This is sort of a bad and inaccurate summary of a much more complicated situation. Mossadegh was trying to dissolve parliament and was in conflict with the Shah before the British got involved. The Shah was already planning to try by constitutional means (which he had legal power to do) to remove Mossadegh. Would he have done it without British and US backing, is a debate for historians.
I don’t think any serious post WWII historians would agree with you. There was a concentrated effort by the UK and US to displace Mossadegh, who was democratically elected by the way. At the very least it disproves your unspoken assertion that the Iranians are primarily to blame for their problems when it’s been proven that the most powerful intelligence agencies on the planet were actively destabilizing their society so that oil revenue would continue flowing into western pockets.
Mossadegh was elected but was also illegally trying to dissolve parliament.
>at the very least it disproves your unspoken assertion that the Iranians are primarily to blame for their problems
I'm very clearly stating that the Shah in particular was highly likely to have removed Mossadegh either way due to a multi-decade power struggle between the Pahlavi dynasty and the parliament /prime minister. The Majlis as a rival power center was largely a result of the Anglo-Soviet invasion which deposed Reza Shah, prior to that the Majlis had functioned in more of an advisory capacity, and Mohammed Reza Pahlavi was always lookign for ways to push back against the Majlis.
It is also important to note that the constitution in place in the early 1950s gave the power to appoint and remove the prime minister to the shah, Mossadegh was recommended to the shah by the Majlis who appointed him prime minister. That is factually how the government worked. It is also important to note that in 1952 Mossadegh stopped the counting of an election that it looked like he was going to lose. In 1953 Mossadegh organized a referendum to dissolve the parliament and vest sole power in the prime minister. This gave the shah the excuse he needed to remove Mossadegh and triggered Anglo-American support for the Shah and Iranian army to remove Mossadegh.
The CIA certainly helped the Shah get generals on side and plan the coup, this is not in dispute. However the idea that Mossadegh was democratically elected is not really true, and the idea that the coup was entirely carried out for external reasons is entirely false.
Ray Takeyh a professor of Near East studies who wrote The Last Shah: America, Iran, and the Fall of the Pahlavi Dynasty (Yale University Press, 2021) holds the position that the coup was internally driven. We also know from declassified document that the CIA thought the coup had failed and that their part was rather insignificant, but Iranian on the ground under their own direction carried out the coup.[1]
I think it’s just a super complicated story. My post above doesn’t even touch the rural urban divide or the role of the Mullahs or Tudeh and the communists. The whole thing was a second from exploding for years.
Well the vote was a sham with no secret ballots and separate voting tents for yes and no votes. Armed members of Tudeh were at almost every poling station, there were wide spread reports of members of Mossadegh's party voting multiple times, and the vote count came out to 99.99% "yes'. On top of being illegal it was obviously fraudulent. It is at times called a coup by Mossadegh.
>The ballot was not a secret one. Separate polling places were provided for those voters favoring dissolution and those against, and the vote had to give his name, his address and the number and place of issuance of his identity card.
Time Magazine from the same month in 1953 [2]:
> Da’s in 1946. Last week Premier Mohammed Mossadegh, the man in the iron cot, topped them all with 99.93%.
> This is the way he did it. Having unconstitutionally dissolved the Majlis, Mossadegh ordered a national referendum to judge his act, crying: “The will of the people is above law.” The 1906 Iranian constitution (which Mossadegh as a young revolutionary helped put across) requires a secret ballot.
From a 1953 article in The Middle East Journal [3]:
>Two days after the bloody confrontation of Tudeh mobs and security forces on
August 11, 1953, Mosaddeq’s government arrested a large number of its opponents
again.
So here we see Tudeh thugs attacking his opponents, and the man himself jailing the opposition.
> Two of Mosaddeq’s closest associates, Dr.Karim Sanjabi, a founder of the National Front and Minister of Education and Dr. Ghol-am-Hossein Sadiqi, the Minister of the Interior advised against dissolving the Majlis and holding a referendum. Both argued that the Majlis had supported Mosaddeq and that it had been the King who had appointed Prime Ministers since the Constitutional Revolution of 1906 subject to parliamentary approval. Without the Majlis, the Shah would be free to oust the Prime Minister and appoint another. Mosaddeq’s reply to both had been the same: Shah jor’at-e in kar ra nadarad [The Shah would not dare].
We also see that Mossadegh's own advisors were cautioning him against trying to dissolve the Majlis, and reminding him that it would allow the Shah to constitutionally remove him. We clearly see a picture of a man, Mossadegh trying to become a dictator.
It would be too much to unpack here but the role of Ayatollah Kashani is also relevant in the story.
Did you just referenced an article by Kenneth Love? I’m sure you already know but for anyone else who might see this, a U.S. District Judge Michael B. Mukasey in Love v. Kwitny (1989) suggests that he played a role in the coup himself! Love even admits it later! [1]
The link from TIME is an op-ed? Who’s the writer? That’s not a source, credible or otherwise.
He was everything but democratically elected. He was installed. The Iranian people did not elect Mosaddegh. He was put there by a Shah and the elites of the Majlis, neither of which ever represented the people of Iran. At no point in the past century has Iran had representative government.
For the absurd 'democratically elected' premise to be true, there would have to be actual representative government. There wasn't, there isn't.
He was as democratically elected as the system at the time allowed and spent basically his entire political career on increasing the power of the majlis and getting rid of colonial interests.
The UK spent a lot of resources conspiring against this project, which ultimately failed, to a large extent because he did not have a solution to the blockade that followed nationalisation of the oil production. Perhaps he also did not expect as many members of the majlis to join the foreign conspiracy as did when the blockade got inconvenient.
It's also not like democratisation followed under the shah, rather the opposite, like the establishment of rather nasty security services and a nuclear program that the later revolutionaries inherited.
Right up until he was about to lose an election, then he suspended counting votes and tried to dissolve the Majlis in alliance with the communist party.
Not sure what you mean. In the -52 election he stopped the vote counting when enough of the majlis was filled that it could legally do work, and then tried to form a government which the shah blocked. This is what led to the proposal that the majlis give him six months of emergency powers.
I don’t have the book I’m looking for handy but the consensus opinion of historians of Iran is that it was an illegitimate move, as explained by Ervand Abrahamian in “ Evolving Iran: An Introduction to Politics and Problems in the Islamic Republic”.
Tellingly his first act after seating a half empty Majlis was to have them grant him emergency powers that allowed him to dictate laws. This is not a democratic system.
Whatever happened due to the British, it’s still fact they Iran was doing pretty well before the current revolution. I don’t think anyone would argue the population at large are better off today than they were under the previous regime.
That's a matter of values. Some would argue that appeasement of and being subdued by colonial powers is a much to high price to pay for whatever material wealth you're referring to.
US influence in Europe would be a much better comparison than indirection between positions and elections in the EU. As you surely know we've had a lot of interference in what parties are allowed and who can get elected and financing of organised crime coming from that direction.
> Most Europeans seem to be fine being under the EU where they don’t get to vote those bureaucrats in.
The political power in the EU comes from the national governments (directly and via the European commission) and the EU parliament. The members of parliament are elected. The national governments are also formed out of elected parliaments. There's also a body of administration and bureaucracy that comes out of these power structures, just like there is, by necessity, in any government ever, democratic or not.
Insinuating that this somehow equates to authoritarian forms of government appears deeply ignorant or dishonest to me.
I didn’t say authoritarian rather there is a supra national body that dictates policy down to sovereign countries whether the countries agree or not. It has similarities to colonial powers. You have local laws and customs but the colonial power can overrule and supersede those.
This is a similarly bizarre claim, for the same reasons as before. You have not really thought about how representative democracy works, or you misunderstand or wilfully misrepresent it.
In the end, your argument can be used against the other levels of government. National governments of not directly elected officials and bureaucrats and remote parliaments dictating to whole regions, who lord it over cities and communities, who oppress individual people, who should not have to cede a bit of their sovereignty to anybody else to decide or act on their behalf.
Nothing is perfect, nor is the EU, but with your line of thinking, you effectively deligitimize every practical way of organizing government as "colonial".
Maybe that's what you want, maybe you misunderstand and don't care if you do. There are many reasons good and bad to dislike the EU. Yours just appears to be nonsensical.
Nationalizing resources simply gives the capitalist west a legitimate casus beli to “liberate” all the assets that were stolen.
Venezuela is about to be turned into another Vietnam. Iran is next. I remember invading them in a mission in BF3. The USA itches to implement what its media anticipated.
No, you see the instant a western power interferes with a region, all agency is immediately stripped from every single person there. It's really sad, they all become puppets or automatons reacting purely to external stimulus.
The West hasn't stopped interfering in Iran though. They did massive terrorist attacks there just a year ago. Israel would openly salivate at the prospect of destroying Iranian agriculture and water supply.
China is an interesting counterfactual. Circa 2010 when Xi came to power, the CPC also essentially destroyed the CIA's footprint in the country, something that was not widely reported in the West. And PRC has done very well since...
> Circa 2010 when Xi came to power, the CPC also essentially destroyed the CIA's footprint in the country, something that was not widely reported in the West. And PRC has done very well since...
The PRC was doing just as fine before they executed all the CIA's agents. I don't see any relation. There's never been any hint from either the US or China that those agents were doing anything other than passive intelligence collection, as opposed to actively interfering in domestic Chinese politics. And in any event, the scope of historical CIA operations has always been overblown. In every case I'm aware of, the CIA leveraged a tipping point already well underway to nudge things one way or another. Developing countries are often already highly unstable and prone to regular disruptive power shifts; it's a major cause of their poverty and inability to fully develop. And in many of the outright coups the CIA has been implicated, the extent of the CIA's involvement was simply talking to and making promises to various power players already poised to make a power grab, Chile being a prime example--the Chilean Senate was the architect of the coup, and the CIA merely offered safe harbor to nudge Pinochet, who was waffling because he wasn't convinced it would succeed. The exceptions were during the middle of the Cold War, ancient history in modern foreign affairs.
The KGB/FSB has always been lauded for opportunistically taking advantage of preexisting situations with small but smart manipulations, but that's just how intelligence agencies have always worked in general. When your interventions are too direct and obvious, which they always will be if you're creating a crisis from scratch, you risk unifying the country, Iran being a prime example.
> There's never been any hint from either the US or China that those agents were doing anything other than passive intelligence collection, as opposed to actively interfering in domestic Chinese politics. And in any event, the scope of historical CIA operations has always been overblown. In every case I'm aware of, the CIA leveraged a tipping point already well underway to nudge things one way or another.
Beyond being self-contradictory (CIA is passive but also they interfere on key issues) this is just false. The West has spent a lot of (covert) resources undermining China in the past decade in Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Taiwan, trade and tech wars, COVID, and so on. All attempts which have failed dramatically, perhaps partly due to the lack of IC penetration into society and government.
> Beyond being self-contradictory (CIA is passive but also they interfere on key issues) this is just false
I said the CIA's intelligence network in China which was dismembered was passive, the same way China's network in the US is passive, not that the CIA is passive everywhere else. But maybe you wouldn't describe either as passive, which is fair, but I don't think that definition fits with how most people conceive of what active political manipulation looks like. Note also I didn't mean to imply that promoting a coup by offering safe harbor is passive in the same sense; I would definitely categorize that as direct domestic political disruption, just not of the kind Hollywood or conspiracy theories depict, which is what people assume when CIA involvement is implicated.
And I'm not sure what you're talking about regarding Hong Kong, Xinjiang, or Taiwan. Is public criticism interfering in domestic politics? Sanctions arguably are, which the US uses regularly around the world, but in the context of China, it's always about money and trade wars and international disputes. The US is active militarily in Taiwan in terms of training and arms supplies, but this is largely at Taiwan's insistence, and the US does much less than Taiwan wants. And none of this involves direct CIA involvement beyond the intelligence collection and sharing networks, both with and without the local government's approval.
I'm curious if you have specific examples. I know the US has proposed sanctions for China's policies in Xinjiang, but I don't remember anything actually coming of it. If I'm misremembering, that's fair, and I understand why China would consider actual sanctions domestic political interference, but note that this is also a cultural divide between Chinese and Western political philosophies--the latter is much more moralistic, and interventions against perceived human rights abuses aren't necessarily considered to violate the principle of state sovereignty.
Iran has been openly funding and training actual terrorist organizations, as recognized by many countries. If fighting that is terrorism to you, then I’m not sure what you’re doing here on the enemy’s social media…
When a country with vastly superior resources intervenes in the affairs of a country with less, then it tips the scales in an unnatural way. Do they depend on greedy, self interested members of Iranian society to succeed? Of course. But that doesn’t excuse western behavior at all.
My point is that western behavior has really nothing to do with Iran going on a foolish dam building spree, or over pumping in a foolish attempt to grow water hungry crops in arid mountain plateaus.
Kind of like how the US built Phoenix and LA in the middle of the desert, and allows farming in the desert as well, setting the stage for a near term water crisis in the region when the Rocky Mountain snow melt gets cut in half?
The Salt River enabled the Phoenix area to be an agricultural power house long before Columbus arrived in America. The Pima practiced irrigation agriculture and were using their crop surpluses to trade far and wide.
What's problematic is Phoenix agriculture is the focus on extremely water hungry crops like alfalfa and not really the presence of agriculture in general.
> What's problematic is Phoenix agriculture is the focus on extremely water hungry crops like alfalfa and not really the presence of agriculture in general.
This is entirely an artifact of arcane water law in the US. Any rational allocation would make alfalfa untenable there.
During WW2 the US leveled 1/3 of all buildings in Japan including most of the manufacturing industry. That didn't stop Japan from rebuilding and coming back stronger. The same is true of Germany, except East Germany turned out to be an abject failure.
I personally am not well read on this, but I know lot of people blame the US and the UK since after they overthrew the democratically elected socialist government and installed a brutal dictator[0], the only elements that survived to oppose the dictatorship were hardened islamists, who later took power from the US backed Shah[1]
This is basic, commonly accepted history. That’s why all of the comments defending US actions deflect and blame the accomplices within Iran like the Shah.
Absolutely, the qualifiers are mostly because I am not knowledgeable to say what caused the situation _now_, not because the facts of the US backed coup damaging Iran are at all in dispute.
> not because the facts of the US backed coup damaging Iran are at all in dispute.
I mean, they are, GP just admitted they stand corrected[0] and "democratically elected government" of Mossadegh is factually incorrect. Other comments have pointed out he was installed not by the people, but by the Shah and Majles, stopped 1952 elections when they didn't go his way, then tried to dissolve parliament and vest power solely in himself
You're leaving out a lot of detail. Yes, Mossadegh stopped counting votes, claiming the election was corrupted by foreign influence, which it to some extent was. Less than half the members of the majlis that had thus been elected belonged to his own party, so that wasn't exactly a power grab for himself.
In the events that followed his popularity rose and he tried to gather a government but was blocked by the shah, which made him even more popular, to the extent that the armed forces backed off from containing the demonstrations. It's against this background he sent a bill to the majlis that would give him six months of emergency powers to push through with his political program and the nationalisation, which was approved.
After those six months he asked for another twelve months and got it, but his base had started to wither away and allies switched sides because the reforms didn't have enough effect fast enough in the international climate they were in. I.e. trade boycott and foreign influence operations and so on, which of course hurt his constituents. Some of his allies were also afraid that he might turn against them, hence they turned on him.
Churchill convinced Eisenhower that Mossadegh were going to deport the shah, and then they launched the coup.
I have no issue with the details, and appreciate the nuance here. I just object to people who frame the situation as "there is no dispute the US and UK overthrew a democratically elected Iranian government"
