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One good reason Iranians might hate us

The Central Intelligence Agency used to be proud of its role in the 1953 coup in Iran, in which the democratically-elected nationalist leader, Mohammad Mossadeq, was overthrown, and the repressive Shah restored to power. Especially back in the 1950s and ‘60s, CIA officials oozed with smug self-satisfaction as they leaked accounts of their derring-do to sympathetic journalists.

Even years after the 1979 revolution in Iran raised some doubts about the wisdom of American policy, a sycophantic history (The Very Best Men, by Evan Thomas) still celebrated the 1953 coup as a story of “romantic intrigue, timing, and luck.” Thomas’s hagiography stuck to the CIA’s fanciful adventure story; its legendary operative, Kermit Roosevelt, President Theodore’s grandson, was a Lawrence of Arabia figure who almost single-handedly changed Iran’s history, keeping the country from falling to the Soviet Union.

Before the United States is maneuvered into supporting an Israeli attack on Iran, we should know more of the truth about why the Iranian people might be suspicious of the West.

Ervand Abrahamian, an Iranian of Armenian background who is a distinguished professor at the City University of New York, is an indispensable guide to his land of origin. His recent A History of Modern Iran is scholarly but still highly readable. In it, he briskly dispenses with the CIA’s self-serving account: “The 1953 coup has often been depicted as a CIA venture to save Iran from international communism. In fact, it was a joint British-American venture to preserve the international oil cartel.”

Oil had been discovered in Iran earlier than anywhere else in the Middle East. It started to flow in 1912, exported by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, a monopoly enterprise that was in fact entirely Anglo, and 51 percent owned by the British government. (Anglo-Iranian eventually became the core of British Petroleum, which, after certain acquisitions, today calls itself BP – although its toxic spill in the Gulf of Mexico may prompt it to run away from this latest name.)

Another valuable guide to the true history of Iran and the West is Stephen Kinzer’s All the Shah’s Men (2003). Kinzer points out that for almost four decades, BP’s predecessor “enjoyed a fantastically lucrative monopoly on the production and sale of Iranian oil” – until the rise of Mohammad Mossadeq and the nationalist movement. Kinzer explains that Anglo-Iranian paid low royalties to Iran’s government, and then used “accounting tricks” to cheat the country even more.

The British managers enjoyed a life of colonial ease in enclaves in Abadan, the oil port on the Persian gulf. By contrast, Iranian oil workers lived in giant halls, built by the company, described by one witness as “housing up to 3,000–4,000 people without walls of partition between them. Each family occupied the space of a blanket. There were no lavatories.” Even after decades, the British had barely trained any Iranian technicians, so the industry remained dependent on expatriates.

Mohammad Mossadeq was an enlightened landowner and an international lawyer who had studied in Europe, and a principled man, who had refused to serve under Reza Shah, the army general who founded the purportedly several-thousand-year-old dynasty in 1921. By the late 1940s, Mossadeq, who was already in his late 60s, found himself at the head of a nationwide nationalist movement that confronted Anglo-Iranian Oil and also promoted social reform. In 1951, the Iranian parliament, democratically elected, voted to nationalize the oil industry.

Professor Abrahamian describes the British reaction: Mossadeq was described variously as “fanatical,” “crazy,” “erratic,” “slippery,” “unbalanced,” “demagogic,” “absurd,” “childish,” “tiresome and single-minded,” “inflammatory,” “volatile and unstable,” “sentimentally mystical,” “wild,” “wily Oriental,” “unwilling to face fact,” “dictatorial,” “xenophobic,” “Robespierre-like,” “Frankenstein-like,” “unprepared to listen to reason and common sense,” and “swayed by martyrdom complex.”

But the British had a big problem; Harry Truman was still in the White House, and he did not agree with their colonial policy. In fact, he called them “block-headed.” Kinzer’s book includes a touching photograph of Truman meeting Mossadeq in the United States in 1952, their broad, genuine smiles a suggestion of a history that might have been. Once Dwight Eisenhower replaced Truman, the new hardline Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, endorsed the British imperialist view, and Mossadeq was toppled on August 19, 1953.

A careful reading of history proves that the CIA’s version is mostly myth. Mossadeq’s government fell mainly because the British had imposed a worldwide boycott of Iranian oil starting back in 1951, and British warships blocked exports. Most of the third world was still under formal colonial rule then, so Iran had to stand alone. Economic warfare, not the cunning Kermit Roosevelt outfoxing flustered and foolish Iranians, was decisive.

The genuine version of history also undermines – or rather profoundly qualifies – the conspiracy theories that circulate in the Mideast and elsewhere, which perversely endorse the CIA’s own version by blaming everything on the supposed superspies at the Agency. There was unquestionably a Western conspiracy against the Iranian people and their right to control their own national resources, but it mainly took the less dramatic but more effective guise of economic strangulation.

The CIA’s version of events usually stops after the coup – with a supposedly “liberated” Iran. The spy agency understandably does not want to dwell on the coup’s consequences: the restored Shah’s repressive rule, which led – just 25 years later – to the profound and anti-American revolution.

Nor does the romantic version inquire into what happened next to Mossadeq and some of his supporters. Sixty military officers who had stayed loyal to Mossadeq – the elected prime minister – were executed. Hussein Fatemi, his patriotic foreign minister, was also judicially murdered, for “treason.” Mossadeq himself was put on trial. He told the judges, “My only crime is that I nationalized the Iranian oil industry and removed from this land the network of colonialism and the political and economic influence of the greatest empire on earth.”

Even though he was already 71 years old, he was sent to prison for 3 years, and then confined under house arrest in his home village for the remaining 11 years of his life.
 

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