'Coup 53' tells the story of 1953 campaign by MI6 and CIA to oust Iran's leader
npr.org
npr.org
What would the middle east look like if the Mosaddegh government had continued? No revolution, No Ayatollah, no Iran-Iraq war, no Hezbollah? Instead we got the Shah who forced his people to modernize, secret police pulling veils off women was common and generally unleashed a reign that was anathema to most of the conservative population outside Tehran. Most of the anger you see is towards the US is from that reign rather than the coup.
The Iranians who are Persians, and not Arabs, have a civilizational history going back 1000s of years. Expat Persians have achieved great success in the US and UK. Going further back, the Zoroastrians, who fled the Islamic conquest and arrived in India more than a millennia ago are the richest, most educated and economically successful minority group by an order of magnitude, or two.
The Shah's reign lasted 25 years. A generation that grew up under the Shah's tyranny led the revolution in 1979. The Islamic revolution is now 40 years old. There have been almost two generations that grew up under the Islamic govt's misrule and grandiose projects of power projection. Hopefully they can take charge and lead Iran back to civilizational greatness. Iran, the middle east and the world needs it.
And I would really like to visit the gardens of Shiraz or the markets of Isfahan which have been around for 1000s of years ;)
Edit: As pointed out in the comments, instead of Arab world, I should have used Arab speaking. There are Arab speakers who are Arab and there are Arab speakers who are not Arab.
The millions of Palestinians unable to vote for the government that controls their movement, trade, and lives in general would probably disagree with your characterization of Israel as a democracy.
For instance, in the Athenian democracy women and metics (immigrants) couldn't vote and slavery was legal. In modern times, the USA, the model of modern democracies, has the largest military in the world (in history!) and does not hesitate to use it to crush lesser nations.
I wouldn't be able to tell you what "democratic" means exactly (I'm not a political scientist) but I susepect having elections without limits on who can vote and who can stand for office, having independent courts and the rule of law are important criteria and under those Israel sure checks out as a democracy. Its people are free. It just happens to keep crushing some other people, who are not its own people, under its heel.
That's a slightly different problem than the fact that democracies can be terrible if the voters choose terrible things.
Just before it was shown, the role of Norman Darbyshire, the MI6 officer involved in the coup, was leaked to the Observer: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/02/mi6-the-coup-i...
The Observer received a D-notice which prevented its publication.
The makers of Coup 53 made use of the unpublished Observer material.
Briefly, the UK Government wanted Mosaddegh overthrown because he wanted to nationalize a British oil company (Anglo-Iranian). It tried to get the CIA involved but Truman opposed American involvement. This changed when Eisenhower was elected president.
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/How-Oil-Defeated-The-N...
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/06/oil-denial-p...
This book covers the illusion of ‘the plucky underdog’ who stood ‘alone’ quite nicely. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/books/2011/...
When the US 'goes to war for oil' in the Middle East, it's going to war not to protect its oil supply but rather to make sure the profits of oil accrue to US companies and to ensure that oil remains priced in US dollars, which is vital for the US Dollar to continue to be the world's reserve currency.
Oil demand is never going away (we need it for plastic, lubricants for wind turbines, etc) but the supply is. When you are talking about macroeconomic nation state scales of oil, the only logical decision is to acquire foreign oil. Not only are you helping to speed the depletion of their reservers, you are holding yours.
The last barrel of oil on earth will be worth more than all the barrels that came before it.
Edit: I did some math. As of 2018 there were 43.8 billion discovered barrels of oil in the US, in 2019 we consumed 20.46 million barrels a day domestically. So we are self sufficient for a little less than 6 years.
Even if you stop burning it (which I think is a terrible idea), you can't live without oil. Antiseptics, rubbing alcohol, paint, aspirin, toothpaste, shoes, pens, bike tires, computers, etc. require it for modern production.
Heck, a standard solar panel plopped on top of your home requires just shy of a full barrel of oil to produce.
It's possible to interpret this sentence to mean two opposite things.
Oil is a strategic resource for energy and not much else important. There is short term manufacturing dependence, but most countries should have sufficient reserve capacity, currently for fuel use.
What's a "discovered barrel"? Most barrel counts depend on the current price, and grows as more oil is economical to mine
Nor are common knowledge the names of the oil company executives and shareholders who benefited from these wars, while dumping the expense and blame on their host countries.
I think the CIA was indeed the prime mover of the coup, at least according to the CIA's official history. Derbyshire, the person who was in charge of SIS's Iran branch, came up with the idea of a coup, but the Brits had not the capacity to pull it off and so they asked the CIA for help. The whole operation was very well documented by the declassified report entitled "CIA Clandestine Service History, Overthrow of Premier Mossadeq of Iran, November 1952-August 1953", which is downloadable from
I live in Hong Kong, so I'm out of luck. Maybe I could use a VPN, but I don't have any VPN subscription and I don't know how well any of the VPN providers can stream video.
Video quality is not bad. Good enough to watch Netflix over VPN.
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/operation-ajax-mike-de-seve...
which is based on the book:
The audio skips and doesn't loop properly for me on Firefox though. Didn't try any other browser.
Seems well done, extra marks when Firefox is supported ;)
I recommend this comic as well as the movie based on it.
"The Jakarta Method" by Vincent Bevins delves into how the CIA adapted and shifted course to address some of the weaknesses of its in-plain-sight coup approach in Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s. The ideal is always to preserve as much as possible the impression that the change in regimes is driven by local, endogenous political forces. The recent coup in Bolivia is a good demonstration of how this can be pulled off while almost entirely avoiding accusations of U.S. involvement.
- Venezuela 2019
- Ecuador 2010
- Honduras 2009
[0] https://www.brasilwire.com/in-plain-sight-bolsonaro-moro-and...
As an aside, All The King's Men and All The President's Men are books I recommend too.
Kinzer is also interviewed in Coup 53.
It covers not just this incident, but many others throughout history when the US has overthrown foreign governments.
[1] - https://www.amazon.com/Overthrow-Americas-Century-Regime-Cha...
This PR coup led to Eisenhower giving Dulles of the CIA a couple of fighter planes to use in Guatemala to remove Jacobo Arbenz from power, which was the CIA's pinnacle of success, strengthening the CIA's reputation even more and leading to the agency's mediocre record thereafter.
The free apps are still present in the App Store, but are now incompatible with recent iOS versions.
We're having our general release on Friday. It's available in the USA, UK, Ireland and Canada. We're going country by country because we don't have a distributor.
RSS feed here: http://safefordemocracy.com/feed/podcast
Safe for Democracy does thorough and sourced deep-dives into the histories of a few American "interventions", disrupting or controlling or supposedly attempting to create democracy in other countries. It goes through the background of the countries, often 100+ years prior to the events in question, and sets the stage thoroughly so that you can get a sense of the cultural forces and context. It also emphasizes the humanity of those involved and what violences were done beyond rattling off death counts so that you can understand the long-term cultural impacts and often genocides involved that are easier to miss if you only hear numbers.
Why can't America just leave other countries alone and tend to its own sorry affairs? America tries to make other countries "more free" and then treats Blacks, Asians, Native Americans, Mexicans, other people of color, women, transgenders and other gender-nonconformists, homosexuals and anyone else that isn't heterosexual, Communists, Socialists, and anyone who isn't their form of "normal" as second-rate citizens in their own country. America (rightfully) accuses other countries of tampering in their election and then tampers in others' elections.[0] Their actions often contradict the values they claim to purvey.
I hear often that if another country was doing as poorly as America is right now, America would have "liberated" it already.
[0]: I found a source here: https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-interfered-in-elections-of-... for my claims, however it's questionable due to accusations of spreading propaganda. Here's a relevant article from a more trustworthy source: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/07/the-us-has...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augusto_Pinochet#U.S._backing_...
JFK, seeking an exit from that Catch-22, tried to promote international institutions[1] in order to approach a world "where the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved"[2] ... but he got cancelled.
[1] compare late Ezra Pound for 1940's rants almost suitable for the 2020's: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24208047
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_Brazilian_coup_d%27%C3%A9...
Should the US just ignore the issues with Hong Kong? Honest question.
The US was quite isolationist in the early 1900's.
Maybe the US should have stayed out of WW2, or at least the European theatre? Western Europe would have fallen under the yoke of a communist dictator for 50 years.
How exactly would Americans feel for that country later? (even just from that incident alone, let's ignore half a century of later meddling).
When Americans consider other countries' reactions towards them, they seldom consider the impact of their own actions, as if the toppling some sovereign country's government (the worse thing you can do) is no big deal, and others should just sit and take it...
Source? I'm an American. I consider it, as do most people I know.
What they "know" is a high level view of what mass media feeds them about the enemy du jour (based on the country's current geopolitical interests and goals) and even that at a very crude level.
Heck, Hollywood/TV series/pop culture/etc depictions of the country have even more stronghold in their minds than even the above.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/can-you-even-locate-iran-o...
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/11/geography-su...
Go talk to 100 random people and ask them who Mosaddegh was and see what you come up with... Heck, ask them to name you current leaders for that matter.
Even their own vice president of 3+ years would be a little difficult for tens of millions...
https://theweek.com/speedreads/821701/more-than-30-million-a...
edit: * primarily, on European soil.
Japan did a few of those, though after much provocation to achieve exactly that and give an excuse to the US to sell the war to its public.
The US intervened in the European war (and not even decidely so, that's another myth), to ensure their improved role in the post-war environment, as the old European colonial powers were weakened by the war.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Theater_(World_War_...
Their lack of ‘total war’ on the US is mostly the consequence of a lack of resources / more pressing concerns.
> 20,000 Killed, 45,000 Wounded, 100 Captured
Note the count includes actions by Japan against the US. Compare it to the European theatre of war.
> Their lack of ‘total war’ on the US is mostly the consequence of a lack of resources / more pressing concerns.
But this is irrelevant for this discussion. The fact remains that the US didn't suffer total war waged by Germany on their soil during WW2, and this might explain the comment which sparked this thread:
> It wasn't very many years earlier that Germany waged total war against the US but a grudge hasn't held out there...
It's easier to hold a grudge with millions dead, bombing campaigns destroying your cities, etc, don't you think? Arguing formalities such as whether Germany and the US were at war seems pointless in this context, doesn't it?
Oh, I definitely agree with this! This attitude also helped shape the narrative of WW2, especially of the Eastern Front [1], by former Wehrmacht officers in the employ of the US Army Historical Division. The Cold War made friends of former enemies, and let them tell their story in an unprecedented way -- an instance of history being told by the losers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Eastern_Front
(Any good recent Hitler rants? Or has that meme fallen into desuetude?)
> " The West is in danger. It makes no difference whether or not their governments and intellectuals realize it or not.
> The German people, in any event, is unwilling to bow to this danger. Behind the oncoming Soviet divisions we see the Jewish liquidation commandos, and behind them terror, the specter of mass starvation and complete anarchy. ... Two thousand years of Western civilization are in danger. ... We could see our venerable part of the world collapse, and bury in its ruins the ancient inheritance of the West. That is the danger we face today.
> My second thesis: Only the German Reich and its allies are in the position to resist this danger. ... Bolshevism set ideological as well as military boundaries, which poses a danger to every nation. The world no longer has the choice between falling back into its old fragmentation or accepting a new order for Europe under Axis leadership. The only choice now is between living under Axis protection or in a Bolshevist Europe."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24137060
(That thread contains the original german, e.g. "Abendland", if anyone wishes to double check the translation copied above. I have not verified the transcript against the speech audio, but given that I've recently watched Triumph of the Will and read some of Ezra Pound's extended rants, I intend to consume some non-fascist content for a good long while...)
30% of our country doesn't see Russia as a threat, with some going as far as wearing "I’d rather be a Russian than a Democrat" t-shirts in public.
The democratic party latched on that story to exlain their failure, using as an excuse the same kind of internet ops the US (and tons of others) do all the time all over the world, and which in Russia's case were insignificant anyway...
As if the US is some poor little country manipulated by the mighty Russia...
Russia wasn't trying to topple the US. It just wanted to weaken its international coalitions (check), eliminate its diplomatic soft power (check) and eliminate the aggressive posture the US had toward Russian expansion (check).
The interested might have to try contemporary sources, e.g. http://content.time.com/time/magazine/0,9263,7601960715,00.h...
Bonus track (1996 in russian pop): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBo5DxhJ12w
I think the party running weak-ass candidates without broad support is the one that lost the popular vote in every election in the last 30 years except 2004.
It also encourages decisions like overcampaigning in California as a result of last minute polling in Wisconsin and Michigan looking like a coin toss. A loss is bad, but a loss that can't be marketed as illegitimate afterwards is far worse.
(To be fair, yes, getting the slave states on board a few centuries back required it. Legacy code probably wouldn't be there if it hadn't done something at one point.)
It does matter to claims of breadth of appeal, whether or not it matters elsewhere. (It's true, breadth of appeal isn't as important in the US, if you have the right narrow appeal, than it would be in a representative democracy, but the claim.made was about breadth of appeal.)
Insofar as Presidents have limited formal power and their informal power is at least as important, and is based in no small part on the perception of a democratic mandate (because whether the formal processes of the US system are democratic or not, democratic values are widespread in US culture), it actually can matter.
> And that's a feature, not a bug.
Well, it was designed in; whether it's a positive feature or a misfeatures depends on what you value.
If you value the systematic disenfranchisement that the electoral college system rewards, the racial repression that it and the Senate structure which underlies it was designed to protect (and still does, though in somewhat less odious form than it originally did), and the idea of structurally promoting tyranny of a particular minority, then, sure, it's a positive feature.
And the Electoral College was an effort to not have the small state dominated by the large ones. That seems like a positive feature, even today.
Mosaddegh was losing popularity and support among the working class which had been his strongest supporters. As he lost support, he became more autocratic. As early as August 1952, he began to rely on emergency powers to rule, generating controversy among his supporters. After an assassination attempt upon one of his cabinet ministers and himself, he ordered the jailing of dozens of his political opponents. This act created widespread anger among the general public, and led to accusations that Mosaddegh was becoming a dictator.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...
tl;dr Britain has a long history of causing harm to other countries.
Parent is not making stereotypes about people from the UK or US. They are describing the reputation of those two political entities.
As for specifics, I'd refer the unfamiliar to Wikipedia which itself refers to a very limited subset of about hundred or so books on the topic.
Perhaps you'll find some particular aspect or angle of British or US imperialism particularly enlightening and will want to research further.
Were they the only ones who suffered?
>The Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) was a British company founded in 1908 following the discovery of a large oil field in Masjed Soleiman, Iran. The British government purchased 51% of the company in 1914,[1] gaining a controlling number of shares, effectively nationalizing the company. It was the first company to extract petroleum from Iran. In 1935 APOC was renamed the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) when Reza Shah Pahlavi formally asked foreign countries to refer to Persia by its endonym Iran.
"Would His Highness kindly abdicate in favour of his son, the heir to the throne? We have a high opinion of him and will ensure his position. But His Highness should not think there is any other solution."
Remember, France wasn't thrown out of Vietnam until the 1954 and had to be thrown out of Algeria a decade later.
Could you provide examples of such structures?
> Artificial states are those in which political borders do not coincide with a division of nationalities desired by the people on the ground. We propose and compute for all countries in the world two new measures how artificial states are. One is based on measuring how borders split ethnic groups into two separate adjacent countries. The other one measures how straight land borders are, under the assumption the straight land borders are more likely to be artificial. We then show that these two measures seem to be highly correlated with several measures of political and economic success.
> Eighty per cent of African borders follow latitudinal and longitudinal lines and many scholars believe that such artificial (unnatural) borders which create ethnically fragmented countries or, conversely, separate into bordering countries the same people, are at the roots of Africa's economic tragedy.
> Under the Skyles-Picot agreement between British and French during WWI, Northern Palestine would go to the French, Southern Palestine to the British, and Central Palestine including Jerusalem would be an allied Condominium shared by the two. After the war, the French agreed to give up any claims to Palestine in return fo rcontrol over Syria. The British abandoned their protegee (Faisal) in Syria and offered him Iraq, cobbling together three different Ottoman provinces containing Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis. This set the stage for instability and the military coups that lead to Saddam Hussein. In Lebanon, the French added Tripoli, Beirut and Sidon to the traditional Moronite area around Mount Lebanon, giving their Maronite Christian allies control to what were originally Muslim areas.
> Latin America is a lesser known (and much earlier) example of artificial borders drawn by a colonial power, in this case Spain.
> The partition of India and Pakistan is [a] famous example of artificial borders
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_of_India
> The partition displaced between 10–12 million people along religious lines, creating overwhelming refugee crises in the newly constituted dominions. There was large-scale violence, with estimates of loss of life accompanying or preceding the partition disputed and varying between several hundred thousand and two million.[1][c] The violent nature of the partition created an atmosphere of hostility and suspicion between India and Pakistan that plagues their relationship to the present.
The Ottoman empire was every bit as colonial and extractive as any Western power - the same favoring of local ethnic groups over others, the same subjugation of native cultures.
In 1857, the ‘Great Mutiny’ broke out in which the Hindus and Muslims jointly fought against the British. This shocked the British government so much that after suppressing the Mutiny, they decided to start the policy of divide and rule.
The British would pay off various people to speak out against the other group i.e. pay of a Hindu priest to stoke anti-Muslim sentiments, and vice versa.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
50 years later when Iranian did see US as enemy, don’t act surprised. This is what Trump sows.
They all come and go. Some learned their lessons, and some are yet to experience the bitter revenge from those they harm and molested.
What new wars have been started under the current administration?
Even the killing of Soleimani took place in Baghdad, where Soleimani (himself a commander of insurgent forces) was meeting with an Iraqi commander of insurgent forces. Hard to argue that this act fell outside the confines of the Congressionally authorized war in Iraq.
It's not Trump's endless war, it's America's.
Congress didn't authorize war “in Iraq”, but to protect against threats from Iraq (in context of the resolution, pretty clearly the State not the geographical area.)
Many an internet flame-war, that's for sure.
But then - how do you define war. The stage of official declaration all to arms type wars seem to be less clear-cut. Economics has and always will be the biggest weapon of wars these days.
I probably wouldn't refer to Trump's twitter commentary as warfare, inflammatory and counterproductive though it may be.
But tread lightly when comparing this administration to any other in the history of western democracy. It's a horror show up close.
I’m American and all I’ve ever seen from Iran is people chanting for my death and the death of the people I love. I was born in the 90s and had no bearing on foreign policy.
If sanctions prevents Iran from accomplishing those goals then I personally will consider that a good thing.
The US has been consistently trying to destroy the nation of Iran. Iran holds demonstrations calling for the destruction of America but they never fought the US in any kind of war. When 9/11 happened, they were one of the only countries in the Middle East to have nationwide moments of silence and prayers for victims in America.
Iran also has been one of the biggest fighters of ISIS in Iraq. They are able to mobilize civilian volunteers in Iraq in a way any other organization would envy.
It's really crazy how much reality you have to ignore to believe there is any justification for US sanctions on Iran or to justify why you think Iranians should not be angry at the US
Just do a google search there are many many instances.
Sanctions currently have the effect at making people in Iran even more dependant of the government, and plays well into the Iranian government propaganda.
Yeah I have no problem with your average Iranian. But the Iranian government routinely organizes protests where people are literally calling for the death of Americans.
Sanctions also have the benefit of preventing the Iranian government and their terrorist revolutionary guard from harming Americans as well as they could without sanctions.
Literally is the keyword here, because the translation "death to something" is just the literal mistranslation of the Iranian idiom meaning "down with something". As if someone believed that when you say "I'd die for a beer" you really meant it.
I mean wouldn't you? If Iran had toppled the US government, installed a puppet, and routinely muddled in your affairs for decades essentially making sure that you are unable to progress in any meaningful way?
Here is one such instance from the recent past: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iran-usa-embassy/iranians...
I don't think you really believe that Iranians are lying awake at night trying to figure out how to destroy you, plandis. They're not even reading Hacker News and thinking 'Death to America and plandis in particular'. If you think about it, you probably recognize that their gripe is with the American presence that surrounds their country - look at the huge number of US bases in the region, in addition to the history we're discussing here. It's not like the Iranians have a ring of bases in Canada and the US, is it now?
When they do care about politics, it's mostly about domestic politics, and Americans tend to have a massive ignorance about what's going on in the rest of the world or the history of any other country.
Civic education and history are not a high priority in the US. American schools tend to be more interested in pumping out people with STEM degrees and business people than about teaching them anything to do with the humanities.
On top of that Americans are constantly lied to and manipulated by their media and politicians, and politicians often act in ways that the American people don't approve of or are not informed of.
So I wouldn't blame the American people for Trump's actions. More and half of those Americans who voted (who aren't nearly all Americans old enough to vote), most voted against electing Trump to be President, and many of them despise him.
That said, Hillary Clinton was a hawk, so even had she become President it's not clear how favorable US government policy would have been towards Iran.
But I wouldn't blame the American people for that either, as America's policy towards Iran was never a major issue in the election (if it was an issue at all), and Americans don't tend to even elect people on policies or issues (which they rarely pay attention to unless it affects them) but on the candidate's image and personality.
Anyway, most Americans have no clue what the US foreign policy towards Iran is, couldn't find Iran on the map, and don't have even have the faintest idea about its history or the history of Iranian-American relations. And for those who know something about it, what they do know (or think they know) probably comes from an occasional 2 minute segment on TV news.
People (all over the world) generally just want to live their lives and be left alone. They don't deserve to be branded enemies for the actions of their governments.
I would like to remind everyone though that for every regime change the US engineered, the KGB was responsible for many times more.
Part of the USSR's philosophy after all was worldwide revolution that was to be exported to all countries.
More relevant to your point:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_involvement_in_regime_c... (This includes the overthrow of Nazi and Imperial Japanese invasion governments, and a good third were post-USSR)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r... (This includes only Nazi overthrows)
As you can see, the second is significantly longer despite not including regime change attempts against Imperial Japanese governments.
If you remove WW2 and WW1, the US list is over twice as long.
Under Stalin, the policy of "Socialism in one country" was implemented, and foreign intervention was no longer a priority nor a philosophical goal. Which is why, under Stalin, the USSR attempted to ally with capitalist nations.
The USSR was a prison for 300 million and it was run as such.
Here it is, 2011 https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110318/02153313534/us-mi...
"Apparently a company called Ntrepid has scored the contract and the US military is getting ready to roll out these "sock puppet" online personas. Of course, it insists that all of this is targeting foreign individuals, not anyone in the US."
HBGary, Palantir, Berico, anything they build will be seen and copied by foreign intelligence. So we're still stuck playing tit for tat.
The "long run" of our lives are much shorter, we don't wait around to get satisfaction that empires fall or "justice" gets done, however you define that. If we live in the era of one victor over another then that's reality for us.
Mossadegh convinced the government to give him 6 months of "emergency powers", ostensibly to fix the financial problems of Iran. In reality, he did a little of that, but also used his powers to further entrench himself by diminishing the power of the Shah. And then he got another 12 months emergency powers, and used it to redistribute land to the poor. Unfortunately at that time, Iran was also incredibly insolvent (due to the British boycott), and so the poor were not happy.
You might argue that Mossadegh would have succeeded if not for the British boycott.. sure, maybe he would have. But what do you expect to happen when you forcibly take all of the British resources? Should they just have said "Oh fine, have them, let's keep doing business together"?
The clerics, at this point, were already the proverbial kingmakers in Iran. They backed Mossadegh when he was expedient, and they backed the Shah when Mossadegh failed them. There's no reason to believe that Iran would have continued under Mossadegh into some kind of Socialist paradise - he probably would have just been deposed by the religious nuts a few years later regardless, just as happened with the Shah.
You take Mossadegh's actions by the measures of the time. When I was reading about the history of the time, I fail to imagine what I could have done.
All in all, Iran's liberal movement by this coup might have been distroyed in a way it never did recover yet.
Very strange how oil underneath the Iranian soil can be considered a "British resource".
They gave willing access to their natural resources in exchange for a relatively massive revenue windfall then seized the sizable British capital investments with no compensation.
Why do you hold the Iranian government to a standard no other government in the world is held? Would you expect the American government to be forever bound to treaties signed by the British, or to agreements made by the executive alone ranging from two decades to a century ago?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Arcy_Concession
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Persian_Oil_Company
I often see on HN that, when the topic of Iran comes up, people who don't know much about the history of the country try to interpret its facts through a modern lens that is tinged with a hint of leftism. The reality is that the development of the global petroleum market was a fiercely capitalistic and competitive phenomenon that yielded immense wealth for major oil companies and host governments alike. That context cannot be amputated when discussing topics like Mosaddegh and the British sphere of influence in Iran during the first half of the 20th century.
I have noticed all such principled defenses of "property rights" and "capitalism" are built upon a very specific and convenient view of what exactly counts as "legitimate property". Was the oil even the Shah's to give away in the first place?
Continuity of governance, honoring good-faith agreements, maintaining confidence of foreign investors...the list goes on.
Are you suggesting that all governmental responsibilities ought to be thrown out the window every time power changes hands? This is not a realistic perspective in most of the third world, where power changes hands frequently and change of government is often established via change of regime.
Ultimately Iran made a killing on the oil business, and that would never have happened without petroleum concessions. In the parlance of the oil business, a "concession" is a deal where the host government allows oil rights in return for profit share, ownership, or some other financial benefit. It is an asymmetrical but symbiotic contract, and the term doesn't carry the same pejorative connotation as it would in standard parlance.
Not to mention that the monarch in question was also the one who ratified the Persian Constitution of 1906.
Under that light, it's not really a case of buyer's remorse, where Iran signed a fair deal, and unjustly decided to renege on it. It's a case of the British company acting exploitatively, violating their agreement, refusing to renegotiate, and the Iranians declaring the agreement void as a result.
It's immediately obvious upon observation of modern Iran's highly developed petroleum industry that concessions sparked the development of infrastructure on a massive scale.
> Under that light, it's not really a case of buyer's remorse, where Iran signed a fair deal, and unjustly decided to renege on it.
I think it's precisely a case of buyer's remorse. In Iran prior to the development of infrastructure, 16% share in profits generated by AIOC with no initial capital commitment from the Qajars sounds like a great deal. In Iran after the wells are pumping, 16% share in profits sounds like a pittance. I reject your framing of the issue as an exploitation by British interests. That may be a palatable narrative for the times we live in today, but it's a distorted perception of the actual facts. Petroleum production was the single greatest driver of wealth and development in 20th century Iran. If not for foreign investment, the industry could not have boomed as it did.
D'Arcy took massive personal risk and even took the British government as an investor, but he failed several times in the process of exploring for oil before he was ultimately successful. Risk is the nature of the wildcatting business.
If you study the process of oil rights and nationalization in the Middle East, you will see that it is a topic marked by extremely brutish behavior from local parties as well as faraway beneficiaries like the US and the UK. Even OPEC is full of deception about production numbers as it sets production amongst member nations.
For that reason as well as others beyond the scope of the current conversation, there aren't many clean hands in the oil production business. Look at the massive corruption and cronyism taking place in Venezuela's PDVSA. Iran has the same kind of problem, where the country's dictators finance their corrupt practices using petroleum income.
The agreement was re-negotiated in 1933, according to terms that the grandparent pointed out. At this point I have to wonder if you are being disingenuous on purpose. The rest of your comment is a moral appeal making a case for why D'Arcy "deserved" the profits. You have to pick a lane, are you arguing on the basis of who "deserves" a countries natural resources, or from the point of view of adherence to contracts and agreements?
Iran didn't take the risk -- or the cost outlay -- of building rigs, importing engineers, etc. The idea that the British were somehow exploitative by resisting renegotiation is ignorant of this fact. Both the 1901 agreement and the 1933 agreement laid out responsibilities for the
Article 16 of the 1933 agreement covered the introduction of more Iranian nationals into the petroleum business, which AIOC did in fact carry out. Article 17 talks about sanitary and public health facilities for workmen, which sounds like bathrooms and medical tents/clinics to handle workmen's injuries and treat their families.
However, I see nothing in the 1901 agreement nor the 1933 agreement that says AIOC will invest in the general infrastructure of Iran. That is what the grandparent said ("generally contribute to the development of infrastructure in the country"). That idea is at best a false pretext for breaking the deal, and at worst just a blind restatement of something on Wikipedia. Actually, the text of the 1933 agreement says that AIOC would require Iran's consent to improve AIOC's infrastructure (including aviation and telephone).
If I'm wrong, find it in the text of the agreement (https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/bbm%3A978-3-658-00093-...) and paste it into a reply for all to see. If I'm right, stop calling me disingenuous.
I just have one part I found incredibly funny
> The idea that the British were somehow exploitative by resisting renegotiation is ignorant of this fact
If overthrowing a democratically elected government is not exploitative, I don't know what is. "Resisting renegotiation" is a very Orwellian way of phrasing such. I'm guessing something along the lines of "we will topple your government and hand over absolute power to a brutal dictator if the terms are violated" was also part of the the agreement?
What about all the other Iranians, the ones that had nothing to do with APOC or oil or the government. Did they also "deserve" their fate?
This document from 1952 has an excellent summary: http://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/74019146804407210...
See Section II (D) beginning on page 4, for violations of the original concession, and Section III (D) beginning on page 16 for violations of the 1933 agreement.
I'm not simply casting the British behavior as exploitative in some hand-waving appeal to the evils of imperialism. I'm talking about real, substantive, and specific violations of their own agreement.
The author of the document you cite says that prior to the 1933 agreement, AIOC withheld royalties under guise of covering damages but really to squeeze Iran into accepting the new agreement; the problem with this logic is that damage to a pipeline also causes revenue loss, so you can't indemnify the company by simply paying them for the repair costs. The 1901 agreement says that Iran will protect the infrastructure, which it failed to do. In any case, those payments were addressed in Article 23 of the new agreement.
It does not appear to me that Section II (D) demonstrates that the contractual stipulations you mentioned (training/hiring of locals and establishment of medical facilities at AIOC sites) were violated. That part of the document also says nothing about infrastructure investment. Maybe I am missing something but I have read it three times now to make sure.
Commercial disputes should be not solved by waging wars.
It's particularly odd that you make this argument given Trump's unilateral withdrawal from the P5+1 agreement as well as many other bi- and multilateral arrangements. If we're just going to rely on realpolitik, why not accept that the oil companies also made bank out of Iran for a while and hey, nothing lasts forever?
In the context of a monarchy, that's the appropriate way to consider it. When Reza Shah Pahlavi took power from the Qajars, the deals with the British remained. There is a level of continuity of governance that exists in the developed West but doesn't exist in the Third World. Ecuador for example was until recently an OPEC nation, but it has had twenty constitutions. However, it is in the nation's best interests, economically speaking, to ensure a peaceful transition of operation across those political perturbations. (I am reminded of software revisions that do not alter the API, so that the software can be treated like a black box and mated to applications without a rewrite of API calls every time revisions are made.)
A current example would be Argentina, where the return of Cristina Kirchner to the country's executive branch has spooked foreign investors (including miners and petroleum companies) because she froze the dollar during her presidency about a decade ago. Ultimately this has a very damaging effect on the country's economy and its people's ability to eat.
In present-day Argentina, we see economic investment chilled by a new administration that operates under the same constitution but endangers foreign investors. In early-20th-century Iran, we saw economic activity boosted by continuity of international agreements across several different monarchical administrations within two separate dynasties.
Please choose the correct lens when you are evaluating a third-world country's economy. What we all learned in social studies class about the differences between regimes, governments, etc.....well it is not necessarily applicable to developing nations where change of administration is frequently carried out by coup or the establishment of a new constitution that is as ephemeral as the previous one.
I tried to communicate this succinctly in my earlier post, quoted here:
> Are you suggesting that all governmental responsibilities ought to be thrown out the window every time power changes hands? This is not a realistic perspective in most of the third world, where power changes hands frequently and change of government is often established via change of regime.
You're not the arbiter of correctness, and that was a lot of expostulation to avoid the point I made above.
I would have sworn there was such a treaty... I think the Europeans still abide by it? Do you agree with Trump's rejection of that treaty?