CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Demonized Iran: A Tale Told By An Idiot

A map of West Asia in 1872, with “Iran or Persia”, ruled by the Qajar dynasty, shaded in pink – Public Domain

The current failing effort to make Iran out to be a major threat to world peace starts the clock at 1979 in its propaganda effort to justify U.S. aggression against Teheran, which deliberately overlooks the events of 1953, when a joint U.S.-British effort overthrew the then secular Iranian government in order to take over the country’s oil industry.

Much like John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen, who successfully plotted the U.S. coup against him, Mohammad Mossadegh (Time’s Man-of-the-Year in 1952) came from an affluent background, welcomed the principles of capitalist democracy, and loathed Marxism. What set the three men on a collision course was not their political values, but the radically unequal world around them.[1]

Mossadegh grew up watching foreigners loot his defenseless country. Nourished by corruption, predatory foreign companies bought up rights to establish Iranian banks and run its post office, telegraph service, railroads, and ferry lines. Other Western firms took over the caviar industry and tobacco trade. When oil was discovered at the beginning of the twentieth century, British officials just bribed a puppet monarch – Mozaffar al-Din Shah – to sign Iran’s rights away to foreign investors. The ocean of oil underfoot became the property of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, mostly owned by the British government.

Thus it was that in his short span of years Mossadegh witnessed a stupendous source of national wealth siphoned off to benefit distant foreigners while Iranian peasants lived in hovels and a quarter of the population consisted of nomadic bands. The country suffered a ninety-percent illiteracy rate, an incredible fifty-percent infant mortality rate, and saw seventy percent of its land monopolized by two percent of its population. Iran exported $360 million worth of oil a year, but only received $35 million in royalties from the Anglo-American Oil Company.[2]

Educated Iranians of Mossadegh’s era faced a choice of continuing this humiliating submission to foreign exploitation or launching a rebellion doomed to failure. Mossadegh chose to rebel, demanding full Iranian control of the nation’s resources, which made him a target for Anglo-American imperialism.

Following World War II Mossadegh had emerged as the leader of the nationalists in the Iranian Parliament, with a reputation for being an honest patriot.[3] He not only denounced British control of the oil industry, but also opposed a vast, mega-profit development scheme Allen Dulles had negotiated for Overseas Consultants Inc., a group of eleven American engineering firms with massive construction plans, including hydroelectric plants, rebuilt cities, and industries imported from abroad. Mossadegh denounced it as a sellout to foreign interests, a judgment that found favor in the Iranian Parliament, which killed the project by refusing to appropriate funds for it in December, 1950.

After delivering this heavy blow to foreign capital, Mossadegh was chosen to be prime minister in April 1951. Before accepting, he asked for a vote in favor of nationalizing Iran’s oil industry, and the vote was unanimous. From that moment on he was regarded in Washington and London as the worst sort of enemy, a populist rabble-rouser who stirred the masses with appeals to independent nationalism, which was effectively treason to transnational capital.

In 1953, with the unanimous backing of the Iranian Parliament and overwhelming public support, Mossadegh proceeded with the nationalization, expropriating the Anglo-American Oil Company. In an impassioned address to the nation he warned that Iran was taking control of “a hidden treasure upon which lies a dragon.”[4]

The dragon retaliated by CIA coup, overthrowing Mossadegh in favor of Shah Reza Pahlavi. General Fazollah Zahedi, a Nazi collaborator and staunch partisan of American oil, became the new prime minister. [5]  President Eisenhower quickly extended him “sympathetic consideration.”

The CIA’s Kermit Roosevelt emerged as vice-president of Gulf Oil. U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles refused to divulge details of the new arrangements, because “making them public would affect adversely the foreign relations of the United States.”[6]

President Eisenhower told the American people that the Iranian people had “saved the day,” owing to their “revulsion against communism,” and “their profound love for their monarchy.”[7]

The New York Times hailed the destruction of Iranian democracy as “good news indeed,” calling the putsch an “object lesson in the heavy cost that must be paid” by a country that “goes berserk with fanatical nationalism.”[8]

Thousands of Mossadegh supporters were dispatched to jail, torture chambers, and graveyards.[9]

A deeply grateful Shah thanked U.S. Ambassador Loy Henderson and Kermit Roosevelt, telling them the he owed his throne to God, the Iranian people, the army, and to Washington.[10]

Gripped by megalomania, the Shah ruled for the subsequent quarter century in a romantic haze built on a fantasy version of Iran and also of himself. He told Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci that he was guided by visions and messages from God, as well as Imam Ali. “I am accompanied by a force that others can’t see, my mythical force, I get messages, religious messages.”[11]

Instead of seeking psychological help, the Shah went for armaments and the technology of repression, soon becoming the central U.S. military and economic partner in the Middle East. Portrayed in the West as a far-seeing moderate in a land teeming with swarthy medievalists, he remained deeply unpopular at home due to his policies of super-militarization, forced modernization, and systematic torture. Powerful Ayatollahs bitterly objected to his rule, and as they amassed a huge popular following the Shah grew increasingly isolated, clinging to power with an avalanche of weapons sent on by Washington.

By the mid-seventies the Shah’s throne sat atop a veritable powder keg. Two-thirds........

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