’t it uncanny how often US intelligence officials appear at the scene of a crime when the crime is the overthrow of an elected government? CIA director John Brennan, traveling under a pseudonym, showed up in Kyiv in 2014 shortly after the coup that toppled ousted elected President Viktor Yanukovych.
In Iran the returned Shah was promoted as an enlightened and liberal modern ruler. To no one’s surprise, the Shah quickly awarded a windfall of oil concessions to Western companies, mostly British Petroleum and to American firms.
As for the “enlightened” policies, the Deep State sent General Norman Schwarzkopf, Sr. (the father of General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, Jr., “Stormin’ Norman,” who commanded coalition forces in the 1990-91 Gulf War) to help the CIA and Israeli Mossad train the Shah’s secret police (later the infamous SAVAK) how to torture his opponents, a distinctly unenlightened characteristic of the Shah’s regime.
His rule consisted of a “radical totalitarianism” according to historian Paul Johnson. It included “megalomaniacal social engineering” and eerily Soviet sounding “Seven Year Plans,” central planning, and inflation. The Shah even set loose student thugs on the streets to arrest “profiteers.”
“He tried to be a Persian Stalin,” wrote Johnson.
It may be that Pahlavi’s resemblance to his father will be more than physical. In any case Americans have done enough damage to Iran over the last three generations and have shown no interest in installing another Shah much less sponsoring another bloody regime change conflagration that will cost them dearly and do less than nothing to make America free, prosperous, and great again.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2026/02/charles-goyette/the-deep-states-next-hero