Status Updates From All the Shah's Men

Despite only being 1/3 done with this book my current conclusions are:

- this should be mandatory reading for quite literally everyone
- the UK owes Iran reparations lmao

Instead of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, I prefer Two Degrees of Problematic Britain, where virtually any geopolitical disaster can be traced back to the British in two degrees of separation or fewer. Still not entirely sure how Eisenhower was persuaded to support the coup beyond the reductive “communism bad, Soviets will make Iran communist” argument. And, as always, fuck the Dulles brothers.

This feels like it should be mandatory reading for everyone rn

‘...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....”