"Iran - then and now" series are often misleading. They cherry-pick extreme examples from non-representative slices of the population.
We've all seen photos of the stylish, 1970s Iranian 1%, but not of pervasive poverty and disenfranchisement that their brand of progress perpetuated on the other 99%. The Shah's elite may have looked American but this doesn't mean that they presided over progress or gave much thought to human rights.
The Muslim world has never known how to do democracy right because of a number of reasons including tribalism, nepotism, elitism. They have never understood what it means to be a liberal democracy. Add to that the colonials wanting to continue this tradition because corruption is easier to exploit and we have the precarious situation in the Middle East which has now deteriorated to an unfixable point.
