<?xml:namespace prefix = o />Reuel Marc Gerecht attempted in an article entitled “No, the <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />CIA did not mess up Iran” to underplay the importance of CIA activities in Iran (and elsewhere). This was my reply.
Gerecht makes a number of valid points, both about the domestic political dynamics of Iran at the time of the 1953 coup d’état and also about Iranians’ incessant search for the “hidden hands” that would explain Iran’s woeful state – and that would, in the process, deflect the responsibility or blame for the mess away from Iranians themselves. It is therefore probably true that the CIA did not mess up Iran.
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But it is not the whole truth.
For although the “well-mannered, striped-tie-wearing Yankees” who did not speak Persian could not have toppled a popular Prime Minister without the active participation of a significant part of either the population or the religious hierarchy, the coup would also have been unthinkable without US support, both moral and financial. And although Mr. Gerecht is partly correct in his assessment of the reasons for the rise, the fall and again the rise of the star of Mossadeq in Iran’s post-revolution political discourse, he is on less sure footing when discussing the deep scars of the 1953 coup left on Iran’s national psyche. The CIA, and the United States, cannot so readily absolve themselves of the mess they are, at least partly, responsible for in Iran.
Few characters in Iran’s inglorious history of the last two centuries have captured the imagination of this ancient and proud people as much as Mossadeq. Indeed, his only rival is the Ayatollah Khomeini. But whereas the Ayatollah Khomeini towers over the landscape of contemporary Iranian politics for having led, and won, the Islamic revolution, Mossadeq represents – at least for the re-emerging middle classes and also the diaspora – one of the most tragic “might-have-been”s of Iranian history.
He was an aristocrat of the first rank, who also became a paragon of democracy. He was a reformist par excellence, holding back the fires of revolutionary republicanism in 40s and 50s Iran, while pushing for a constitutional monarchy – the type of monarchy that he had seen in practice in Iran’s ancien régime when he served as MP and Foreign Minister in the 1910s. His nationalisation of the Iranian oil industry – whatever its economic merits – still ranks as one of the great expressions of Iranismus, an Iranian national identity, this century. And his brilliant defence of this act before the International Court of Justice became and remains a defining moment for a country that for much of the past fifty years has had at best a rocky relationship with international law.
Mossadeq is significant not because the Iranian revolution has run out of gas and needs new heroes. Far from it: the revolution continues, though in a different guise; and new heroes are born every day. Witness Khatami, Nouri, Hajjarian, Kadivar, Ganji, Shams – the list goes on. Rather, though deeply flawed as a politician and limitlessly naïve as an international statesman, Mossadeq was and continues to be the brightest beacon of democratic leadership in the otherwise sorry history of the Iranian constitutionalist history. The coup that toppled him and brought back the Shah did more than put an end to the premiership of an erratic aristocrat that governed Iran from his bed. The coup killed the dream of the possibility of a constitutionalist democracy in Iran. The uprisings of 1963, the desperate terrorist acts of the 70s, and then the Islamic revolution itself, were born the day the nationalists lost – the day it was proven to all that a constitutional monarchy cannot function in Iran.
To be sure, it is a sickness of old societies to look at past glories and see, responsible for their current dire circumstances, the hands of foreign agents and internal traitors. Iran is no exception. The ready willingness of Iranians to ascribe all their ills to the secret machinations of the British or the Russians or the Americans – or the Zionists – while claiming the credit for the most minute achievements of Iran in its 6000-odd year history is not unique to that country. It is not surprising that along with a dozen other internal problems over the last two centuries, the 1953 coup is considered by most Iranians to have been of purely foreign origin. The rôle of many key clerics in undermining Mossadeq and in supporting the Shah and the military government that succeeded him is a subject that is discussed, if at all, with a great deal of caution.
However, what Mr. Gerecht conveniently ignores is that the coup would not have gone forward without the active backing of US dollars and without the sure knowledge that the US government would support the post-coup government. More important, the coup of 1953 should not be seen as an isolated act. Popular governments are not overthrown overnight. In the course of many months before the coup, the democratic government of Mossadeq was increasingly isolated internationally – an isolation in which the United States government was both actively and passively complicit. Between the instability caused by Iran’s economic isolation; money, logistical and planning support from the CIA; and diplomatic approval from Washington, the government of Dr. Mossadeq had nowhere to go but into prison (or before the firing squad, as did his foreign minister, one of the most popular political figures of modern Iranian history).
What is more tragic is that Mossadeq genuinely considered the United States as an anti-Imperialist friend. But, carried away by anti-Communist paranoia, the United States bizarrely considered this nationalist aristocrat, himself a major landowner just south of Tehran, as a potential Soviet puppet. Mossadeq was blind-sided by the US support of the coup. So were the intelligentsia and the nationalists. The dream died. And with that death, two things began: first, a simmering hatred of the US, the fires under which were stoked by the “capitulation” regime imposed in the late-60s and 70s for American military personnel. The cauldron finally boiled over, for the United States, on 4 November 1979. And second, a (misguided) belief that western-style constitutional monarchy is unviable in Iran. That cauldron simmered until 1 February 1979; it is still boiling.
The United States is not solely responsible for the mess in Iran. But it is a truism that no historical event has a single cause. The UnitesStates and the CIA are at least partly responsible for the overthrow of a democratic government, ending constitutional monarchy in Iran, thirty years of dictatorial rule by the Shah, and the Islamic revolution. To be able to move forward and forge a healthy and democratic society, Iranians must be able to accept their share of the blame for the mess. To be able to understand Iran and begin to establish a healthy dialogue, leading to an equal relationship with Iran, the United States must also accept its share of the blame.