{"id":1071,"date":"2017-07-12T14:50:26","date_gmt":"2017-07-12T14:50:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.iransos.com\/en\/?p=1071"},"modified":"2017-07-12T14:50:26","modified_gmt":"2017-07-12T14:50:26","slug":"the-trump-administration-should-read-its-own-documents-about-regime-change-in-iran","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.iransos.com\/en\/?p=1071","title":{"rendered":"The Trump administration should read its own documents about regime change in Iran"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the end of last month, the U.S. State Department quietly published a trove of hundreds of documents detailing the American role in Iran’s 1953 coup.<\/strong><\/p><\/div>\n

07.11.2017 – Washington Post – <\/strong>In that year, a\u00a0combined CIA and British plot deposed democratically elected Prime Minister\u00a0Mohammed Mossadegh, an act fueled by Cold War geopolitics as well as Western indignation\u00a0at Mossadegh’s nationalization of Iran’s oil assets. The coup may feel distant to Americans, but it lives long in the imagination of many in the Middle East. “This is still such an important, emotional benchmark for Iranians,” said Malcolm Byrne, the director of research\u00a0of\u00a0the nongovernmental National Security Archive at George Washington University, to\u00a0the Associated Press<\/a>. “Many people see it as the day that Iranian politics turned away from any hope of democracy.”<\/p>\n

Mossadegh’s overthrow \u2014 and the restoration of the shah of Iran’s authoritarian, pro-Western regime \u2014 animated the idea of the United States and Britain, whose\u00a0Anglo-Persian Oil Company (now known as BP)<\/a>once dominated the Iranian\u00a0oil industry, as meddling neo-imperialist oppressors.\u00a0And it’s still relevant at a time when a whole wing of the Washington establishment openly\u00a0desires\u00a0regime change in Tehran.<\/strong><\/p>\n

An army officer rallies a crowd of the shah’s supporters in front of Mossadegh’s home in Tehran on Feb. 28, 1953. (Associated Press)<\/strong><\/p><\/div>\n

Mossadegh\u00a0was a populist nationalist irked by the control Western powers had over Iran’s natural wealth.<\/strong>British oil interests in Iran\u00a0functioned\u00a0in a neocolonial context<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 through World War II, Iranian workers endured cholera and food shortages in the major British-run refinery to help keep the Allied war machine humming. In 1951, Mossadegh decided to nationalize the British oil holdings, sparking a global crisis and a British- and U.S.-led boycott.<\/p>\n

In January 1952, Time magazine\u00a0named<\/a>\u00a0Mossadegh the Person of the Year in an unflattering cover story. It described him as a “strange old wizard” far too cozy with\u00a0Moscow and sneeringly gestured to Iran as “a mountainous land between Baghdad and the Sea of Caviar.” A year and a half later, the CIA orchestrated a takeover that removed Mossadegh, reinstated the shah and put the oil back in British hands.<\/p>\n

The newly published papers \u2014 part of a tranche of\u00a0more than 1,000 documents<\/a>\u00a0related to official American correspondence on the Iranian coup from both the Truman and Eisenhower administrations \u2014 expose\u00a0in greater depth how\u00a0U.S. interests were motivated by both the fear of Iranian communists as well as a desire to help Britain\u00a0regain control over its oil assets.\u00a0Although\u00a0still a bit skimpy on how the coup was executed, the documents show how involved various organs of the American foreign policy apparatus were in trying to force Mossadegh out.<\/strong>\u00a0That included Loy Henderson, then the American ambassador in Tehran.<\/p>\n

“Every so often Henderson would pronounce with a straight face that the U.S. had the principled policy of never interfering in another country\u2019s internal politics,”\u00a0wrote Ervand Abrahamian<\/a>, a historian of Iran, after scanning the newly published items. “Then he would plunge in without batting an eye.”<\/p>\n

Abrahamian also notes that although\u00a0the\u00a0conventional narrative<\/a>\u00a0is that the United States, unlike Britain, wasn’t too concerned\u00a0about Iran’s oil, it seems that American officials were still concerned about the consequences of a country in the Middle East choosing to reclaim its assets.<\/p>\n

“The example [of successful nationalization] might have grave effects on U.S. oil concession in other parts of the world,”\u00a0Eisenhower notes\u00a0<\/a>in one Cabinet discussion.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The documents show how\u00a0the CIA guided virtually every step<\/a>\u00a0of Mossadegh’s removal, including helping generate pro-monarchy, anti-Mossadegh protests on the streets. In\u00a0one paper<\/a>, Kermit Roosevelt Jr.\u00a0\u2014 the chief CIA official orchestrating the coup, and someone with perhaps the most 20th-century American name possible \u2014 was thrilled when the military\u00a0started to pound leftist counter-demonstrators from the Tudeh Party, which was linked to Moscow.<\/p>\n

“There was one other very encouraging sign Sunday evening, and that was that Tudeh began some demonstrations …\u00a0and acting without orders, the Army started to beat the hell out of them, and they carted away four truckloads of bloody Tudeh demonstrators Sunday afternoon, and they had no authorization,”\u00a0Roosevelt said<\/a>.\u00a0“It was just a spontaneous thing, and that gave us tremendous encouragement.” By then, Mossadegh had already slipped into exile. The shah would soon return and more than two decades of autocratic rule would follow.<\/p>\n

Mossadegh supporters gather around a huge portrait of Kashani in 1951, who would later break ties with the premier. (Associated Press)<\/strong><\/p><\/div>\n

Another revelation from the new archive shows how the CIA also wooed Ayatollah Abol-Ghasem Kashani, perhaps the most important\u00a0religious figure at the time, whose dropping of support for Mossadegh\u00a0proved fatal for his rule.\u00a0<\/strong>The new documents show that Kashani, who was\u00a0an inspiration<\/a>\u00a0for the Islamic Republic’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini,\u00a0solicited financial assistance<\/a>\u00a0from the Americans. When the shah landed in Iran in August 1953, some Islamist newspapers\u00a0hailed the coup<\/a>\u00a0that ousted Mossadegh as a “holy uprising.”<\/p>\n

Last month, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson\u00a0seemed to suggest<\/a>\u00a0that regime change\u00a0was the intent\u00a0of the Trump administration, which has made no secret of its dislike of the Islamic Republic. At a session of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Tillerson said that U.S. policy toward Iran would be to counter its attempts at regional\u00a0“hegemony, contain their ability to develop obviously nuclear weapons, and to work toward support of those elements inside of Iran that would lead to a peaceful transition of that government.”<\/p>\n

That reference to elements working toward a “transition” led\u00a0Iranian officials to fire back an angry response. “Since the 1950s, the United States tried to meddle in Iranian affairs by different strategies such as coup d\u2019\u00e9tat, regime change, and military intervention,”\u00a0said Bahram Qassemi<\/a>, a spokesman for the Iranian Foreign Ministry.<\/p>\n

Although\u00a0there many reasons to object to Iran’s theocratic leadership,\u00a0American officials play a dangerous and perhaps self-defeating game by displaying their historical amnesia.<\/strong><\/p>\n

“The things we did were ‘covert,'” Eisenhower noted\u00a0in a diary entry on Oct. 8, 1953<\/a>. “If knowledge of them became public, we would not only be embarrassed in that region, but our chances to do anything of like nature in the future would almost totally disappear.”<\/p>\n

Want smart analysis of the most important news in your inbox every weekday along with other global reads, interesting ideas and opinions to know?<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

07.11.2017 – Washington Post – In that year, a\u00a0combined CIA and British plot deposed democratically elected Prime Minister\u00a0Mohammed Mossadegh, an act fueled by Cold War geopolitics as well as Western<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[326,325,296],"class_list":["post-1071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-human-rights","tag-iran-regime-change","tag-mohammed-mossadegh","tag-president-donald-trump"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iransos.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iransos.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iransos.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iransos.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iransos.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1071"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.iransos.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1071\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1072,"href":"https:\/\/www.iransos.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1071\/revisions\/1072"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.iransos.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iransos.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.iransos.com\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}