Even dissenting experts remained committed to the Iranian shah’s regime until its end

Evidence

One of the experts given credit for predicting what the “crisis of ‘78” might lead to, James Bill of the University of Texas, nevertheless recommended to American policymakers as late as December 1978 that the United States government should encourage “the shah…to open the system up.” In other words, even a supposedly dissenting expert voice was still committed to maintaining a regime against which, at the very moment he spoke, literally millions of its people had risen in one of the most massive insurrections in modern history. — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 142