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The shah’s illusions about the power he wielded were reflected in his often naive economic policies, which fueled the unrest that eventually toppled him. He seemed to believe that he could buck convention, that he could do the impossible by using Iran’s huge influx of oil wealth to impose industrialization from the top. He tried to stick multibillion-dollar petrochemical complexes, nuclear power plants and other advanced industrial units into the arid landscape like pins into a map.
