AP:

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — At the height of his power in 1971, Iran's Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi drew world leaders to a wind-swept luxury tent city, offering a lavish banquet of food flown in from Paris to celebrate 2,500 years of Persian monarchy in the ruins of Persepolis.

Only eight years later, his own empire would be in ruins.

The fall of the Peacock Throne and the rise of the Islamic Revolution in Iran grew out of the shah's ever-tightening control over the country as other Middle East monarchies toppled. While successfully riding rising oil prices in the 1970s, the shah failed to see that Iranians had begun to expect more as the country's people moved from the countryside to cities like Tehran.

And as the crisis reached a fever pitch, the shah's inability to act and poor decisions while secretly fighting what would be a fatal cancer doomed him.

"He was, as one diplomat said, almost Hamlet-like in his indecision," said Abbas Milani, a professor at Stanford University who wrote a book on the shah. "Shakespeare said sometimes greatness comes to the great, sometimes greatness is thrust upon them. And he had a kingdom thrust upon him."

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