roke off diplomatic relations with Washington during the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. The British withdrew their forces from the region in 1971. In April 1972, the Iraqis signed a 15-year treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with the USSR which became its principal arms supplier.
In the early 1970s, the United States and the Pahlavi Shah collaborated in giving covert armed assistance to the Kurds in northern Iraq because they "were alarmed by increasing Soviet influence in Iraq" (Metz, 1990, p. 61). The Shah and Iraq's new leader, Saddam Hussein, resolved their differences over the Kurds and the borders along the Shatt al-Arab waterway in the South under the Algiers Accord of March 6, 1975. Meanwhile, relations between Iraq and the United States remained cool during the rest of the 1970s, "primarily because the Baathists were antagonistic to the close United States-Israeli relationship" (Metz, 1990, p. 205). The Americans by the 1970s were disillusioned with Nasserism in all its manifestations.
Iranian-American relations were cordial after the coup engineered by British intelligence and the CIA ousted Mohammed Mossadegh and restored the Shah to power in 1953. During the period 1953-1961, American economic aid to Iran was $548 million and military aid was $501 million. From 1962 to 1975, the comparable figures were $186 million and $844.7 million, respectively (Valibeigi, 1988, p. 211).
The administration of President John Kennedy insisted that the Shah's government adopt and implement a package of domestic reforms, which became known as the White Revolution. According to Bill (1988), those reforms, which included some redistribution of land to peasants and a much ballyhooed campaign against official corruption, were really quite superficial: "the middle classes saw [them] as a political palliative designed to impress foreigners while Pahlavi power continued absolute" (p. 148). Relations were much closer under presidents Lyndon J...