A Very Elegant Coup

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

Quietly and methodically, Roosevelt coordinated his plans in Tehran with politicians and army officers who were anti-Communist and loyal to the shah. They were able to manipulate the mob against Mossadegh, much as he had manipulated it against the shah. Surprisingly, Mossadegh did not suspect what was happening, and lost his chance to take the police measures that might have saved him. In contrast, the shah immediately concluded that Mossadegh would succeed, and fled in panic in a private plane to Baghdad. Kinzer relies on rather well-known secondary sources but gives a thorough and useful account of the mechanics of the coup, even if he cannot resist sneering at its executors.

In the era of Nasser, Sukarno, and Nehru, the defeated Mossadegh became a symbol of the nationalist hero done down by wicked imperialists. When the shah returned from Baghdad, he misread the outcome of the coup as evidence of his popularity; he came to believe that he could modernize Iran as he saw fit. In reality, he proved a rather weak man, vain, unwilling or unable to be a benevolent autocrat or, alternatively, to introduce the constitutional reforms that had been in the air for most of a century. So he brought on his own head the successful revolution that Ayatollah Khomeini managed in 1979. A Shia divine and a forbidding personality, an autocrat through and through, Khomeini set up a religious dictatorship and reversed as much westernization as possible.

None of that would have happened, Kinzer likes to think, if the CIA had not frustrated Mossadegh. This is simplistic, not to say fanciful. Order was preserved in Iran at a time of emergency, just as military intervention in Iraq is establishing order in today's uncertain world. According to intelligence reports, the ayatollahs are likely to have a nuclear weapon within 18 months, endangering their own people and many others. Preservation of order may then require measures larger in scale and far more costly in every way than Kermit Roosevelt's elegant coup.