On Summer Reading: All the Shah's Men

For some time, I have had an interest in the nation of Iran. It started my freshman year during an exercise for my playwriting class. I came a cross an article describing a student protest at the University of Tehran (Tehran is Iran's capital city) Based on the exceedingly brief description in the two paragraph long article, it sounded similar to the protests of America's not too distant past. I decided to start researching the protest and the forthcoming events. The BBC was my best ally in this endeavour. The more I read about Iran, the more I wanted to know. It just so happened that a year later I had to read "Persepolis" for a class. It is a graphic novel about a girl growing up in Tehran during the volatile years surrounding the Islamic Revolution that established the current regime in 1979. This got me to start researching further back into Iran's history. The latest step in my research was the book All the Shah's Men by Stephen Kinzer.

This book describes the events of the 1953 coup of Iran's first democratic government. The prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh was removed from power and sentenced to a life of house arrest while the Shah (Iranian king) who had previously been little more than a figurehead became essentially a dictator. It was he who would later be ousted in the 1979 revolution.

What Kinzer details is the involvement of British and American agents in the coup. Until Mossadegh became prime minister, the vast resources and profits of Iran's oil fields were controlled by the vast Anglo-Iranian Oil, a British company. However, Mossadegh was the primary force of Iranian nationalism, and his chief goal once he reached power was to nationalize Iran's oil industry that that great economic benefit might be in the hands of the Iranian people to whom the land and the labour belonged.

Of course, this did not sit well with Anglo-Iranian nor with the British government for whom the company generated enormous income. Britain began working as hard they could to subvert Mossadegh and restore their interests in Iran. Britain, led by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, sought support from America, but President Truman saw what a central role Iran held in Middle East relations and sought a more diplomatic solution with Iran. So, the British waited until Truman's term ended and Republican Dwight Eisenhower took office. Eisenhower took a sort of "Don't ask, don't tell" approach and let the CIA do what they thought best, which happened to be staging a coup to destroy a democratic government and replace it with a monarchy. Propoganda was printed, people were bribed, leaders chosen, and the government fell just as planned.

This book was incredibly eye-opening for me when it comes to America's relationship with Iran. Is it any wonder they don't like us? Not only did their oil industry fall back under the influence of foreign powers and their government revert to a monarchy, but the events of that coup created the circumstances leading to the Islamic Revolution which has stifled Iran under religious fundamentalism. The book was recently published in a new edition because of the how tense the current current relations with Iran are. There have already been people suggesting the promotion of a coup similar to the on of 1953 to remove the Islamic regime. While I agree that the current government in Iran is a bad thing, I think it could be even worse to tamper so casually and haphazardly in a culture we don't fully understand, especially when the consequences were so awful last time.