Posted on 07/25/2015 6:42:43 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The common wisdom is wrong; a history lesson is in order.
A cousin of mine has finished his freshman year in college; like most freshmen, he now knows absolutely everything. He took it upon himself, this week, to announce (to my brother, who is a very patient man) that Iran’s Islamist dictators were “a predictable consequence of American imperialism,” which manifested itself through “the CIA’s international pro-fascist crimes.”
That’s nonsense, of course, but it’s widely believed nonsense — and not just among college kids who’ve read the first chapter of a Noam Chomsky book. There are serious men who are under the impression that the CIA led a coup to replace an upstanding, democratic reformer named Mohammed Mossadegh with a fascist Shah named Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and that Pahlavi’s crimes were so atrocious that Iran was driven into the arms of the mullahs. None of that is true. And with Congress getting ready to vote on the Iran deal, everyone could use a little historical perspective.
Mossadegh, a popular parliamentarian, was appointed prime minister by the Shah in the spring of 1951. He quickly set about social-reforming: Serfs were freed, paid sick-leave was mandated, landlords’ revenues were tithed to pay for public works — and the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company was nationalized.
The story of Iranian oil dates back to 1901, when an English businessman named William D’Arcy negotiated an oil-exploration contract with the (then) Shah of Iran, Shah Qajar. In exchange for a large cash payment and shares in the ensuing oil company, along with 16 percent of all oil revenue, D’Arcy acquired exclusive drilling rights in most of Iran for 60 years.
At first, it seemed that Iran had gotten the (much) better end of the deal: After seven years of prospecting, D’Arcy had found nothing. He was almost bankrupt; he had recapitalized with a new partner, the Burmah [sic] Oil Company, which wanted to call it a day. D’Arcy was already in the process of closing up his Iranian shop when — lo and behold — he struck oil, in May 1908.
The British government, hoping to reduce its dependence on coal, invested heavily in in the D’Arcy–Burmah company, which was renamed the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, and later the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The AIOC turned a large profit for the British, and, with 16 percent of the revenue, Iran turned a large profit too. As time went on, though, Iran’s government came to consider the initial 1901 arrangement unfair; after lengthy negotiations, in 1933 — 32 years into a 60-year deal — the British agreed to sign a new contract. In the late Forties, Iran’s government again demanded a new contract, which led to a “supplemental” agreement in 1949, setting higher minimum payments to Iran. Nonetheless, in 1951, Mossadegh had all Anglo-Iranian Oil agreements terminated and the AIOC nationalized. He described the nationalization as a blow against British imperialism.
Extremely valuable property, legally owned by the British government and British private citizens, had been confiscated by a foreign government. Before the war, Britain might have invaded. Instead, it retaliated against Mossadegh by leading an international embargo of Iran’s oil and by withdrawing its technicians from the nationalized holdings. Without British know-how, the company could barely function; after the withdrawal, Iranian oil production dropped 96 percent. And the oil that was produced couldn’t be sold.
Oil money funded the Iranian government; without it, Mossadegh’s reforms were worthless, and his popularity plunged. Mossadegh called a parliamentary election in late 1951. When he realized he was going to lose, he had the election suspended.
(That should put to bed the notion that he was an idealistic democrat.)
Nonetheless, Shah Pahlavi allowed Mossadegh to form a new government, and in the summer of ’52, Mossadegh demanded authority to appoint a new minister of war and a new chief of staff, which would give him control of Iran’s military — thitherto under the authority of (and loyal to) the Shah. The Shah refused; Mossadegh resigned, and began to organize anti-Shah demonstrations. Iran was thrown into chaos, and, fearing collapse of the country, the Shah acquiesced, re-appointed Mossadegh, and gave him full control over the military.
(Quite the fascist was Shah Reza Pahlavi.)
Reinstated, Mossadegh — in the tradition of all great democrats — persuaded the parliament to grant him emergency powers, which he used to confiscate the Shah’s land, ban him from communicating with foreign countries, and exile his sister. Mossadegh also used his emergency powers to institute collective farming. According to Stephen Kinzer’s book All the Shah’s Men, “Iranians were becoming poorer and unhappier by the day. Mossadegh’s political coalition was fraying.”
You may have noticed that, up to this point, the dark and shadowy hand of the CIA has not made an appearance. In fact, the U.S.’s only role in the proceedings thus far was as an intermediary between Iran and Britain in an effort to reach a settlement everyone could live with — something that turned out not to be possible. (The U.S. also played an accidental role in aggravating the situation when an American oil company reached a 50-50 oil-revenue agreement with the Saudis, which made Iran’s 16 percent deal look shabby by comparison.)
After American mediation failed, the U.S. took Iran’s side, accusing the British of being unreasonably immovable. That changed, however, in 1953: According to a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations named Ray Takeyh, as Iran’s economy collapsed, “Mossadeq responded . . . by behaving in an increasingly autocratic manner.” As Mossadegh’s policies drove Iran further and further into poverty, it looked more and more likely that he would turn to the Soviet Union for support. At least, that was the view of Dwight Eisenhower and Winston Churchill, two men who had more than their fair share of experience in the spread of Soviet socialism. It began to appear that the choice in Iran would be a Soviet-backed dictator — a Mao, a Kim, a Kun — or a pro-Western dictator who they hoped would steer the country toward democracy, as in South Korea or Taiwan.
The U.S. had helped turn Persian public opinion against Mossadegh. However: There was no coup. In 1953, Mossadegh was prime minister of Iran; like many heads of state, the Shah had the legal, constitutional authority to remove his prime minister, which he did, at the behest of his ally the United States. Mossadegh, though, refused to be removed, and he arrested the officers who tried to deliver the Shah’s notice of dismissal. The Shah was forced to flee the country.
At that point, it looked at if the U.S.’s anti-Mossadegh efforts had failed: The Shah was gone, and Mossadegh remained in power. After the Shah fled, says Takeyh, “the initiative passed to the Iranians.”
The man who the Americans, the British, and the Shah had agreed should replace Mossadegh was General Fazlollah Zahedi; Zahedi was a powerful man, and well-liked by much of the political establishment, the religious establishment, and the army. With the Shah gone, and the Americans more or less resigned to failure, Zahedi took over the anti-Mossadegh campaign himself, spreading word throughout the country that the Shah — who remained popular — had fired Mossadegh and appointed Zahedi in his place. Says Takeyh: “Pro-shah protesters took to the streets. It is true that the CIA paid a number of toughs from the bazaar and athletic centers to agitate against the government, but the CIA-financed mobs rarely exceeded a few hundred people in a country now rocked by demonstrators numbering in the thousands . . . in the end, the CIA-organized demonstrations were overtaken by a spontaneous cascade of pro-shah protesters.”
Mossadegh ordered the army to restore order; the army took Zahedi’s side, and Mossadegh fled, soon “[turning] himself in to General Zahedi’s headquarters, where he was treated with courtesy and respect. Before the advent of the Islamic Republic, Persian politics were still marked by civility and decorum.”
The CIA was happy to take credit, exaggerating its involvement in what was, at the time, considered a big success — but a private CIA cable credited Mossadegh’s collapse to the fact that “the flight of the Shah . . . galvanized the people into an irate pro-Shah force.” (A large portion of those galvanized people, it should be noted, were hard-core Islamists, who feared that Mossadegh’s slide to the left would include Communist atheism.)
So: Mossadegh was no democrat, and the CIA was not responsible for his ouster; the CIA did not install the Shah in his place, and it did not become involved because of oil. In fact, after Mossadegh was gone, Iran’s oil infrastructure remained nationalized, and eventually the British agreed to a 50-50 profit split.
There’s no question, though, that the U.S. was one of the Shah’s major backers. And according to many luminaries — Ron Paul, Ben Affleck, my cousin — the Shah was a real bastard. Ben Affleck’s movie Argo opens with a monologue that says the “Shah was known for opulence and excess . . . [he] has his lunches flown in by Concorde from Paris. . . . The people starved. . . . The Shah kept power though his ruthless internal police: the SAVAK.” It was an “era of torture and fear.”
With a brutal, American-puppet dictator in power, who can blame the Iranians for turning to the ayatollahs? Well, it’s possible that Argo overstated its case. According to historian Ervand Abrahamian, “Whereas less than 100 political prisoners had been executed between 1971 and 1979, more than 7,900 were executed between 1981 and 1985. . . . Prison life was drastically worse under the Islamic Republic than under the Pahlavis. One who survived both writes that four months under [the ayatollahs’ warden] took the toll of four years under SAVAK. In the prison literature of the Pahlavi era, the recurring words have been ‘boredom’ and ‘monotony.’ In that of the Islamic Republic, they are ‘fear,’ ‘death,’ ‘terror,’ ‘horror,’ and most frequent of all ‘nightmare.’”
Abrahamian also reports that the Shah’s political prisoners had access to “a radio, television set, reading room, Ping-Pong table, and indoor gym equipped with exercise machines.”
Even Mossadegh was a beneficiary of the Shah’s liberal attitude toward retribution: According to a contemporary New York Times piece, the court that tried Mossadegh “refused to accede to the prosecutor’s demand that Dr. Mossadegh be sentenced to death or at least imprisonment for life as a result of the Shah’s intervention. . . . Most persons had expected the defendant would be exiled or imprisoned for life.” Instead, thanks to the Shah, Mossadegh was sentenced to three years’ house arrest.
Reza Pahlavi was a dictator, but not one of the worst — he was Chiang Kai-shek to the Islamists’ Mao. Reza Pahlavi was a dictator, but not one of the worst — he was Chiang Kai-shek to the Islamists’ Mao. The Shah curbed the power of the aristocracy, promoted rights for women, built new infrastructure and schools, spread literacy to peasants, and maintained a strong pro-democracy foreign policy — the Shah’s Iran was even a friend and ally of that noirest of bêtes noires, Israel. To boot, under the Shah, Iran prospered at Asian Tiger levels: During the last 14 years of his reign, Iran saw annual economic growth of over 13 percent.
Iran did not fall to the mullahs because of “the hated Shah,” as Ron Paul has said — it fell because the United States refused to defend progress from Islamism, in the same way we refused to protect our successes in Iraq from the rise of ISIS. The Shah’s government could have been saved, but we refused to save it.
So why do so many people believe the imperialist-calamity version of modern Persian history? Because the world is filled with freshmen and sophomoric adults.
— Josh Gelernter writes weekly for NRO and is a regular contributor to The Weekly Standard.
Bookmark, I’ve heard this argument indeed parroted.
Amazing History is always twisted and rewritten by the left. So when the truth coms out there is a credibility gap because the lies have been used for decades.
Our name for this process was "The American Revolution." Why would the author of this article have a problem with it?
Bookmark
During the Islamic revolution of 1979, the U.S. embassy was actually the second major Western "landmark" that was sacked and occupied during the uprising. A special honor as a scholar in modern Iranian history goes to the Freeper who knows which building was first.
http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB435/
The CIA doesn’t agree. They say did it, in partnership with Britain, for British strategic reasons.
“Our name for this process was “The American Revolution.” Why would the author of this article have a problem with it?”
I think you’re comparing two different things. Iran signed a deal over the oil interests. We signed no deal with Britain. The British took what was OURS in other words.
Who does the "OURS" refer to?
That kid is going to have reality slapping him in the face for many years now. He better get used to it after being fed so many liberal lies at the university. First one he’s going to learn is ht Obama lied about student loan forgiveness...
Dear God this article is a complete farce.
Some reading material for the class
http://www.amazon.com/All-Shahs-Men-American-Middle/dp/0470580410
I also cannot take an article about 1953 seriously without any mention of Kermit Roosevelt
Evidence Jimmy Carter abandoned the Shah
http://www.rescueattempt.com/id24.html
We were British in 1774.
“Who does the “OURS” refer to?”
Our money, our freedom, our rights - through the imposition of taxes without our say, the billeting of soldiers in homes against our will, and the imposition - or at least attempts at the imposition - of speech and social controls.
Are you saying you’ve never read the Declaration of Independence?
Here are the accusations against King George III:
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
Six decades to the day since a pro-Shah mob, led by Iranian agents recruited by the U.S. and the British, marched on Mossadegh’s residence, Byrne published extracts from internal C.I.A. documents that, for the first time, explicitly acknowledge how the agency masterminded the change of government in Tehran.
The C.I.A.’s involvement in the coup, which served as a model for subsequent clandestine operations in Guatemala, Cuba, and other countries, has been well known for decades, and even today it is a source of animosity towards the United States on the part of many Iranians. The agent who led the coup was Kermit Roosevelt, the grandson of Theodore Roosevelt. Until recently, though, the agency hasn’t publicly acknowledged the extent of its role, which was code named TPAJAX. That has now changed. In an internal C.I.A. account of the coup, which was written in the nineteen-seventies and kept secret until Byrne obtained it, the anonymous author states bluntly:
The military coup that overthrew Mosadeq [a different English translation of the prime minister’s name from Farsi] and his National Front cabinet was carried out under CIA direction as an act of U.S. foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government.
So much for the the Eisenhower Administration’s vigorous denials that it was behind the coup. And so much for the alternative version of the events, assiduously promoted in some quarters, which claimed that the overthrowal of Mossadegh was a locally-inspired plot that the Americans and the British merely helped along. The internal C.I.A. historian continues:
It was not an aggressively simplistic solution, clandestinely arrived at, but was instead an official admission … that normal, rational methods of international communication and commerce had failed. TPJAX was entered into as a last resort.
The newly released account come from one of a series of documents that the C.I.A. eventually turned over to Byrne after he filed Freedom of Information requests. It is different from another history of the Iranian coup that was written in 1954 by one of its planners at the C.I.A., Donald N. Wilber, and which the New York Times reporter James Risen obtained in 2000. Wilber’s account was almost contemporaneous, and it contained many vivid details of the coup attempt, which almost failed. The new account, portions of which had been declassified previously, takes a broader and more detached approach. In addition to confirming that a U.S. President, Dwight Eisenhower, personally approved the toppling of a foreign government, it contains several other items of interest.
The United States saw the coup essentially as a Cold War maneuver. For the British, who were also eager to overthrow Mossadegh, the main beef with the Iranian Prime Minister was that, in May of 1951, he had nationalized the oil fields controlled by the Anglo Iranian Oil Company, the precursor to BP. From the perspective of Washington, though, as the newly released documents confirm, Mossadegh’s biggest sin was his flirtation with the Soviet Union, which, like Britain, had colonial ties to Iran. As the animosity between Tehran and London escalated, the British moved to prevent Iran from selling any oil internationally, thus depriving the government of much-needed revenues. The C.I.A. and other U.S. agencies became concerned that Mossadegh would turn to the Soviets for economic and even military help. From the Agency’s history:
“We were British in 1774.”
Not my family.
Gee, thanks for that advertisement. I saw no mention of the Tudeh party and Soviet influence. I guess Marxists are always welcome liberators and the West are always meddling coup-plotters.
Of course. My point is that grievances of this sort are behind almost any revolutionary movement where a colonial power is overthrown. That’s pretty much what happened in Iran in 1979, isn’t it?
Considering Mossadegh completely rejected any “Soviet security zone” in Northern Iran the Soviet threat was overblown, and conceived by Churchill to convince Eisenhower to take action, after Truman refused.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.