Between a Hard Place and Iraq
Lately, I keep running into Iran when I least expect it.
The Chomsky-Michael Moore tinged people I live among, in this political purgatory, pull out Iran at the oddest times, as some sort of holy hand grenade of argument. It has been used to prove: 1. Americans don't really care about democracy in the Muslim world because they overthrew a pure democracy in Iran in 1953, and 2. contemporary terrorism against Americans is just a natural, and excusable, outgrowth of whatever it was we did in Iran in 1953.
All this seems to be based on a false presumption of pre-coup Iran as a sort of paradise of freedom and democracy, and on American action there as darkly evil and motivated entirely by oil greed.
The reality was a good deal more complex, with tragic misunderstandings all around. The Americans got involved reluctantly in a feud between Iran and Britain, and spent years trying to bring it to peaceful resolution before losing patience in the face of Cold War fears.
The account that follows is going to attempt to be dispassionate look at the situation. It steers in some directions specifically to refute common misconceptions on the America-hating side, but it doesn't attempt to justify American actions. The CIA almost certainly took the leading role in overthrowing the existing Iranian government and giving the shah almost tyrannical powers. It did so based on a Cold War definition of self-interest and political necessity. It did so in a classic case of failure to distinguish a nationalist and a reformer from a communist tool. It was a bad bit of work, if you don't like coups, but it wasn't the root of all terrorism, nor was it a disruption of a Persian paradise.
Iran was a constitutional monarchy, but with an unsettled relationship between the parliament (Majles) and the shah, more like Britain under the Georges than a modern limited monarchy. Politics were in the hands of the elite, especially the large landowners. They dueled for power with the shah, who not only reigned, but ruled, and at times was able to rule as an autocrat. But when popular anger united behind the Majles, it could successfully challenge the shah.
Britain and Russia unilaterally occupied Iran in August 1941, and they overthrew the German-sympathizing Reza Shah and installed his son on the throne. The country was used as a crucial supply route for the Soviet Union. After America got into the war, it, too, participated in the transportation lifeline. But as the war drew to an end, the Truman Administration took pains to insure that the invaders left Iran within six months of the final Axis surrender.
Stalin seemed inclined to test American commitment on this and to discover if he could get anything out of the Iran occupation -- a toehold in the northern region, or even a full-blown Soviet satellite state, or at least an oil concession. He also had used the occupation to ensure the Iranian communist party, the Tudeh, followed his will.
Politics in Iran at the time were typically turbulent. The autumn 1944 Majles elections was crudely rigged by the shah. Popular outrage at this galvanized an opposition front all across the political spectrum.
As the war wound down, the Soviets encouraged break-away people's republics in Iran's Azeri and Kurdish regions, and they actually increased their troop presence rather than withdrawing. Their propaganda appeared to be ginning up the image of popular support for a Soviet Iran. The Tudeh began labor strikes and street disturbances. The Soviets cut off the flow of food from the north -- Iran's breadbasket -- to the rest of the country. The Iranian government appealed for help to the United Nations, which did nothing. By 1946, Iran threatened to become the first Cold War crisis.
Truman responded with a firm hand. He put three American divisions in Austria, then preparing to return home, on alert for Iranian duty. At the same time a new prime minister in Iran, Ahmad Qavam, began direct negotiations with the Soviets. He may have played them royally, or he may genuinely have been the useful idiot Stalin perhaps thought he was, but some combination of Qavam's negotiation and Truman's stalwartness convinced Stalin to back down. By May 1946, Soviet forces were withdrawing from Iran.
Iran emerged from the war poor, backwards, and more fearful than ever of the power of the USSR. Iranians were hardly less suspicious of the British, with whom they had long and unpleasant experience. In fact, the country had suffered long in the Great Game, and Iranians traditionally looked for a third-nation savior to ride to the rescue and extricate the country from its squeeze. That was one reason Reza Shah was drawn to the rising power of Hitler. After the war, Iran looked to the United States as a counterbalance. At first, however, the U.S. had little interest, and Washington responded to the shah's request for military aid by telling him to concentrate on political and economic reform instead.
Iran's oil exports had grown from less than 300,000 tons in 1914 to 16.5 million tons in 1945. But a raw deal in the concession treaty with the British company that controlled the oil fields, compounded by British cheating, meant that Iran got less than 14 percent of the oil revenues from its natural resource. In addition to swindling Iran out of billions of dollars, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (the British government was the chief shareholder), treated its Iranian workers like slaves.
A general strike against the company in July 1946 provoked an old-fashioned imperialist response. The British sent warships to threaten the main refinery, at Abadan, and recruited local Arab tribes to attack the strikers. The British agreed to some concessions to get the workers back on the job (such as observing Iranian labor laws), but they ignored them once the strike was over. Averell Harriman reported that the British had "a completely nineteenth century colonial attitude toward Iran."
The war also had weakened the Iranian throne against the Majles, but with the end of the Axis, the winds began to blow the other way. Qavam held power into 1946 by fixing the election, but his coalition then fell apart. The shah rebuilt his power base in the army, and in late 1947 he ousted Qavam and installed his own choice as prime minister.
A February 1949 assassination attempt gave the shah the pretext to grasp even more power. The would-be killer seemed to have ties to both the communists and the Islamic clergy, which opened the door for the shah to crack down on two of his most powerful opposition groups. He declared martial law, changed the Constitution to bolster his power over the Majles, banned the Tudeh, and deported many leading clergy. But he squandered his political advantage by trying, again, to rig the elections in July, and he suffered a popular backlash.
The National Front organized October 1949 to oppose both the shah and the British. It was a broad coalition, ranging from the liberals to the middle class to the religious fundamentalists. And it naturally gathered around elder statesman Mohammad Mosaddeq, who had made his mark opposing both the shah and the foreign oil companies.
The shah's tainted elections were overturned, and new elections held in late fall 1949 were among the most free ever in Iran. Candidates sympathetic to the National Front (including a revived Tudeh) swept into the Majles.
One of the first acts of the new administration was to demand a renegotiation of the British oil concession. But postwar Britain had fallen on hard times, too, and could hardly afford to sacrifice AIOC for humanitarian reasons. The British government drew $142 million in annual taxes from the firm, in addition to drawing off about 60 percent of its $93 million annual profits via stock shares.
The Americans had set the example by negotiating a fifty-fifty profits split with Venezuela for oil drilling rights, and the U.S. soon reached a similar deal with Saudi Arabia. Iran sought the same from Britain. AIOC flatly refused, and its counter officer was frankly insulting. The shah, however, fearing the British would overthrow him, recommended the Majles accept. Instead, it moved to nationalize the oil fields.
The whole blow-up made the Truman administration enormously unhappy. Their ire was directed at the British and the AIOC, and their sympathies were with Mosaddeq and the Iranian nationalists. They believed that the era when colonial powers could bully smaller states was ending, and they feared British greed and inflexibility would drive Iran into the communist sphere. Nobody wanted to "lose" Iran.
Things got worse in 1950 after the Korean War began. Containment of communism rose to the top of the U.S. global agenda. The U.S. and Iran signed a mutual defense agreement in May and Washington turned up the heat on the British to compromise on the oil concession and accept a 50-50 split.
The British had other ideas. They strong-armed the shah to replace the current prime minister with Gen. 'Ali Razmara, whom they thought would do their will. Many Iranians wrongly assumed the Americans were behind this sudden move.
But the Majles was in no mood to back down, and it kept insisting on a 50-50 split of oil revenues, which the British constistently rejected. The pressure for nationalization of the oil fields rose. Razmara blocked it, but he was assassinated by a Muslim extremist with some ties to the National Front. That cleared the deck; Mosaddeq became prime minister and on April 30, 1951, the Majles voted to nationalize all Iran's oil fields. The shah, with no recourse, signed the bill.
The British government planned an unrestrained response. It drew up plans for an invasion of Iran by land and sea, involving 70,000 troops, codenamed "Buccaneer." London moved warships to the Persian gulf and a paratroop brigade to Cyprus. The AIOC, meanwhile, shut down the oil fields, fired 20,000 Iranian workers, and organized an international boycott of Iranian oil to discourage other governments from nationalization. The British Navy enforced the boycott.
Both sides looked to the United States. The Truman Administration had been watching with dismay. They were convinced Mossadeq was a popular national leader, a strong anti-communist, and someone who could be reasoned with. They didn't want a row with the British over Iran, yet they didn't want to drive Iran closer to the Soviet Union. If the British invaded southern Iran, they feared, the Russians might move in from the north.
Both Truman and Dean Acheson private pressured the British to drop their invasion plans, while the State Department publicly pushed for a negotiated settlement and made statements sympathetic to Iranian rights. Truman sent Harriman to Tehran in July 1951 and he eventually convinced Mossadeq to meet again with the British. The U.S. ambassador told the Wall Street Journal, "Since nationalization is an accomplished fact, it would be wise for Britain to adopt a conciliatory attitude. Mossadegh's National Front party is the closest thing to a moderate and stable political element in the national parliament."
British PM Clement Atlee was furious that the Americans were backing Tehran, but the U.S. pressure forced Britain to scrap its invasion plan. London continued to work for regime change in Iran, however. It merely switched to covert action. The British-Iranian meetings arranged by Harriman came to nothing because the British would not accept the nationalization.
Meanwhile Mossadeq's government was revealing the strident nationalism that was, and is, such a feature of Iranian relations with the West. Washington's pro-Iran tilt, so far from being appreciated, was protested in Iran as interference in internal affairs. At the same time, Mossadeq was bitterly disappointed that the Americans did not leap to Iran's defense against the British.
In part due to British covert action, Mossadeq's party had begun to crack before the spring 1952 Majles election. A coalition based on opposing certain things is difficult to maintain when the threats retreat. And the natural differences in the coalition members began to reassert themselves; in particular the conflict between secular Mossadeq and Ayatollah Kashani. But even more important in fracturing the National Front was the economic pinch of the British embargo, which cost tens of thousands of oil workers jobs.
It's unlikely that Mossadeq's coalition would have lasted, even without foreign pressure. But that proposition can't be tested now, because the outside pressure was intense. Mossadeq, a scrupulous constitutionalist through most of his career, reacted by stretching the boundaries of the law to hold power, and ended up standing entirely outside them.
Mossadeq set out to insure his continuance in power by gerrymandering voting districts and sequencing the election. But early results did not give him the support he needed and it became clear the National Front was going down to defeat. Mossadeq then called an emergency session of the cabinet and convinced it to halt the elections, using the pretext that they were corrupted by foreign agents. Certainly there was some truth to this, but it remains unclear to what degree, and whether it materially affected the outcome.
Mossadeq's next step was to challenge the shah by attempting to take from him the customary perogative of appointing the minister of war. The shah refused and Mossadeq resigned. The British somehow got the shah to appoint Qavam in his place. But when Qavam announced he was going to reverse many of Mossadeq's policies and arrest those who opposed, the people rose up in mass demonstrations. The situation rapidly spiralled into bloodshed and troop mutiny, and four days later the shah asked Qavam to step down and recalled Mossadeq.
Mossadeq now was effective dictator of Iran. Even the shah was powerless before him. Mossadeq first shuffled the army, to weaken a traditional power base of the shah, then he declared martial law. Then he turned to the rump Majles and got it to grant him emergency powers for six months to "decree any law he felt necessary for obtaining not only financial solvency, but also electoral, judicial, and educational reform."
[To be continued, eventually]
The Chomsky-Michael Moore tinged people I live among, in this political purgatory, pull out Iran at the oddest times, as some sort of holy hand grenade of argument. It has been used to prove: 1. Americans don't really care about democracy in the Muslim world because they overthrew a pure democracy in Iran in 1953, and 2. contemporary terrorism against Americans is just a natural, and excusable, outgrowth of whatever it was we did in Iran in 1953.
All this seems to be based on a false presumption of pre-coup Iran as a sort of paradise of freedom and democracy, and on American action there as darkly evil and motivated entirely by oil greed.
The reality was a good deal more complex, with tragic misunderstandings all around. The Americans got involved reluctantly in a feud between Iran and Britain, and spent years trying to bring it to peaceful resolution before losing patience in the face of Cold War fears.
The account that follows is going to attempt to be dispassionate look at the situation. It steers in some directions specifically to refute common misconceptions on the America-hating side, but it doesn't attempt to justify American actions. The CIA almost certainly took the leading role in overthrowing the existing Iranian government and giving the shah almost tyrannical powers. It did so based on a Cold War definition of self-interest and political necessity. It did so in a classic case of failure to distinguish a nationalist and a reformer from a communist tool. It was a bad bit of work, if you don't like coups, but it wasn't the root of all terrorism, nor was it a disruption of a Persian paradise.
Iran was a constitutional monarchy, but with an unsettled relationship between the parliament (Majles) and the shah, more like Britain under the Georges than a modern limited monarchy. Politics were in the hands of the elite, especially the large landowners. They dueled for power with the shah, who not only reigned, but ruled, and at times was able to rule as an autocrat. But when popular anger united behind the Majles, it could successfully challenge the shah.
Britain and Russia unilaterally occupied Iran in August 1941, and they overthrew the German-sympathizing Reza Shah and installed his son on the throne. The country was used as a crucial supply route for the Soviet Union. After America got into the war, it, too, participated in the transportation lifeline. But as the war drew to an end, the Truman Administration took pains to insure that the invaders left Iran within six months of the final Axis surrender.
Stalin seemed inclined to test American commitment on this and to discover if he could get anything out of the Iran occupation -- a toehold in the northern region, or even a full-blown Soviet satellite state, or at least an oil concession. He also had used the occupation to ensure the Iranian communist party, the Tudeh, followed his will.
Politics in Iran at the time were typically turbulent. The autumn 1944 Majles elections was crudely rigged by the shah. Popular outrage at this galvanized an opposition front all across the political spectrum.
As the war wound down, the Soviets encouraged break-away people's republics in Iran's Azeri and Kurdish regions, and they actually increased their troop presence rather than withdrawing. Their propaganda appeared to be ginning up the image of popular support for a Soviet Iran. The Tudeh began labor strikes and street disturbances. The Soviets cut off the flow of food from the north -- Iran's breadbasket -- to the rest of the country. The Iranian government appealed for help to the United Nations, which did nothing. By 1946, Iran threatened to become the first Cold War crisis.
Truman responded with a firm hand. He put three American divisions in Austria, then preparing to return home, on alert for Iranian duty. At the same time a new prime minister in Iran, Ahmad Qavam, began direct negotiations with the Soviets. He may have played them royally, or he may genuinely have been the useful idiot Stalin perhaps thought he was, but some combination of Qavam's negotiation and Truman's stalwartness convinced Stalin to back down. By May 1946, Soviet forces were withdrawing from Iran.
Iran emerged from the war poor, backwards, and more fearful than ever of the power of the USSR. Iranians were hardly less suspicious of the British, with whom they had long and unpleasant experience. In fact, the country had suffered long in the Great Game, and Iranians traditionally looked for a third-nation savior to ride to the rescue and extricate the country from its squeeze. That was one reason Reza Shah was drawn to the rising power of Hitler. After the war, Iran looked to the United States as a counterbalance. At first, however, the U.S. had little interest, and Washington responded to the shah's request for military aid by telling him to concentrate on political and economic reform instead.
Iran's oil exports had grown from less than 300,000 tons in 1914 to 16.5 million tons in 1945. But a raw deal in the concession treaty with the British company that controlled the oil fields, compounded by British cheating, meant that Iran got less than 14 percent of the oil revenues from its natural resource. In addition to swindling Iran out of billions of dollars, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (the British government was the chief shareholder), treated its Iranian workers like slaves.
A general strike against the company in July 1946 provoked an old-fashioned imperialist response. The British sent warships to threaten the main refinery, at Abadan, and recruited local Arab tribes to attack the strikers. The British agreed to some concessions to get the workers back on the job (such as observing Iranian labor laws), but they ignored them once the strike was over. Averell Harriman reported that the British had "a completely nineteenth century colonial attitude toward Iran."
The war also had weakened the Iranian throne against the Majles, but with the end of the Axis, the winds began to blow the other way. Qavam held power into 1946 by fixing the election, but his coalition then fell apart. The shah rebuilt his power base in the army, and in late 1947 he ousted Qavam and installed his own choice as prime minister.
A February 1949 assassination attempt gave the shah the pretext to grasp even more power. The would-be killer seemed to have ties to both the communists and the Islamic clergy, which opened the door for the shah to crack down on two of his most powerful opposition groups. He declared martial law, changed the Constitution to bolster his power over the Majles, banned the Tudeh, and deported many leading clergy. But he squandered his political advantage by trying, again, to rig the elections in July, and he suffered a popular backlash.
The National Front organized October 1949 to oppose both the shah and the British. It was a broad coalition, ranging from the liberals to the middle class to the religious fundamentalists. And it naturally gathered around elder statesman Mohammad Mosaddeq, who had made his mark opposing both the shah and the foreign oil companies.
The shah's tainted elections were overturned, and new elections held in late fall 1949 were among the most free ever in Iran. Candidates sympathetic to the National Front (including a revived Tudeh) swept into the Majles.
One of the first acts of the new administration was to demand a renegotiation of the British oil concession. But postwar Britain had fallen on hard times, too, and could hardly afford to sacrifice AIOC for humanitarian reasons. The British government drew $142 million in annual taxes from the firm, in addition to drawing off about 60 percent of its $93 million annual profits via stock shares.
The Americans had set the example by negotiating a fifty-fifty profits split with Venezuela for oil drilling rights, and the U.S. soon reached a similar deal with Saudi Arabia. Iran sought the same from Britain. AIOC flatly refused, and its counter officer was frankly insulting. The shah, however, fearing the British would overthrow him, recommended the Majles accept. Instead, it moved to nationalize the oil fields.
The whole blow-up made the Truman administration enormously unhappy. Their ire was directed at the British and the AIOC, and their sympathies were with Mosaddeq and the Iranian nationalists. They believed that the era when colonial powers could bully smaller states was ending, and they feared British greed and inflexibility would drive Iran into the communist sphere. Nobody wanted to "lose" Iran.
Things got worse in 1950 after the Korean War began. Containment of communism rose to the top of the U.S. global agenda. The U.S. and Iran signed a mutual defense agreement in May and Washington turned up the heat on the British to compromise on the oil concession and accept a 50-50 split.
The British had other ideas. They strong-armed the shah to replace the current prime minister with Gen. 'Ali Razmara, whom they thought would do their will. Many Iranians wrongly assumed the Americans were behind this sudden move.
But the Majles was in no mood to back down, and it kept insisting on a 50-50 split of oil revenues, which the British constistently rejected. The pressure for nationalization of the oil fields rose. Razmara blocked it, but he was assassinated by a Muslim extremist with some ties to the National Front. That cleared the deck; Mosaddeq became prime minister and on April 30, 1951, the Majles voted to nationalize all Iran's oil fields. The shah, with no recourse, signed the bill.
The British government planned an unrestrained response. It drew up plans for an invasion of Iran by land and sea, involving 70,000 troops, codenamed "Buccaneer." London moved warships to the Persian gulf and a paratroop brigade to Cyprus. The AIOC, meanwhile, shut down the oil fields, fired 20,000 Iranian workers, and organized an international boycott of Iranian oil to discourage other governments from nationalization. The British Navy enforced the boycott.
Both sides looked to the United States. The Truman Administration had been watching with dismay. They were convinced Mossadeq was a popular national leader, a strong anti-communist, and someone who could be reasoned with. They didn't want a row with the British over Iran, yet they didn't want to drive Iran closer to the Soviet Union. If the British invaded southern Iran, they feared, the Russians might move in from the north.
Both Truman and Dean Acheson private pressured the British to drop their invasion plans, while the State Department publicly pushed for a negotiated settlement and made statements sympathetic to Iranian rights. Truman sent Harriman to Tehran in July 1951 and he eventually convinced Mossadeq to meet again with the British. The U.S. ambassador told the Wall Street Journal, "Since nationalization is an accomplished fact, it would be wise for Britain to adopt a conciliatory attitude. Mossadegh's National Front party is the closest thing to a moderate and stable political element in the national parliament."
British PM Clement Atlee was furious that the Americans were backing Tehran, but the U.S. pressure forced Britain to scrap its invasion plan. London continued to work for regime change in Iran, however. It merely switched to covert action. The British-Iranian meetings arranged by Harriman came to nothing because the British would not accept the nationalization.
Meanwhile Mossadeq's government was revealing the strident nationalism that was, and is, such a feature of Iranian relations with the West. Washington's pro-Iran tilt, so far from being appreciated, was protested in Iran as interference in internal affairs. At the same time, Mossadeq was bitterly disappointed that the Americans did not leap to Iran's defense against the British.
In part due to British covert action, Mossadeq's party had begun to crack before the spring 1952 Majles election. A coalition based on opposing certain things is difficult to maintain when the threats retreat. And the natural differences in the coalition members began to reassert themselves; in particular the conflict between secular Mossadeq and Ayatollah Kashani. But even more important in fracturing the National Front was the economic pinch of the British embargo, which cost tens of thousands of oil workers jobs.
It's unlikely that Mossadeq's coalition would have lasted, even without foreign pressure. But that proposition can't be tested now, because the outside pressure was intense. Mossadeq, a scrupulous constitutionalist through most of his career, reacted by stretching the boundaries of the law to hold power, and ended up standing entirely outside them.
Mossadeq set out to insure his continuance in power by gerrymandering voting districts and sequencing the election. But early results did not give him the support he needed and it became clear the National Front was going down to defeat. Mossadeq then called an emergency session of the cabinet and convinced it to halt the elections, using the pretext that they were corrupted by foreign agents. Certainly there was some truth to this, but it remains unclear to what degree, and whether it materially affected the outcome.
Mossadeq's next step was to challenge the shah by attempting to take from him the customary perogative of appointing the minister of war. The shah refused and Mossadeq resigned. The British somehow got the shah to appoint Qavam in his place. But when Qavam announced he was going to reverse many of Mossadeq's policies and arrest those who opposed, the people rose up in mass demonstrations. The situation rapidly spiralled into bloodshed and troop mutiny, and four days later the shah asked Qavam to step down and recalled Mossadeq.
Mossadeq now was effective dictator of Iran. Even the shah was powerless before him. Mossadeq first shuffled the army, to weaken a traditional power base of the shah, then he declared martial law. Then he turned to the rump Majles and got it to grant him emergency powers for six months to "decree any law he felt necessary for obtaining not only financial solvency, but also electoral, judicial, and educational reform."
[To be continued, eventually]
Labels: Iran
