Carter decided that Iran was Khomeini’s. It wasn’t. The president still effectively controlled the Iranian generals and might have fashioned a moderate reform coalition under their aegis. Instead, Carter selected a negative program: merely cultivating contacts with moderate Islamic clergy, officers, and politicians in the vain hope that they would counter Khomeini’s radicalism and step in if the ayatollah’s movement unraveled…

The Iranian generals threw in the towel. Sullivan cabled Washington on February 27, warning that anti-American sentiment was boiling over in the streets and the press, and that the U.S. Embassy could no longer be protected. He and his subordinates recommended the embassy staff be reduced to “six officers and a vicious dog.” (When the embassy was actually seized eight months later, Carter must have wished he had heeded the warning.) With Washington in retreat, the generals declared “neutrality”; most were arrested, exiled, or shot. The army stood down and let the demonstrations disarm it. “In Iran, all our investment in an individual, rather than in a country, came to naught,” an American colonel named Colin Powell observed from the Pentagon. “When the shah fell, our Iran policy fell with him.”