Status Updates From All the Shah's Men: An Amer...

‘...U. S. involvement in the [1953] coup and the 1954 consortium agreement convinced the Iranian people that the United States cared little for their interests, that it was more concerned with propping up British imperialism... These convictions led Iranian nationalists to dub the United States the Great Satan and to blame it for all their nation’s ills during the next twenty-five years...’

Understandable

“Undoubtedly, there would have been no coup in August 1953 if it had not been for the CIA. The CIA devised Operation Ajax, paid a large sum to carry it out—estimates of the final cost range from $100,000 to $20 million, depending on which expenses are counted—and assigned one of its most imaginative agents to direct it. Yet Kermit Roosevelt and his comrades could not have succeeded without help from Iranians.”

“Dulles was indeed planning. The next year he and his brother organized the CIA’s second coup d’etat, which led to the fall of President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala and set off a sequence of events in that country that led to civil war and hundreds of thousands of violent deaths. Later the CIA set out to kill or depose foreign leaders from Cuba and Chile to the Congo and Vietnam...”

“How did Iran reach the tragic crossroads of August 1953? The main responsibility lies with the obtuse neocolonialism that guided the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and with the British government’s willingness to accept it. If the company had shown even a modicum of good sense, it could have reached a compromise with the Iranian authorities....”

‘It is a reasonable argument that but for the coup, Iran would be a mature democracy. So traumatic was the coup’s legacy that when the Shah finally departed in 1979, many Iranians feared a repetition of 1953, which was one of the motivations for the student seizure of the U.S. embassy. The hostage crisis, in turn, precipitated the Iraqi invasion of Iran...’

“With their devotion to radical Islam and their eagerness to embrace even the most horrific kinds of violence, Iran’s revolutionary leaders became heroes to fanatics in many countries. Among those who were inspired by their example were Afghans who founded the Taliban, led it to power in Kabul, and gave Osama bin-Laden the base from which he launched devastating terror attacks....”

‘Churchill once said privately that he considered the coup to have been “the finest operation since the end of the war,” but he never considered it more than an obscure footnote to his career.’

‘“It is easy to see Operation Boot as the first step towards the Iranian catastrophe of 1979,” Woodhouse conceded. “What we did not foresee was that the Shah would gather new strength and use it so tyrannically, nor that the US government and the Foreign Office would fail so abjectly to keep him on a reasonable course. At the time we were simply relieved that a threat to British interests had been removed.”’

‘“In Iran you can get a crowd that’s fearsome,” John Waller, the head of the CIA’s Iran desk, mused afterward. “Or you can get a friendly crowd. Or you can get something in between. Or one can turn into the other.”’

‘On the morning of “coup day,” thousands of paid demonstrators would stage a massive antigovernment rally. The well-prepared Majlis would respond with a “quasi-legal” vote to dismiss Mossadegh. If he resisted, army units under Zahedi’s control would arrest him and his key supporters, and then seize military command posts, police stations, telephone and telegraph offices, radio stations, and the national bank.’

‘...To rising applause he declared that Britain “for centuries has been used to plundering poor nations,” and that Iran would no longer accept its “oppressive terms.” He concluded with a telling moral observation: “Abiding by law and respecting the rights of the weak not only would not diminish, but would greatly enhance the position and prestige of the strong.”’

This book is so engrossing but alas I have to study for an exam 😔

‘Mossadegh was a “wild,” “erratic,” “eccentric,” “crazy,” “gangster-like,” “fanatical,” “absurd,” “dictatorial,” “demagogic,” “inflammatory,” “cunning,” “slippery,” “completely unscrupulous,” and “clearly imbalanced” “wily Oriental” who “looks like a cab horse” and “diffuses a slight reek of opium.”’

‘“We English have had hundreds of years of experience on how to treat the Natives. Socialism is all right back home, but out here you have to be the master.”’

“...The author, a British diplomat, asserted that the typical Iranian was motivated by

an unabashed dishonesty, fatalistic outlook, [and] indifference to suffering.... The ordinary Persian is vain, unprincipled, eager to promise what he knows he is incapable or has no intention of performing, wedded to procrastination, lacking in perseverance and energy, but amenable to discipline....”

Big yikes