Page 326 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin 323

President Carter at a state banquet in Tehran on 31 December 1977. ‘This is a
great tribute to you, Your Majesty, and to the respect and the admiration and
the love which your people give you.’
Muhammad Reza Shah accepted such blandishments at their face value.
Although he was reputed to possess a strong sense of history, he used the past

solely as an adjunct to his rule, as if its whole purpose had been to furnish a
prologue to the accession of the Pahlavi dynasty. A more unassuming
approach, a little sober reflection upon the imponderables and accidents of
history, might have served him better. He might even have derived some profit
(and a timely warning) from heeding what one of the most astute observers of
Persian society and history, George Curzon, had written seme eighty years or
so earlier (in Persia and the Persian Question) about the fate that was bound to
attend any fanciful plans for the rapid modernization of Persia:

Persia is neither powerful, nor spontaneously progressive, nor patriotic. Her agricul­
ture is bad, her resources unexplored, her trade ill-developed, her government corrupt,
her army a cypher. The impediments that exist to a policy of reform, or even to material
recuperation, are neither few nor insignificant. ... Colossal schemes for the swift
regeneration of Persia are not in my judgment - though herein I differ from some other
authorities - to be thought of, and will only end in fiasco. Magnificent projects for
overlaying the country with a network of railways from north to south, and from east to
west, and for equipping it with a panoply of factories and workshops and mills, can only
end in financial disaster, and bring discredit upon their promoters. Hot-headed conces­
sions for making or exporting or importing every article under the sun, from telephones
to tobacco, and from rose-water to roulette-tables, contain no element of durable
advantage, and are seldom devised with any other object than to put money into the
pocket of the originators of the scheme.