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Many of them worked in the government and in government-related organizations and were instrumental in the building of the whole edifice of state power under Reza Shah. Yet they remained cynical and resentful of Reza Shah's power, ready to explode into the political void once it had been removed. A generation later, the same type of individuals, with far greater technological ability, became the architects of Iran's phenomenal transformation during the last fifteen years of Muhammad Reza Shah's rule.

Again it is clear that on some key issues the most relevant foreign policy interaction between the United States and certain Middle Eastern states may be domestic, not international, bringing with it ethnic, ideological, and political-economic conflicts rather than the classical political-military conflicts of sovereign nations. In managing regional and international conflict in the Middle East, different methods are required depending on the type and level of conflict involved, and, once more, the region provides an excellent laboratory for innovative foreign policy.

The Middle East, penetrated greatly by Western influence and yet resilient enough to maintain a flourishing indigenous politics as well, provides an important and comprehensive laboratory for the study of the relations bet\veen ideology and power. Its politics are, for Westerners, similar to their own and yet also different enough to allow for some relatively disengaged understanding of the positive and negative features of modern political ideologies. 'The Middle East In any study of the Middle East, most of all one that aims, as this volume does, to explore the linkages between ideology and power in the region, extreme care must be taken in order not to fall into the conceptual trap so capably analyzed by Edward Said.