THE erasure of modern Iran has been 120 years in the making. It began with the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907, when two imperial powers — the United Kingdom and Czarist Russia — divided Iran into spheres of influence. Russia got the north and the UK received the south.

The subsequent discovery of oil by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company made it a Persian version of the East India Company — a body corporate with imperial purposes. During both world wars, Iran tried to remain neutral. The Allies decided otherwise. In 1941, they ousted Reza Shah Pahlavi and exiled him, installing his pliable 22-year-old son Muhammad Reza Shah on the unstable peacock throne.

Ten years later, Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh nationalised the Iranian oil industry. Within two years, the CIA engineered a coup, toppling Mossadegh and restoring the Shah. For the next 26 years, the Shah reigned while the US ruled Iran. “I believe that my alliance with the West was based on strength, loyalty and mutual trust,” the Shah wrote in his autobiography Answer to History, adding sourly, “Perhaps that trust had been misguided.”

Just how ‘misguided’ the Shah learned when, after effectively abdicating in 1979, he fled to Egypt. Later that year, his plane........

© Dawn