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The Shah's goal, however, was to make Iran a modern, Westernized state, and if that meant equal rights for women, so be it. He aimed to make Iran one of the world's five great powers, along with the U.S., the Soviet Union, France and Japan. The idea might have seemed laughable initially but, as Western demand for oil kept climbing, the Shah's ambitions began to look more plausible. The Shah, whose country pumped 7% of the non-Communist world's oil imports, led the way in the first huge price increase, from $3 to $12 per bbl. between 1973 and 1974 and, though he aided the West by refusing to join the Arab oil embargo, he also kept urging OPEC to go on increasing its prices.
The Shah's oil revenues soared from just over $1 billion a year at the beginning of the decade to $21 billion by the late 1970s. That enabled him to buy nuclear reactors from France and Germany, steel mills from the Soviet Union, telecommunications systems from the U.S. In the mid ' 70s, the growth rate of the Iranian economy shot up to an unbelievable 41% per year. The Shah further set out to build one of the world's foremost military machines, and in the last 20 years of his reign spent a cool $36 billion on arms—Chieftain tanks from Britain, sophisticated F-14 fighter planes and Hawk and Phoenix missiles from the U.S. By the time the Khomeini revolution broke out, the Shah had placed orders that would have given Iran a 1980 supersonic fighter force larger than that of any Western country except the U.S.
While the Shah's military machine frightened some Arab neighbors, the U.S. looked on it as a bulwark against the spread of Soviet influence in the Middle East, and President Nixon gave the Shah carte blanche to buy all the American weapons he desired.
Although formal U.S. aid to Iran ended in 1967, the ties between Washington and Tehran continued to tighten. The U.S. gave its blessing to extensive American business investment in Iran; in its heyday the list of major U.S. corporations with operations in Iran looked like a not-too-abridged version of the FORTUNE 500. A sizable army of American technicians —engineers, teachers, military men on training missions—moved into the country. President Carter in his press conference last week asserted that in the Shah's last days no fewer than 70,000 Americans were in Iran. Considerable traffic flowed the other way, too; Washington ended the last training programs for Iranian jet pilots in the U.S. only two weeks ago.
The general attitude in Washington was that, although the Shah could be a most stubborn and inconvenient ally (former Secretary of the Treasury William Simon once called him "a nut"), he was on the whole a force for stability and moderation in the Middle East. In return for all the American help, the Shah did give a valuable assist to the U.S. in strategic, though hardly in economic, policy. Among other things, he set up electronic listening posts close to the Soviet border from which the CIA could monitor Soviet missile tests.