Bob Gordon

Upper Saddle River, NJ

Iran 1979

I worked in Iran from mid-73 until mid-79, thus I lived through the meat of the revolution.
My employer was under contract with the Iranian government.
My wife had been born in Iran, though we met and married in New Jersey before I went to work there. She was from "the 400 families" - an aristocracy of sorts, but no longer with any influence.
Her father had been Ambassador to the UN, amongst other posts, and was assassinated around 1950 under suspicion of disloyalty, then exonerated, posthumously.
I did not participate in the revolution, but was offered weapons from a raided armory by my neighbors in the early days, so that I might defend myself, if necessary. Then it was determined that as a foreigner I'd be better off without arms. My neighbors pledged to defend me and my family.
I personally knew a number of the people killed by the revolutionaries in the first few weeks.

As a not particularly astute political observer, and a professional IT worker, my observations are simply first-person witnessing, anecdotally.
Many disparate (and utterly incompatible) groups banded together "in the moment" to get the Shah out. What the intelligentsia said was "we're only using Khomeini to get rid of the Shah; then we'll get rid of the Khomeinists." The implication was that then will come a more participatory government.
So you had the business people (bazaaris), students, Communists, journalists, academicians, western-minded middle and upper class people - all in favor of the Shah's ouster.

My advice for others looking forward to removing oppressive regimes is that you can never underestimate the danger of hidden motives or the extent to which nefarious people will go to obtain their objective. Too often, that objective is substituting their own rule instead of the powers that be.