Like his father and grandfather, Reza Pahlavi wished to be a Western stooge

TEHRAN – The missiles began to fall on the morning of 28 February, and those who had planned that morning expected the Islamic Republic to be gone within days, or at the outside within a matter of weeks. This is what the fragments now surfacing in Western sources suggest, and it is perhaps the most consequential fact about this war: not that it was fought, but that it was fought upon a forecast which proved to be worth nothing at all. Forecasts of that kind do not compose themselves, and it is worth asking who supplied this one.