A Very Elegant Coup

National Review, Sept 15, 2003 by David Pryce-Jones

All The Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror, by Stephen Kinzer (Wiley, 272 pp., $24.95)

In the summer of 1953, the CIA and Britain's MI6 arranged a coup in Tehran. The Iranian prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, appeared to be opening his country to the Soviets, and the objective was to overthrow him. The coup succeeded brilliantly. Mossadegh spent the rest of his life on his country estate; Iran remained a strong Cold War ally of the West. And a myth central to the Left took lasting shape: The CIA is thuggish, arrogant, immoral, and -- finally -- stupid, because interventions of that sort prove counterproductive. No matter how many countries the Soviet Union might subvert, in this view, the United States should never interfere in other peoples' internal affairs. This myth is being revived forcefully, now that the U.S. has gone far beyond staging a mere coup in order to keep the peace in many trouble spots, including Iraq.

Stephen Kinzer is a New York Times correspondent who prefers to deal in myth rather than consider realities. Everything that has ever gone wrong with Iran, he thinks, is the fault of the British. Admittedly, the British had discovered Iran's oil resources, and developed the huge Anglo-Iranian Oil Company -- but they did this only to exploit Iran's wealth. In the face of these colonialists, the Iranians could do nothing except grow angry. Righteous indignation bubbles out of Kinzer.

It might all have been so different -- because, in its hour of crisis, Iran produced Mossadegh, whom Kinzer in awe and trembling more than once calls a titan, a towering figure, "one of history's most gifted visionaries." A tall man with a stoop and the lugubrious appearance of a vulture, Mossadegh was an aristocrat, educated in France and Switzerland. Breathless, resting on a cane, in and out of clinics, bursting into tears or fainting dead away at well-chosen moments, he acted out a high-class melodrama all his own. Between the wars, as a member of the rubber-stamp Iranian parliament, he began his lifelong challenge to the Pahlavi shahs in power since 1926. If they could rule, he believed, so could he.

In pre-Pahlavi days, shahs of Iran had engaged in incessant warfare with their neighbors, the rival Muslim rulers of Ottoman Turkey and Afghanistan, and the czars of Russia. Making and breaking treaties, losing territories steadily (especially to Russia), these shahs weakened -- and took their people down with them. Fearful of this decline and the corresponding superiority of the West, reformers in Iran, like those in Ottoman Turkey and czarist Russia, proposed programs of constitutional reform. Power struggles followed between reformers and the shah, the sultan, and the czar they had in their respective sights. The autocrats duly fell, to be replaced by Reza Pahlavi, Ataturk, and Lenin.

An upstart risen from the ranks, Reza Shah Pahlavi seized power in a coup. He set about westernizing Iran, with no regard for Islamic sensibilities. When he made the crucial mistake of backing Hitler, the British summarily ejected him in favor of his son Mohammad Reza. Lenin's successor, Stalin, soon proved to be every bit as acquisitive as the former czars, and during and after World War II he contrived to set up a puppet republic in northern Iran, and to organize the Communist Tudeh party in his support. Under British pressure, Stalin reluctantly withdrew. In spite of the doubts they had about the Pahlavis, Kinzer's colonialist British maintained Iran's territorial integrity for the sake of order.

Mohammad Reza Shah was still young and inexperienced, and Mossadegh judged that the surefire way to overthrow him was to attack the British. He therefore called for the nationalization of Anglo-Iranian. This brought enthusiastic and often violent mobs out into the street. The British refused to make real concessions to Mossadegh, and Kinzer may be right that, since they had already retreated from India and Palestine, this was impossibly inflexible of them. But Mossadegh never had any intention of compromising; he was banging the nationalist drum for all he was worth.

Britain and the U.S. understood that the likeliest outcome of Mossadegh's cunning introduction of disorder was the downfall of the shah, and the creation of a void in which the Communists would assume power. In that event, Iran would find itself frogmarched into the Soviet bloc. China had just gone Communist, and the Korean War was not yet stabilized. The recently promulgated Truman Doctrine stated that the U.S. would come to the defense of any people threatened by Communism. President Truman and Britain's Clement Attlee discussed the use of force in Iran, only to reject it in the hope that the whole issue would somehow resolve itself. The election of Churchill in Britain and Eisenhower in the U.S. then brought into office two men who did not hesitate to enforce order. They agreed that a coup would serve the purpose better than a military expedition. The CIA officer chosen to direct it was Kermit Roosevelt, grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt.