Before the United States goes to war with Iran, as many Americans seem anxious to do, we should first understand how Iran became our implacable enemy.\u00a0 U.S. presidents from Eisenhower to Carter viewed Iran as our friend.\u00a0 The CIA didn\u2019t see this coming, and neither did our State Department.<\/p>\n
The story goes back to the early days of World War II.\u00a0 In 1941, Great Britain and the Soviet Union invaded Iran, because the ruler, Rez\u0101 Sh\u0101h, seemed incapable of countering Nazi influence.\u00a0 They forced him to resign.\u00a0 He surrendered his wealth that included multi-million dollar bank accounts, some 2,000 villages as well as myriad other properties that he had expropriated.\u00a0 Rez\u0101 Sh\u0101h\u2019s son Mohammad Reza Pahlevi was installed as Iran\u2019s political leader, because he appeared likely to do the bidding of the Allies.\u00a0 He became the Shah and served as a constitutional monarch with very limited powers.<\/p>\n
After the war and the humiliating invasions, an Iranian nationalist movement clamored to eliminate foreign intervention in their country.\u00a0 Great Britain withdrew its forces, but the Soviets stalled.\u00a0 Extended negotiations resulted in an agreement that an Iranian-Soviet oil company would be established.\u00a0 Soviet forces eventually withdrew, in part, because U.S. President Harry Truman sent a stern warning to Moscow.\u00a0 Nationalists orchestrated demonstrations against the proposed Soviet oil deal, and it was rejected.<\/p>\n
Then nationalists targeted the British government-controlled Anglo-Iranian Oil Company that monopolized oil production.\u00a0 There were negotiations aimed at increasing Iran\u2019s share of oil revenues, but the company refused.\u00a0 Britain was desperate to maximize its oil revenues, because of its dire financial situation after World\u00a0War\u00a0II.\u00a0 The ambitious intriguer General Haj-Ali Razmara, who favored the British, was assassinated \u2014 a\u00a0warning to those who defied Iranian nationalism.<\/p>\n
The wily nationalist Mohammed Mosaddeq emerged as leader of the campaign against the oil company.\u00a0 The Shah favored nationalization, and despite British threats, he nominated Mosaddeq as prime minister in April 1951.\u00a0 Mosaddeq cancelled Britain\u2019s right to extract oil from Iran and ordered the seizure of its assets.\u00a0 The company shut down the refineries, withdrew their employees, oil production collapsed, and British navy blockaded Iran\u2019s ports, throttling the export of oil or the import of food.\u00a0 Diplomatic relations with Britain were severed.<\/p>\n
Economic crisis led to political turmoil.\u00a0 Mosaddeq demanded more power, especially control of finances and the military.\u00a0 When Mosaddeq wasn\u2019t pushing the British for an acceptable deal, he was trying to undermine the Shah\u2019s position in the government by excluding him from meetings and preventing other politicians from contacting him.\u00a0 From time to time, Mosaddeq flirted with the Tudeh (Iranian communist) party or even the Soviet Union as he maneuvered among his political rivals.\u00a0 Meanwhile, Mosaddeq pursued Soviet-style expropriation of landed estates, and he established collective farms.\u00a0 As negotiations with the British dragged on, the Iranian economy deteriorated, and the Tudeh party displayed its strength by organizing riots and strikes.<\/p>\n
Crowds began denouncing Mosaddeq, and the Shah became weary of Mosaddeq\u2019s constant scheming.\u00a0 On August 19, 1953, the Shah boldly dismissed him.\u00a0 Amidst escalating violence, the Shah fled to Iraq.\u00a0 While he was gone, loyal General Fazlollah Zahedi restored order and made it safe for the Shah to return.\u00a0 He demanded to be involved in political and administrative decisions.\u00a0 He insisted on exclusive control of the military.\u00a0 He gained supreme power in his country.\u00a0 Mosaddeq was imprisoned.<\/p>\n
Diplomatic relations with Britain were restored, Britain\u2019s Iranian oil monopoly ended, and Iran offered a financial settlement for nationalized properties.\u00a0 The Iranian government began to receive oil revenue again.<\/p>\n
Well, it turned out that the uprising against Mosaddeq and the pro-Shah military maneuvers were organized by British and CIA secret agents.\u00a0 A major concern was that Iran might be drawn into the Soviet orbit.\u00a0 Only a few years earlier, Soviet mass murderer Josef Stalin had seized control of Eastern Europe, and the Chinese mass murderer Mao Zedong had converted his country into a totalitarian communist state.<\/p>\n
If a communist takeover in Iran was as serious a threat as feared, the coup might be considered successful.\u00a0 But for the rest of his days, the Shah was viewed as a tool of Western interests \u2013 and to a significant degree, he was.\u00a0 Moreover, as far as many people were concerned, by installing and continuing to support the Shah, the U.S. as well as Great Britain implicitly bought into his policies.\u00a0 Certainly U.S. presidents and other Cold War friends of the Shah were very discreet about publicly criticizing him.<\/p>\n
This was a risky thing to do, because many seemingly stable governments collapsed amidst unexpected coups and revolutions.\u00a0 For instance, in 1952 Egyptian colonel Gamal Abdel Nassar led a revolution toppling the Muhammad Ali monarchy that had ruled Egypt since 1905 \u2013 far longer than the Iranian monarchy the Shah\u2019s father had started in 1925.\u00a0 Nassar promoted a witches\u2019 brew of nationalism and socialism.\u00a0 Then in 1958, the Hashemite monarchy in Iraq, which King Faisal I had established in 1921, was overthrown in a military coup led by Brigadier General\u00a0Abd al\u2011Karim Qasim.\u00a0 The king, a prince and three princesses were gunned down.\u00a0 In 1960, Turkey\u2019s democratically-elected government was overthrown by a military coup.<\/p>\n
The Shah was determined to consolidate his power and establish a police state.\u00a0 \u201cMy father\u2019s dictatorship was necessary,\u201d he was quoted as saying, \u201cand my authoritarianism is also necessary.\u201d\u00a0 He paid off journalists and established a newspaper that could be counted on to portray him and his policies in glowing colors.\u00a0 The Iranian constitution was amended to increase the Shah\u2019s power.\u00a0 It established a new senate with 60 members, half of whom were appointed by the Shah.\u00a0 He responded to demands for free elections by picking at least two candidates for each elective office, then letting voters choose between them.\u00a0 Police observed as people cast their votes in open ballot boxes.<\/p>\n
In 1957, CIA secret agents helped the Shah establish SAVAK.\u00a0 Originally, this was intended to be an intelligence-gathering agency, but soon its mission became to help the Shah\u2019s friends and destroy his enemies.\u00a0 If widely-published reports are to be believed, SAVAK had as many as 60,000 secret agents, informers and collaborators.\u00a0 SAVAK\u2019s interrogation methods were said to include rape, extracting fingernails and attaching high voltage power lines to genitals.\u00a0 Historian Gholam Reza Afkhami remarked: \u201cSAVAK was more successful in antagonizing the supporters of the regime than in neutralizing its enemies.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Shah strongly believed in a government-run economy.\u00a0 He insisted that government must control prices and that \u201ckey\u201d industries must be government monopolies.\u00a0 He was determined to limit the accumulation of private sector wealth that could enable people to challenge his regime.\u00a0 He expropriated landed estates.\u00a0 He seized Iran\u2019s only private TV network, the oldest private university and the most valuable private mine, among other private assets.\u00a0 From the standpoint of victims whose property was stolen, the Shah must have been hard to distinguish from a hardcore socialist or communist.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Shah had a statist vision of the economy where the state could and should become an economic leviathan,\u201d observed Stanford University<\/a> historian Abbas Milani.\u00a0 The Shah practiced corrupt crony capitalism on a colossal scale.\u00a0 A British Embassy study revealed there were \u201cfew branches of economic activity\u201d that eluded the greedy hands of the Shah, his family and friends.\u00a0 They owned businesses in \u201cbanking, publishing, wholesale and retail trading, shipping, construction work, hotels, agricultural development and even housing.\u201d\u00a0 The Shah reportedly had a part\u2011interest in cement, fertilizer and beet sugar production, as well as grain marketing.\u00a0 The Shah was a valued partner, because he could clear away regulatory obstacles that plagued entrepreneurs who lacked royal connections.\u00a0 But all this wasn\u2019t enough.\u00a0 The Shah and his cronies amassed even more loot simply by stiffing vendors with unpaid\u00a0bills.<\/p>\n As a consequence of such statism and profligacy, the Iranian government was for many years in bad shape financially \u2013 despite all the oil.\u00a0 That\u2019s why the Shah repeatedly pitched American officials for cash. He complained that Iran didn\u2019t receive as much U.S. aid as Turkey or Pakistan.\u00a0 He wrote a long letter to President John F. Kennedy, pleading that Iran was \u201cin need of assistance which only America can furnish.\u201d\u00a0 By continuing to bankroll the Shah and collaborate with him on military matters, the U.S. effectively supported his policies, helping to make his enemies our enemies.<\/p>\n During the 1960s, the Shah began to make enemies among Shia clerics.\u00a0 The traditional practice was for officials to take an oath of office with the Qur\u2019an, like Western officials who used the Bible, but the Shah decided that various religious minorities could use their own holy books.\u00a0 Clerics were outraged.\u00a0 They insisted on the supremacy of the Qur\u2019an.\u00a0 Moreover, the Shah believed that women should be able to vote and hold public office.\u00a0 The clerics were against this, even though women\u2019s ballots weren\u2019t counted.<\/p>\n Among those outraged was Ayatollah Khomeini, the same cleric who was to play a leading role in the 1979 Iranian revolution against the Shah. He slighted Khomeini by addressing him as \u201cHojat-al Islam,\u201d a lower rank in the Muslim religious hierarchy.\u00a0 The Shah was angry when clerics joined landowners to form organized political opposition.\u00a0 The Shah denounced the \u201clittle, empty and antique\u201d clerics who tried to prevent Iran from becoming a modern nation.\u00a0 Khomeini, enraged, reached out to a rapidly expanding Muslim underground network that included terrorists plotting against the Shah.\u00a0 In 1965, there was another attempted coup and assassination.\u00a0 The Shah\u2019s armed forces killed some 200 people during Tehran riots.\u00a0 The Shah blamed those riots on Khomeini.<\/p>\n When the Shah visited the United States during the 1970s, he encountered large numbers of Iranian students protesting his oppressive regime.\u00a0 Historian Milani reported that the Shah \u201cwould never again travel to a Western European or American city without the specter of student demonstrations haunting him.\u201d\u00a0 Meanwhile, the political opposition gathered momentum at home.\u00a0 Dr. Yahya Adle, one of the Shah\u2019s friends, reportedly warned him: \u201cYou can\u2019t keep your throne afloat on a river of blood.\u201d<\/p>\n The Iranian businessman Abolhassan Ebtehaj gave a talk at Stanford University, warning that although the U.S. government had given the Shah\u2019s government more than a billion dollars, the U.S. was \u201cneither loved nor respected.\u201d\u00a0 He explained, \u201cwhere the recipient government is corrupt, the donor government very understandably appears in the judgment of the public to support corruption.\u201d<\/p>\n Major demonstrations against the Shah began in October 1977.\u00a0 They intensified in January 1978 and were followed by strikes that substantially shut down the Iranian economy.\u00a0 The Shah fled the country in January 1979.\u00a0 Ayatollah Khomeini, his nemesis since the early 1960s, emerged as the principal leader of the revolution and the theocratic successor regime that appears to be even more oppressive than the Shah\u2019s.\u00a0 Evidently the CIA and State Department failed to anticipate this upheaval because they had limited contacts with people in movements opposing the Shah.<\/p>\n Americans were stunned when suddenly, as it seemed, their Iranian \u201cfriend\u201d became a bitter enemy, but political opposition had been gathering momentum for more than two decades as the Shah made more and more enemies.\u00a0 Middle class people disgusted at the blatant corruption of the Shah, his family and his cronies, Shia clerics offended by the Shah\u2019s arrogance and secular policies, families outraged because loved ones were tortured or murdered by SAVAK, businessmen who became weary of competing against the Shah\u2019s insiders with special privileges, landowners who suffered from expropriation, students who embraced revolutionary ideas \u2013 all wanted the Shah\u00a0gone.\u00a0 It didn\u2019t help that former CIA secret agent Kermit Roosevelt bragged about his 1953 exploits orchestrating the downfall of Mosaddeq, thereby enabling the Shah to establish his dictatorship.<\/p>\n To be sure, the Shah did much to help the U.S. thwart Soviet aggression in the Middle East, but Iranian nationalists were bound to resist Soviet aggression as they previously resisted the Soviet and British presence in Iranian oil fields.\u00a0 If the Shah had been on his own, undoubtedly he would have resisted another Soviet challenge to his power \u2013 he didn\u2019t want to be somebody else\u2019s lackey.\u00a0 If the Soviets had conquered Iran, higher oil prices would have stimulated more production and exploration, increasing oil supplies, so global markets would have resolved the oil issue.\u00a0 In addition, the larger the Soviet empire became \u2013 it already extended across 11 time zones \u2013 the more over-extended and vulnerable it was.\u00a0 Ultimately, of course, the Soviet Union collapsed, as the over-extended empires of Napoleon and Hitler had collapsed before.<\/p>\n Soviet aggression was a serious risk, but a nationalist backlash was a serious risk, too. The Shah\u2019s enemies became America\u2019s enemies, since the U.S. played a principal role sustaining the power of the Shah.\u00a0 As if this weren\u2019t enough, Washington<\/a> doubled down by backing another dictator \u2013 Iraq\u2019s Saddam Hussein \u2013 in an effort to check Iran\u2019s power.\u00a0 A reported 300,000 Iranians were killed and perhaps another 700,000 Iranians were injured in the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988).\u00a0 So, when the U.S. intervened in Iran and Iraq, it backed two dictators and ended up having to deal with two more enemies!\u00a0 Now that Iran is scrambling to develop a nuclear capability, it\u2019s hard to see how potentially lethal hatreds could be defused.<\/p>\n By now, we ought to understand that it\u2019s dangerous to view the making of enemies as something that can be satisfactorily resolved later.\u00a0 Hatreds, once provoked, have persisted for decades or even hundreds of years after people lost loved ones, surrendered territories or were otherwise humiliated by their enemies.\u00a0 In Ireland, Germany, the Balkans, the Mideast and elsewhere, hatreds have led to chronic, explosive violence.<\/p>\n We need a national defense strong enough to deter attacks, together with a foreign policy that involves less intervention overseas.\u00a0 Intervention and war ought to be the exception, not the rule.<\/p>\n ___________________<\/p>\n