The Benchmark

From The Iranians: Persia, Islam and the Soul of a Nation, by Sandra Mackey (1996)

"Between 1951 and 1953, a charismatic figure named Muhammad Mossadeq rose out of the Iranian parliament to lead Iran in its second revolution against national subjugation and absolute monarchy. The British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company was his sword and a broad spectrum of Iran's population his soldiers. For over two years, the weak and vacillating Muhammad Reza Shah, king for almost a decade, played a passive role as leadership moved from the peacock Throne to the magnetic Mossadeq. Finally, the second Pahlavi shah fled Iran for the first, but not the last, time. It was Mossadeq's own mistakes and the intervention into Iran of yet another foreign power -- the United States -- that placed Mohammad Reza Shah back on his throne. The Pahlavi dynasty survived in large part because Mossadeq's Nationalist Movement, which found its ideology in Western political thought, could gather but not hold the great masses of Iran to its cause. ..In the end, the Nationalist Movement of 1951 to 1953 by engaging the United States in iran, exhausting the middle of the political spectrum, and largely destroying the left, bequeathed to Shiism the emotional issue of nationalism and the leadership of the opposition against absolute monarchy." (p. 188)

That "intervention" was an engineered coup against Prime Minister Mossadeq by the CIA. One can allow some latitude to this author because the date of her book (1996) is before the revelations came out. Nevertheless, the passage seems to me hardly more than a tissue of falsehoods.

But she gets better. Of Mossadeq- "Possessing a magnificent courage to challenge, he sadly lacked the capacity to construct." (200) This may be accurate. Says that Mossadeq sought for a third power to strengthen Iran by neutralizing Britain. "It was only the beginning of America's bewildering relationship with Mohammad Mossadeq." (201) By the end of 1953, "Externally, the attempt to employ the U.S. as leverage against Britain had collapsed in Mossadeq's rigidity and America's misunderstanding of the melodramatic prime minister." (202) Questionable. Visitors to Iran - Allen Dulles and Brigadier General H. Norman Schwarzkopf are described as "...characters in a plot to rid Iran of its troublesome prime minister by restoring the authority of the shah." (204) Also Kermit Roosevelt - head of the CIA's Middle East operation, employed bribery and contacts provided by British intelligence to weave together a royalist coalition to unseat Mossadeq. Finally she lets the cat out of the bag: "The coup triumphed with a speed that surprised even its most ardent supporters." (207)

So the truth finally comes out. But unwillingly, it seems to me. This book would therefore not pass my benchmark test: which would be to grapple uncompromisingly with American interference in Iranian politics. Such a confrontation with our own "Shadow" would focus not on Mossadeq's failures but on our own duplicity and manipulation.

For I think the CIA-sponsored coup in Iran was a benchmark in our own history- the imperial mantle passed from Britain to the U.S. President Truman did not want to take up this mantle. But Eisenhower was persuaded.

The passing of the imperial handshake from Britain to the US was a dark moment in our history.