How far back must we go to understand the roots of the long enmity between Iran and the United States? A good place to start is the Iran Hostage Crisis, sparked forty-six years ago after the US ally, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, sought protection and medical care in the US. Iranian revolutionaries took over the US Embassy in Tehran in November 1979 and held sixty-six staffers, demanding the Shah’s return.
The Shah, head of the monarchy, died in Egypt in July 1980, at the age of sixty. Fifty-two of the Embassy hostages were held for 444 days, until January 1981. Relations have generally been abysmal since, reaching another nadir with the US’s recent bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Others go back further still, to the coup that toppled the last democratically elected Iranian government. That was in 1953. Famously, or infamously, the CIA has been given much of the credit for ending the government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq. A 2019 NPR piece, for instance, largely reduces complex events to the actions of a single individual, Kermit Roosevelt Jr, the CIA’s man in Tehran (and Teddy Roosevelt’s grandson).
The official Iranian line today is that the US is an insidious prime mover of Iranian history. The quasi-official line in the US isn’t all that dissimilar, minus the “Great Satan” part.
Middle East scholar Ray Takeyh, who was born in Iran and now serves as a Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, challenges the centrality of the role of the CIA in the overthrow of Mosaddeq. He argues instead that it was largely internal politics and that the CIA’s “impact on the events of 1953 was ultimately insignificant.”
“Regardless of anything the United States did or did not do, Mosaddeq was bound to fall,” he writes.
The Iranian nationalist movement of the early 1950s was united in wanting to take Iran’s oil wealth from the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, whose biggest shareholder was the British state. Iran’s “liberal reformers, its intelligentsia, elements of its clerical establishment, and its middle-class professionals” coalesced around Mohammad Mosaddeq, an “upper-class lawyer” long involved in politics. In 1951, Mosaddeq was appointed Prime Minister by the Majlis (parliament). He said he would only accept the post if the Majlis nationalized the oil industry. The vote for nationalization was unanimous, “and the easily intimidated shah capitulated to the parliament’s demands,” Takeyh explains.
More to Explore
Progress Is Not the Same as Westernization
The British, dependent on Iranian oil for what was left of their empire, responded by blockading Iran’s petroleum exports. This was devastating to the Iranian economy. At first, the US, which had economically supported Iran since the end of WWII, continued to do so and “dissuaded” the British from a military response.
With the economy in collapse, social unrest resulted in Mosaddeq becoming more authoritarian. Washington, ever concerned about “the Reds,” began to worry that Mosaddeq’s refusal to compromise would lead to the communist Tudeh Party taking over. Meanwhile, the nationalist coalition fell apart under the twin hammers of economic disaster and Mosaddeq’s intransigence. The middle class, the officer corps, and the clerics drifted towards the royalist opposition. (Takeyh notes that today’s ruling theocrats would be loath to admit that their fore-mullahs rallied to the Shah.) In February 1953, the Shah’s threat to leave the country brought out big protests in support of him.
So Mosaddeq was in serious trouble even before the US agreed to join British efforts to get rid of him. MI6 and CIA propaganda efforts fell on eager ears. On August 13, 1953, the Shah, after much lobbying, signed a decree dismissing the Prime Minister. Mosaddeq refused to accept the constitutionally legal order and arrested those sent to deliver it. The Shah fled the country. His ally, General Fazlollah Zahedi, picked to be the next PM, went into hiding. Washington and London thought they had blown it.
Weekly Newsletter
“What is clear is that by that point, the attempt to salvage the coup became very much an Iranian initiative,” writes Takeyh. Pro-Shah forces came out in droves, surprising the CIA. Mosaddeq, “having turned into a populist demagogue: rigging elections, intimidating his rivals, disbanding parliament, and demanding special powers,” had no more allies to call on. The military wouldn’t follow his orders to restore order. On August 19th, it was Mosaddeq’s turn to go into hiding. Months later, he was convicted of treason, and he spent the last fourteen years of his life in internal exile. Takeyh calls Mosaddeq a tragic figure, principled but blind to the necessary compromises of politics.
He also notes that the Shah, then in his late thirties, was still a popular figure in this period. He too would turn out to be blind to the seductions of power.
Takeyh stresses that “self-serving narratives concocted by American and Iranians alike” about US fingerprints on the events of 1953, are one of the reasons relations remain so bad so many decades later.
Support JSTOR Daily! Join our membership program on Patreon today.
