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Why the West’s learning curve is flat on Iran
Mohammad Al-Urdun looks at a book examining the West’s policy on Iran
IRAN TODAY
by Dilip Hiro,
Politico’s Publishing, £9.99
A NEW York journalist recently coined a snappy one-liner that neatly illustrated why America was once dubbed the United States of Amnesia. Observing that the teetotal Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad insisted on a soft-drinks bar at a United Nations soiree, the journalist quipped: “He proposes spilling all the blood in Israel but condemns the pouring of so much as a glass of wine”. Americans chuckled, the BBC cheerily interviewed the journalist – but few paid any heed to what it really summarised: a woeful ignorance of the history of Iran, Israel, America and Britain. In fact, said historian and Middle East expert Dilip Hiro, policy setters in Britain and America are so ill-informed of the facts despite more than a century of interference in Iran that they have a “precisely flat learning curve”.
In 1953 America and Britain toppled the popular Iranian prime minister over an oil dispute and ushered in a monarchy so corrupt that within 25 years it was swept aside by the ayatollahs. Then American President Jimmy Carter launched attempted to trigger another coup under the cover of freeing embassy staff taken hostage – a move which ended in military humiliation. In 2003, exactly 50 years after the first ill-faited Iranian coup, America and Britain took the disastrous decision to invade Iran’s neighbour, Iraq.
Now, just as America was drawn into the ’53 coup by Britain on the specious grounds that Iran was a stooge of the USSR, Washington is again conjuring up the Soviet spectre to paint Iran as a global threat. A couple of months ago American Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warned a behind-closed-doors meeting of European experts that Iran is the new USSR. America, she said, wrongly backed away from military confrontation with the USSR – and won’t make the same mistake with Iran.
The comparison between the superpower USSR and Iran, which is struggling to get its first atomic power plant off the ground and can barely keep its aging airforce in the sky, doesn’t stand scrutiny. But, said Hiro, America is knee deep in a “process that will rebound and hit back hard”.
Hiro has published 17 books on the Middle East and his latest, Iran Today, illustrates how two centuries of colonial intervention in Iran are coming to a head.
Speaking to an audience at the Marx Memorial Library in Clerkenwell, central London, he explained how Iran’s unhappy relationship with Europe and then America began in the early 19th Century.
It found itself in the crossfire between the British and Russian empires which were vying for control of the east and had already carved out Afghanistan as a partition between their territories. Britain was determined protect India, its jewel in the crown, and Iran, a global powerhouse in antiquity, found itself reduced to a frontline state in the Great Game cold war.
When Indian nationalists rebelled in 1857 Britain was so alarmed it decided to keep tabs on its empire by building a telegraph line from London to Calcutta – the longest in the world – and carve out the Suez Canal to improve trade. Iran was bisected by the telegraph line and suddenly became a pivotal territory.
But the consequences of the line were completely unexpected.
British investors suddenly had free access to the Iranian interior and their eyes were opened to its resources. Among the first to cash in was????? Reuters who snapped up a monopoly on growing and selling tobacco in the country. (Later he founded the Reuters global news agency).
The foreign concessions suited the Europhile Iranian Shah who earned kickbacks to fund lavish shopping European shopping sprees but infuriated the people. Within 13 years a nationalist rebellion began.
The other unexpected effect of the telegraph line was to revolutionise communications across Iran, helping to spread the rebellion. Further concessions, including a 1901 oil monopoly snapped up by the British speculator William Darcey ???? – the “beginning point” of global oil politics, said Hiro – were the last straw. In 1907 the Shah was forced to introduce Iran’s first constitution. But it was strangled at birth by European meddling - just four years later, under pressure from the Russian Tsar terrified the idea would spread, Iran was forced to bin it. Instead the Iranians were subject to even closer control from Britain and Russia, who facing the approach of World War One divided the country into spheres of control. On the eve of war the British government bought out Darcey’s Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) – a forerunner of BP –to guarantee fuel for its warships.
Toward the end of the war the newly installed Bolsheviks made one of their first acts to hand back the Russian occupied territories in north Iran. But the British government smelled the worth of Iranian oil and was more determined than ever to keep control of control of it. In the Second World War the oil was also coveted by Nazi Germany and Iran was occupied by British and Soviet armies. They pulled out in ’46 but AOIC stayed, keeping monopoly rights over the oil.
Despite the oil flow most Iranians were still desperately poor with 80% of population malnourished and life expectancy among the majority peasants only 27 years. In 1950 AIOC made around £200m in profit – a huge sum in those days – whilst the Iranian government netted only £16m in oil taxes – in other words almost 95% of its oil wealth flowed out of Iran to the West. In fact AIOC’s profit in 1950 alone exceeded the total the Iranian treasury had wrung from the company over the previous half-century.
As liberation movements spread across the Third World it was no surprise the Shah was forced to appoint a nationalist government under the urbane Dr Mohammed Mossadegh. Its first act – carried out on almost its first day in office – was to nationalise the oil.
The British Labour government screamed daylight robbery, complaining the Iranians had nationalised their oil by force. Seeking support at the international court in the Hague, however, London was embarrassed to find opinion – and the law – backed the Iranians. Undeterred it called on ex-pat engineers in Iran to boycott the nationalised company and dispatched seven warships and 4,000 paratroopers to enforce a blockade. With American support Iranian oil was virtually shut off.
But it was a tricky time for British whose empire was falling away from India to Egypt, where the popular nationalist revolution of ‘52 threatened to encourage the Middle East to break out of its colonial grasp. In Egypt MI6’s machinations and the British army’s bloody suppression of the nationalist movement led a few years later to it being dumped out of the country and the loss of the Suez Canal.
Meanwhile in Iran Britain wanted to stop the collapse of of its influence but was too overstretched to intervene. When the Conservative Prime Minister Winston Churchill was elected in ’51 he stepped up efforts to talk America off the fence and into backing action against. Within two years American President Eisenhower – quite wrongly – accepted the British assertion that Mossadegh was a Soviet stooge and the CIA and MI6 devised Operation Ajax, a coup to re-install the Shah and take back the oil.
With American cash the MI6 spy network set up in Iran during the Second World War and headed by three brothers – a banker, a con-man and a gifted agitator – was reactivated.
Under Ajax, which formed the blueprint for other coups including Indonesia, Ghana, Chile and recently in Venezuela, the media chiefs, religious leaders and sympathetic military officers were co-opted with bribes. Articles denouncing Mossadegh as anti-Shah and un-Islamic were regularly wired over from the American State Department in Washington for publication under Iranian by-lines the next day – a tactic employed as recently as the Iraq invasion. Mossadegh, a Swiss-educated Europhile, refused to crack down on the rebellion, fuelled by agent provocateurs and which cost the CIA $5m.
The coup, on a knife edge, tipped in the Shah’s favour only after a sleigh of hand by the Americans who talked Mossadegh into appointing a pro-Shah officer to the military top job. It was the final straw and the Shah was re-installed in ‘53.
Virtually his first act was to hand the oil to a consortium of seven American and British companies: Gulf, Mobil, Standard California, Standard New Jersey, Texaco and the British firms BP and Shell. Together they controlled 92% of world’s oil resources – a fact that has barely changed. “From then on American domination of Middle East oil was cemented,” said Hiro.
In the aftermath of the coup was a bloodbath. Under the guidance of Washington and London, thousands of communists, nationalists, trade unionists, army officers and even politicians were beaten up, imprisoned, disappeared and executed. In one demonstration in ’63 about 4,000 protesters were killed. Mossadegh was put under house arrest, the brutal Savak secret police was formed and the country put under effective military rule. Iran was almost immediately integrated into the anti-Soviet Middle Eastern alliance, firstly the Baghdad Pact and then into Cento?????.
If Washington or London ever had hopes of the Shah’s Iran becoming a modern, stable ally they were baseless. There were some land reforms in ‘60s and much upheaval during a haphazard industrialisation a decade later but vast sums were spent on weapons from America and Britain, and lavished on the opulence of the Shah and his ruling elites. The son of a local landowner, the Shah announced he was in fact heir to the great Iranian rulers Darius and Sirus and in ’71, while the majority languished, he arranged an extravaganza that might have been lifted from a Cecil B. DeMille Hollywood epic. Set in the ruins of the ancient capital of Persepolis foreign heads flocked to the party which cost $300m and in which 25,000 bottles of wine were drunk.
By the late Seventies the tide had turned irreversibly against the Shah. But it wasn’t the social democratic, liberal or progressive parties who led the anti-Shah movement – two decades of repression had scattered their members. Instead it was the reactionary clerics, led by Ruhollah Khomeni, whose bases in the mosques and religious schools had for centuries been an untouchable. By the time the Shah was teetering in 1978 the clerics were leading the revolution.
Even as the Shah was trying desperately to cling to power with promises of reforms he was backed by President Jimmy Carter’s Democrats in America and Jim Callaghan’s Labour government in Britain. Only when the writing was on the wall did Britain and America briefly swing behind Khomeni in an attempt to protect their oil interests. On the eve of the overthrow they were locked in secret talks with Khomeni, while from California planes flew to Iran carrying paraffin to power homes because the refineries had shut down.
But control over Iranian affairs – and ultimately its oil – slipped through their fingers. The ’78 revolution ushered in a regime stridently anti-American and which became the scourge of pro-Western regimes across the Middle East. The Saudi regime was terrified, Saddam’s Iraq was urged into a bloody eight year war with Iran, and the flowering of democracy and open discussion in Iran’s streets in the immediate aftermath of the revolution gave way to book burning and bloody repression.
Even the orchestrated demonstrations outside the American embassy in support of the student hostage takers – against which President Carter disastrously ordered his special forces – were just cover for the introduction of reactionary measures including war against the Kurds, a clampdown on progressives and execution of homosexuals and adulterers.
When Khomeni issued an edict ordering women to don the veil 20,000 protested on the streets. But the Iranian Left turned their backs on the women, as they had the Kurds and Turcomans for resisting the clerics. By ’81 the prisons were overflowing with Leftists, Islamic mujahadin guerrillas, Kurds and Turcomans and democrats of all shades. Show trials were routine and Savak, the Shah’s brutal secret police, was busier than ever – and reported almost yearly by Amnesty International for gross violations. In ’83 an international report warned there had been 5,000 executions, and in one night 497 had been shot in a prison.
The overthrow of Mossadegh was a defining moment in American-British-Iranian relations, Hiro concluded. Iran would probably have developed into a progressive, modern state but instead its development was catapulted backwards by America and Britain’s gung-ho intervention in ‘53. Within 25 years the brutal monarchy was toppled by Khomeni’s revolution and the stage was set for a bloody climax in American-British-Iranian relations. The repeat in Iraq and now the threat of war in Iran implies the lessons were never learned.
“If we look at Iran in ’53, and for that matter Iraq in 2003, we can see America started a process that will hit so hard that no American will be able to function in any part of the region,” said Hiro. “Anyone who even thinks about strikes against Iran should immediately be rushed to the nearest mental hospital. It will make Iraq look like a Sunday picnic.”
There are, he concluded, “always options, historical choices – and the Americans took the wrong choice in ’53 and made the same mistake 50 years later in Iraq.” With a dismissive sweep of his hand, he added: “It seems their learning curve is precisely flat”.
Dilip Hiro reviews The Last Mughal for the CNJ click here |
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