Harry Targ
Code Pink
The history of U.S./Iranian relations has been long and
painful. Before the dramatic United States involvement in that country, Iran’s
vital oil resource had been under control of the weakening British empire. In
1901 the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now British Petroleum) consolidated control
of much of the production, refining, and export of Iranian oil. Local oligarchs
received only 16 percent of the oil revenue from the global sale of the oil.
After World War II, with a young monarch
Mohammad Reza Shah serving as the Iranian ruler and Iranian masses living in
poverty, Iranian nationalists mobilized to seize control of their valuable
resource. Upper class nationalist Mohammed Mosaddegh became Prime Minister and
asserted the power of the parliament over the monarchy. The parliament voted to
nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.
The British government enlisted the United
States in 1953 to overthrow the Mossadegh regime using covert operations
directed by the CIA. After Mossadegh was imprisoned and the Shah given full
power to impose his will on an angry population, a new oil consortium agreement
was established in 1954 which allowed five U.S. oil companies to gain a 40
percent share of Iranian oil. Anglo-Iranian would retain another 40 percent,
and the rest would be given to rich Iranians.
Over the years, the Shah’s regime became the
bulwark of US power in the increasingly vital Persian Gulf region. In the Nixon
period, Iran was defined as a key “gendarme” state, which would serve as a
surrogate western police power to oversee the region. Presumably Iran would
protect the flow of Gulf oil to the United States, Europe, and Japan. By the
1970s, the Shah’s military was the fifth largest in the world.
To the great surprise of left critics of the
Shah’s dictatorship, the CIA, and the Carter administration, the Shah’s regime
began to crumble in the summer of 1978 as large strikes were organized by oil
workers against the regime. In January, 1979, massive street protests led by
the religious community doomed the regime. As Iranian soldiers refused to fire
upon street demonstrators, President Carter’s National Security Advisor,
Zbigniew Brzezinski, urged the president to send troops to Iran to save the
U.S. regional policeman, the Shah, from overthrow. That proposal was rejected
by Carter.
After jockeying for power in the
post-revolutionary period, religious leaders consolidated their power over the
political system. To add embarrassment to loss of economic and geopolitical
control over the vital Persian Gulf region, Iranian students took 52 U.S.
diplomats and military attaches hostage and held them for 444 days. In 1980
Carter authorized a military rescue effort that failed. The bungled military
operation further damaged the image of infallibility that American foreign
policy elites, and the public, held about the nation’s power and destiny.
In the 1980s, to challenge Iran’s potential
for becoming the hegemonic power in the Gulf, the Reagan administration sided
with Iraq in the brutal war between it and Iran. In 1988, shortly before the
end of the Iraq/Iran war U.S. planes shot down a civilian Iranian airliner
killing 290 people aboard.
Subsequent to the ignoble history of U.S.
support for the Shah’s dictatorship, militarization, the overthrow of
Mosaddegh, the embarrassment of the hostage taking, funding Iraq in the brutal
Gulf war of the 1980s, the United States has maintained hostility to Iran
despite occasional signals from the latter of a desire to establish better
relations and a short-lived nuclear treaty. U.S. policy has included an
economic embargo, efforts to create region-wide opposition to the regime,
expressions of support for a large and justifiable internal movement for
democracy and secularization in the country, and encouragement for growing
Israeli threats against Iran which recently led to Israel’s bombing of Iran.
Along with interventions in Latin America, Africa, and
Southeast Asia the US coup in Iran in August 19, 1953 epitomized United States interventionist
foreign policy since the end of World War II.
