The Iran We Might Have Today If It Wasn’t for Winston Churchill and the CIA

There once was a man named Iranian Mohammad Mosaddegh, who was the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran. — an event many historians describe as Iran’s first real chance at parliamentary democracy.

Remember now, and here’s where it gets complicated, Iran was formally ruled by the Shah of Iran, the monarch Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. So, Iran in the late 1940s and early 1950s was a hybrid system: it had a king (the Shah), an elected parliament, prime ministers, powerful landowners, clerics, military factions, and heavy British influence, mostly because of their heavy oil extraction companies.

So, Mosaddegh did not overthrow the Shah, he became prime minister under the Shah through parliamentary politics.

The Setup, Mosaddegh was a liberal prime minister in a kingdom. He believed the Shah should rule under a constitution, not as an absolute monarch. Essentially, he believed in parliamentary authority, civilian government, elections, and limits upon royal power.

None of this was all that radical, but based upon in Iran’s Constitutional Revolution of 1905–1911, in which had tried to create a modern constitutional monarchy. Mosaddegh saw himself as merely defending that tradition, which made him dangerous to both the Shah, and all those nasty foreign powers accustomed to dealing with strongmen.

Which is where Churchill comes into the picture, cigar clenched firmly in his jaw.

Mosaddegh argued that Iran’s oil belonged to Iranians. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company controlled enormous wealth while most Iranians remained poor. This was not new, it has ever been so in strongman countries. Britain received both huge revenues and strategic advantages from Iranian oil.

Mosaddegh’s nationalization was a declaration that 16% royalty was not nearly enough for Iran’s in-ground oil reserves and Iran was not, by any means, a British dependency.

That made him a hero across much of the developing world.

That was more than enough for Sir Winston…

In a nation all but destroyed by the ravages of WWII, and in the process of gradually losing what would become almost all of its World Empire, the impudence of a neighboring monarchy suddenly nationalizing its oil reserves was a bridge too far.

If this formerly agreeable Iranian kingdom was about to become disagreeable, in a matter so important to Great Britain, Churchill would step to the helm of its democratic ship of state and correct its course.

He had not been head of the Admiralty for nothing.

The simple coup of a mere prime minister was not a hill too steep to climb for a man who had once run an empire upon which the sun never set.

The Americans would need to be involved. An inconvenient and pesky thing at the time, but necessary in this postwar world. The CIA was wearing new shoes at the moment, eager to get over the pinch and expand Bill Donovan’s old OSS beginnings across a world ripe for pickings. It had not yet earned its Harry Truman reference as “an American Gestapo,” when the word Gestapo was so fresh in the world’s mind.

But the Central Intelligence Agency had its own SS General Heinrich Müller, in the form of Allen Dulles, brother of John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower’s Secretary of State. Together they helped shape the aggressive anti-communist posture of the 1950s. Critics argued that the brothers completely obliterated the line between diplomacy, corporate interests, and covert intervention.

So, there’s a benchmark for you, if you are not otherwise occupied.

The brothers accurately defined Churchill’s requirements in Iran.

In Churchill’s own words, “You can always depend upon Americans to do the right thing, once they have explored all the alternatives.” Indeed, the world’s greatest power (at the time) didn’t get there by fair play and square dealing.

So it was done, the details of Mosaddegh’s demise of no interest to us here, other than the fact that he he initially escaped capture during the fighting in Tehran, but surrendered a few days later to avoid further bloodshed. His televised military trial (in small-screen black and white) became internationally famous.

He defended himself passionately and with great skill, arguing that he had acted constitutionally and in Iran’s national interest by nationalizing Iranian oil.

But the deal was done and, at least, he faced no firing squad.

He was sentenced to three years in prison, followed by lifelong internal exile under house arrest and, for the remainder of his life, lived under heavy surveillance at his family estate in Ahmadabad, a village northwest of Tehran.

He was forbidden from political activity and largely cut off from public life, dying there in 1967 at age eighty-four.

The Shah retained his monarchy, playing alto-sax in the British and American Big Band, until his reckoning in an Iranian Revolution in early 1979. The wheel of truth does indeed turn slowly, and the truth it reveals is often but another lie.

The sequence went roughly like this.

Massive civilian protests, strikes, and demonstrations against the Shah escalated throughout 1978 and, in January of 1979, the Shah left Iran, announcing a ‘vacation,’ but everyone understood his regime was permanently made redundant and bankrupt. The Shah died in exile in Egypt in 1980.

On the first of February in 1979, Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile in France to enormous public support. Almost immediately, the monarchy collapsed and Khomeini’s revolutionary forces controlled the country.

The part I never really understood, because I’m not yet old enough to remember centuries-old history, is who the hell the Mullahs were and where they came from.

The Mullahs, more formally the Shiite clerical establishment, did not suddenly appear in 1979. They had been a major force in Iranian society for centuries.

Who knew?

In 2000, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright publicly acknowledged the American role in the coup, calling it a setback for Iran’s political development. Later, declassified CIA documents explicitly confirmed CIA involvement.

A setback for Iran’s political development is, perhaps, praise by too weak a term, Madeleine.

Iran should be a bastion of democratic policy in the Middle East today, and it is not.

But Bastions are harder come by than back-to-back Superbowls.

Ninety million citizens of that country have been denied their destiny. And Albright calls it ‘a setback for Iran’s political development.’ Is the Trump presidency nothing more than ‘a setback for America’s 140 million citizen’s political development?’

Perhaps.

But 130 million Americans, 90 million Iranians, 46 million Argentinians, 40 million Ukrainians, and 11 million Cubans might argue with the definition of a ‘setback.’

In this fragile geographic territory we casually call ‘the Middle East,’ events are transpiring today that may well set political and military realities for a century, perhaps more. They are as casually laid out as Trump’s daily diet Coca-Cola intake, and as easily disposed of as sweeping the cans into a wastebasket.

Yet it all could have been different, if world powers had not abused their power…and sallied forth to commit these identical abuses today.

Churchill has been dead sixty years, John Foster Dulles sixty-seven years, Allen Dulles the same.

Have we learned nothing?

My near-century witnessing politics tells me we have not…