funny thing how history repeats.
Fifty years ago, on Aug. 19, 1953, the predecessors of George W. Bush and Tony Blair -- Dwight Eisenhower and Winston Churchill -- orchestrated a plot for "regime change" in the Middle East. It involved a coup d'état in Iran against the democratically elected government of Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh, who had nationalized the Iranian oil industry.
'Victims of geography'
By SAEED RAHNEMA
Saturday, Aug. 16, 2003
All the Shah's Men:
An American Coup
and the Roots of Middle East Terror
By Stephen Kinzer
Wiley, 260 pages, $38.95
Fifty years ago, on Aug. 19, 1953, the predecessors of George W. Bush and Tony Blair -- Dwight Eisenhower and Winston Churchill -- orchestrated a plot for "regime change" in the Middle East. It involved a coup d'état in Iran against the democratically elected government of Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh, who had nationalized the Iranian oil industry.
At the turn of 20th century, the British had gained a 60-year exclusive concession to exploit Iranian natural gas and petroleum in return for a royalty payment of only 16 per cent of the company's declared net profit, over which Iran had no right of audit. The Brits, typical of their colonial policies and attitudes, had created prosperous quarters in the cities for their managers and employees, while the "native" workers lived in impoverished slums in the most squalid conditions. Several earlier demands by Iranian governments to revise the concession had fallen on deaf ears.
In 1950, convinced that the British would not concede to these demands, or even agree to a 50-50 share -- similar to what the U.S. companies had concluded with the Saudis -- Mossadegh, an MP from Tehran, led a parliamentary committee to recommend nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC). The bill, responding to the long-desired aspirations of the Iranian people, was unanimously passed by both the parliament and the senate. The outraged British pushed the indecisive and fearful shah to dissolve parliament and bring in a pro-British prime minister. Instead, considering his huge popular backing, parliament offered the position to Mossadegh.
A British-imposed embargo and numerous plots to destabilize the government were not enough to topple Mossadegh, so the Brits turned to the Americans for help. President Harry Truman refused, but his successor, Dwight Eisenhower, agreed, and the coup was carried out.
New York Times writer Stephen Kinzer's All the Shah's Men provides a detailed account of events leading to the coup. Drawing primarily on British sources and memoirs, and on an internal CIA history of the coup partly published by The Times in April, 2000, Kinzer explains, in thriller-novel style, the clandestine operation and the characters involved in the events.
The book covers more than the title suggests -- inevitably, not in much depth. Kinzer provides a historical overview of Iran, with the hope of exploring the social, cultural and political background of a nation that, in the span of a century, had a series of major upheavals against despotic rule and foreign domination. In 1891, the so-called tobacco uprising forced Nasseredin Shah to cancel a lucrative concession given to the British. In 1906, a constitutional revolution forced Mozaffaredin Shah to yield to the creation of one of the first parliamentary systems in the Third World. In 1951, Iranians nationalized their oil. In the 1979 revolution, they toppled the last shah. Today, the population is mobilizing against the fundamentalist clerics.
Kinzer attempts to link the great themes that run through Iranian -- that is, Persian -- history and shape the national psyche. As Zoroastrians, he says, the early Persians held that "the sacred responsibility of every human being is to work toward establishing social justice on earth." Zoroastrian religion taught that "citizens have an inalienable right to enlightened leadership, and that the duty of subjects is not simply to obey wise kings but also to rise up against those who are wicked."
Persians had a "long experience in assimilating foreign cultures, and . . . they shaped those cultures to their liking." That is why, Kinzer argues, when the Iranians "were forced to adopt Islam . . . they fashioned an interpretation of Islam quite different from that of their Arab conquerors." The resulting Shiism, with its strong sense that revolt and martyrdom could create a just society and just leadership, shaped the "collective psyche of Iranians."
Kinzer further argues that Iranians have been "victims of geography," a constant target for foreign invaders. The constitutional revolution of 1906 "was crushed with the decisive help of foreign powers, but only after it had laid the foundation of democratic Iran." That revolution also revealed for the first time the clash between clerics and secular reformers, and also among clerics, between those who "believed the religion was compatible with modern ideas" and those who saw conflict between the two. Kinzer contends that "all these strains combined . . . to produce and then destroy the towering figure of Mohammad Mossadegh."
With this background, All the Shah's Men describes the process that led to Mossadegh's premiership, the nationalization of oil and the plots to destabilize, discredit and, eventually, topple Mossadegh.
A senior CIA agent, Kermit Roosevelt, grandson of former U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt, was dispatched to implement "Operation Ajax." Kinzer describes Roosevelt's masterful use of the sophisticated network of agents and sub-agents among the military, clerics, journalists and MPs whom the British had left behind, and the distribution of sacks of money brought to Tehran by General Norman Schwarzkopf Sr., father of the Desert Storm commander, to pay off thugs and mobs in preparation for the coup.
Posing as Communists, the paid demonstrators looted shops, intimidated the people and harassed religious leaders to turn them against Mossadegh. The first coup attempt by military officers failed. But Mossadegh's vacillation in confronting them, and his illusions about the Americans, allowed the staging of a second, successful coup.
The shah returned, Mossadegh was tried and put in jail, and officers who had resisted the coup were executed, along with Iran's popular foreign minister, Hussein Fatemi. A consortium of foreign oil companies took over the nationalized Iranian oil company. AIOC's name was changed to British Petroleum (BP). Its share of the total supply was reduced to 40 per cent; five American oil companies got 40 per cent, and the rest was given to Royal Dutch/Shell and the CFP of France. The non-British companies paid $1-billion (U.S.) to BP -- not to the Iranian people -- for 60 per cent of the concession. Although the consortium agreed to a 50-50 share of profits with Iran, it still refused to open its books to Iranian auditors.
The shah ruled with brutal force, and suppressed all dissent for 26 years, only to be toppled in the 1979 revolution.
Kinzer rightly draws direct connections between the fall of Mossadegh, the 1979 revolution, and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and anti-Americanism that has engulfed the Middle East, and observes, "The world has paid a heavy price for the lack of democracy in most of the Middle East." True. This raises the question: What would have been the outcome had the United States and Britain not destroyed Iran's chance to experience democracy 50 years ago?
The book suffers from some minor weaknesses, including confusion over names. Its discussion of Soviet policies toward Iran, and the role of the Communist Tudeh party, is insufficient. And at times Kinzer is too generous toward Truman's policies in the Middle East. Still, All the Shah's Men is essential reading for those who want to better understand the causes of the rise of religious fundamentalism, terrorism and the politics of oil.
Prof. Saeed Rahnema is the political science co-ordinator in the Atkinson faculty at York University.
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