Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
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Starting in the late 1940s, in the heat of the Cold War, the Harry Truman administration embraced the young shah as an important partner in the emerging anti-Soviet alliance in the Middle East, despite mounting Iranian resentment of the shah’s corruption and his reckless sales of Iran’s resources to foreign companies to finance his lavish lifestyle. The shah’s spending spree led him to sell exclusive rights to Iran’s oil and natural gas to Western multinational oil companies, mainly the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), which exploited Iranians and exported millions of barrels of oil that made fabulous profits while paying Iran virtually nothing.
✏️ It’s in the same time.. just a little later. And yet this deal leads to corruption and not taking care of the people at all. 🔗 View Highlight
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Resentment of the shah soon gave rise to popular dissent. In October 1949, Mossadegh, a longtime critic of the Pahlavi dynasty and a vocal advocate for Iran’s right to control its own oil industry, founded the National Front, a broad coalition that included both middle-class moderates and members of the left-wing Tudeh Party. Mossadegh and his allies soon held the balance of power in the Iranian parliament, known as the Majles, where they ran on the platform of sharing oil profits between Iran and AIOC, citing the example of other multinational oil firms operating in Venezuela and Saudi Arabia.
✏️ There’s enough resentment that a counter-force is formed to shift things, nationalize and wrest control from the west. 🔗 View Highlight
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Backed by the British government, AIOC refused to compromise. The Majles responded by nationalizing the Iranian oil industry. Shortly after, Mossadegh was elected prime minister, and immediately announced plans to wrest control of Iran’s oil fields and refineries from the UK.
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US and British agents carried out what they branded as a “countercoup” against the newly elected government, which entailed distributing lavish bribes to mobilize hundreds of pro-shah mercenaries, who stormed into the streets chanting anti-government slogans and staged violent clashes with Mossadegh’s supporters. Meanwhile, Western-friendly general Fazlollah Zahedi and right-wing military officers, along with the Iranian secret police, known as SAVAK, moved to restore order and crack down on dissent, rounding up Tudeh Party militants, arresting Mossadegh, and reinstating the shah.
✏️ The west quickly counter the coup. 🔗 View Highlight
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The 1953 coup, known in Iran as the 28 Mordad coup d’état, was a prelude to a long history of US covert regime change operations against democratically elected leaders across the Global South. Two decades later, in Chile, the United States infamously conspired to overthrow the elected socialist president Salvador Allende, helping usher in an authoritarian right-wing dictatorship.
✏️ A history of meddling 🔗 View Highlight
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In April 1962, Kennedy, fresh off the Bay of Pigs debacle, invited Shah Pahlavi to Washington, where the two leaders reviewed a “blueprint for stability in Iran.” Nine months later, the shah unveiled his White Revolution, a package of modernizing, “top-down” reforms designed to avert radical “bottom-up” change along the lines of Fidel Castro’s red revolution in Cuba. In the spring of 1963, US Peace Corps volunteers descended on Iran to preach American modernization, and as hundreds of US corporations began investing in the shah’s “economic miracle,” millions of barrels of oil flowed from Iran to the United States’ Cold War allies in Asia and Western Europe.
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Iranian opposition leaders, led by Ruhollah Khomeini, mocked the shah as an American puppet, and denounced the US-backed reforms as “Westoxification”
✏️ The start of a new opposition 🔗 View Highlight
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Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. Desperate to boost US expansion in the Middle East and get out of the Vietnam quagmire, the Nixon administration eyed monarchical Iran as a US proxy. In 1972, the pair visited Tehran, where they presented the shah with their “Nixon doctrine”: in exchange for the United States’ help in ensuring political stability in Iran, the United States would permit the shah to purchase nonnuclear weapon systems from the US arsenal, including helicopter gunships, jet fighters, and guided-missile frigates.
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viewed with growing disdain the shah’s wasteful spending on US arms. Riots erupted in the streets of Iran and were met with a brutal crackdown by the shah,
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From his exile in Iraq, the increasingly popular Khomeini condemned the bloodshed, calling for the overthrow of the US-backed tyrant. The Iranian Revolution was soon underway.
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On January 16, 1979, Shah Pahlavi boarded a Boeing 707 at Tehran’s Mehrabad airport and headed, after a brief stop in Egypt, for exile in the United States
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Khomeini returned to Iran for the first time after fifteen years in exile, promising to establish an Islamic Republic and vowing to cleanse the country of all remaining influence of “the Great Satan.” Khomeini and his supporters beat down the left-wing forces that had aided in overthrowing the shah and soon created their own authoritarian state, albeit one that garnered popular support for its opposition to US imperialism.
✏️ a new authoritarian state that has support because of its opposition to the US. 🔗 View Highlight
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They never acknowledged that festering anti-American sentiments in Iran were not religious or cultural in origin, or the product of a “clash of civilization” or some other ahistorical nonsense but had roots in the United States’ long history of meddling in the country and its support of the shah’s dictatorship.
✏️ The hardly subtle nuance of it… it wasn’t about religion or any extremism. It was about rebelling against the constant meddling in their own country. 🔗 View Highlight
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Eager to settle old scores with Iran, the Reagan administration sided with Iraq, providing Saddam Hussein with weapons and aircraft, military intelligence, and billions of dollars of credit.
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Emboldened by his US partnership, Hussein invaded Kuwait three years later, and the United States was soon fighting its former ally and new pariah in Iraq.
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Bill Clinton adopted a policy of “dual containment,” which employed crippling economic sanctions and preemptive military threats to weaken Iran
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George W. Bush, neoconservatives made destabilizing Iran an official policy, again despite Iranian outreach. Hours after 9/11 unfolded, Khatami sent condolences to Bush, while thousands of young Iranians held a candlelight vigil in the streets of Tehran. Bush responded by branding Iran a terrorist regime and a member of “the Axis of Evil,” along with Iraq and North Korea
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whether it was the CIA overthrowing the democratically elected Prime Minister Mossadegh; or Carter giving refuge to the authoritarian shah; or Reagan sending weapons to Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War; or George W. Bush rebuffing an Iran nuclear deal, or Donald Trump sabotaging Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran and carrying out the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, or the Biden administration warmongering against Iran in a time of mounting regional conflict, stoking the flames of a wider war — on top of sending thousands more US troops to the region and securing a $8.7 billion military aid package for Israel.