If you know anything about the history of relations between the West and Iran, you appreciate why the notion of getting military with ancient Persia is unthinkable.
Today, we have in place in Iran a fundamentalist Shiite theocracy that regards the West, and the United States specifically, with a hyper-wary eye. How did this state come about?
Flashback to the early 1950s, with Mohammed Reza Pahlavi Shah on the Peacock Throne and with Iran’s vast oil reserves firmly in the grip of Great Britain’s Anglo Iranian Oil Co. The Shah, a brutally dictatorial monarch, was a puppet of Anglo Iranian, and the British were inflicting rapacious imperialism on Iran. As an example, at the Abadan crude oil refinery 10,000 Iranian laborers lived in squalor, a shantytown where the laborers crafted shelters out of any rubble they could find. There were no sewage or potable water systems. Laborers were paid the equivalent of 50 cents per day while the British employees of Anglo Iranian lived in luxury.
Enter the Nationalistic Front, headed by Mohammad Mossaddegh – one of history’s most compassionate political leaders. Mossaddegh’s party obtained a majority in the parliament, and Mossaddegh so effectively marginalized the monarch that the Shah left Iran. Then the Nationalistic Front embarked on nationalizing Anglo Iranian – a move that the British would not tolerate.
The British appealed to the Truman administration to support a covert overthrow of the Iranian parliament. Truman refused, but Eisenhower, who followed Truman, agreed, and the U.S. staged the ouster of a legitimately democratic government. You can read about our shadowy and disgraceful antics in Stephen Kinzer’s All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror.
The U.S. booted the Mossaddegh government and returned Muhammed Reza to the throne. Over a 25-year period, the Shah’s unfettered preference for everything western combined with the brutality exerted by his secret intelligence service, Sevak, aroused the Islamic revolution and the theocratic government now in power.
It’s no exaggeration to claim that we created the Iran we have to deal with today.
Tom Wright
Aztec
