All the Shah's men
by Val Stevenson
[ politics | bookreviews ]
Americans were shocked by the anti-Americanism which followed Iran's Islamic Revolution in 1979. Most were unaware of their country's involvement in the 1953 fall of the liberal, European-educated prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh, which was not publicly acknowledged until 2000. (Clinton's Secretary of State Madeleine Albright admitted that "the coup was clearly a setback for Iran's political development. And it is easy to see now why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America in their internal affairs." NY Times,18 March 2000.)
Operation Ajax, as the 1953 CIA-run plot was code-named, ousted Mossadegh's secular government and installed Mohammad Reza Shah. It signalled, as Kinzer says, that "the world's most powerful governments were willing to tolerate limitless oppression as long as oppressive regimes were friendly to the West and to Western oil companies." The Shah's tyranny was ended in 1979. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who succeeded Ayatollah Khomeini, boasted that "we are not liberals like Allende and Mossadegh, whom the CIA can snuff out." Iran sponsored and inspired terrorism, most notably in Afghanistan.
Kinzer argues convincingly that "[i]t is not far-fetched to draw a line from Operation Ajax through the Shah's repressive regime and the Islamic Revolution to the fireballs that engulfed the World Trade Center in New York."
All the Shah's Men tells a tale of oil, empire and very dirty deeds. In 1919, to protect the Anglo-Persian Oil Company's fields ("a prize from fairyland beyond our wildest dreams," according to Winston Churchill), the British imposed martial law under the Anglo-Persian Agreement. Ahmad Shah, the last - and politically impotent - ruler of the Qajar dynasty, was deposed in 1921 by Reza Khan in a coup funded, at least in part, by the British.
Reza, who described himself as a nationalist but recognised his debt to the British, became the first shah of the Pahlavi dynasty and started a reign which was as brutal as it was efficient. He emulated Atatürk's social reforms but, lacking Atatürk's political skills, alienated most of his people. His flirtation with Nazi Germany resulted in British and Soviet troops entering Iran on 25 August 1941. Reza abdicated, to be succeeded by his 21-year-old son Mohammad Reza. The abdication had removed a leader who could impose order on a people to whom the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) concession seemed grotesquely unfair.
In 1949, the British demanded a better deal. The National Front, a popular coalition led by Mossadegh, opposed it. (In 1947 he had written a law demanding the renegotiation of the AIOC concession and forbidding any others.) The Shah appointed General Ali Razmara as prime minister at the insistence of the British, who wanted a strong PM. Anglo-Iranian could have fatally weakened the National Front by agreeing to the Razmara's compromise solution, but they rejected it: "Never had so few lost so much so stupidly and so fast", as Dean Acheson said: conciliation was impossible. Razmara was assassinated and Mossadegh succeeded him.
Instead of the Razmara's proposed 50/50 split, Mossadegh demanded and got from the Iranian parliament complete nationalisation. The Shah - under duress - revoked the concession, Mossadegh became a national hero, and the British fumed.
Truman received news from Henry Grady, his ambassador in Iran, that Britain wanted to overthrow Mossadegh (an act of "utter folly", as Grady put it), and let it be known that a coup would be totally unacceptable. The British, with epic miscalculation, took their case to the United Nations Security Council. In fluent French, the frail Mossadegh appealed to the United Nations as "the ultimate refuge of weak and oppressed nations" and denied Britain's claim to the oil. The British thought he looked "like a cab horse", but theirs was a minority opinion: he was Time's man of the year in 1951.
While Iran was concentrating on Iran, America too had a consuming interest: communism. The British persuaded Eisenhower that Iran was in danger of falling to communism.
If Churchill and Eisenhower had not won the elections in their respective countries, there would have been no Operation Ajax. Truman, like Eisenhower, believed that Moscow was aiming at world domination. Unlike him, he believed that America, as a friend of liberty, should stand beside nationalist movements in the developing world. The consequences of overthrowing foreign regimes were unpredictable and potentially catastrophic. Eisenhower, guided by John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles, who were running the overt and covert sides of US foreign policy, concluded that America had to sponsor "regime change" to guarantee its own survival. "Overnight," Kinzer writes, "the CIA became a central part of the American foreign policy apparatus, and covert action came to be regarded as a cheap and effective way to shape the course of world events." Operation Ajax marked the first time America overthrew a foreign government.
Kinzer's description of the coup is masterful and thrilling. There were two, in fact, but after the first one failed, the instigator, Kermit Roosevelt, the grandson of the former president, calmly organised the second. He had browbeaten the Shah into signing a firman dismissing Mossadegh, and organised riots and counter-riots. "[Mossadegh] was willing to sacrifice the Iranian people, and he almost succeeded. Thank God my people finally understood him," the Shah intoned. "My only crime," Mossadegh told his judges, "is that I nationalised the Iranian oil industry and removed from this land the network of colonialism and political and economic influence of the greatest empire on earth." Mossadegh was sentenced to three years in prison followed by house arrest for life.
In the late 1970s, the Shah discovered there was no one to negotiate with: he had crushed all legitimate opposition. Khomenei returned from Paris and dismissed the past: "Why do you talk of the Shah, Mossadegh, money? These have already passed. Islam is all that remains."
Mossadegh was "a visionary, a utopian, a millenarian" who, unfortunately, could - or would - not understand America's near pathological fear of communism. However, as Kinzer says, "he towers over Iranian history, Middle Eastern history, and the history of anticolonialism." He dealt a ferocious blow to the British empire and hastened its collapse.
Just one year after Operation Ajax, Jacabo Arbenz of Guatamala was overthrown, the second in a string of foreign leaders killed or deposed by the CIA.
This is an exciting, well-written, accessible and timely book, and as clear an exposition of the law of unintended consequences as you could wish for. As historian William Roger Louis, quoted by Kinzer, concluded, "the older political advice not to interfere would seem to be the better part of political wisdom."
