You don't think Iran's situation is also mostly its own doing?
A key motive was to protect British oil interests in Iran after Mossadegh nationalized and refused to concede to western oil demands.
As in everywhere else.
He was everything but democratically elected. He was installed. The Iranian people did not elect Mosaddegh. He was put there by a Shah and the elites of the Majlis, neither of which ever represented the people of Iran. At no point in the past century has Iran had representative government.
For the absurd 'democratically elected' premise to be true, there would have to be actual representative government. There wasn't, there isn't.
The UK spent a lot of resources conspiring against this project, which ultimately failed, to a large extent because he did not have a solution to the blockade that followed nationalisation of the oil production. Perhaps he also did not expect as many members of the majlis to join the foreign conspiracy as did when the blockade got inconvenient.
It's also not like democratisation followed under the shah, rather the opposite, like the establishment of rather nasty security services and a nuclear program that the later revolutionaries inherited.
Right up until he was about to lose an election, then he suspended counting votes and tried to dissolve the Majlis in alliance with the communist party.
He stopped the counting at 79 members, just enough for parliamentary quorum, out of which 30 belonged to his party.
Tellingly his first act after seating a half empty Majlis was to have them grant him emergency powers that allowed him to dictate laws. This is not a democratic system.
>at the very least it disproves your unspoken assertion that the Iranians are primarily to blame for their problems
I'm very clearly stating that the Shah in particular was highly likely to have removed Mossadegh either way due to a multi-decade power struggle between the Pahlavi dynasty and the parliament /prime minister. The Majlis as a rival power center was largely a result of the Anglo-Soviet invasion which deposed Reza Shah, prior to that the Majlis had functioned in more of an advisory capacity, and Mohammed Reza Pahlavi was always lookign for ways to push back against the Majlis.
It is also important to note that the constitution in place in the early 1950s gave the power to appoint and remove the prime minister to the shah, Mossadegh was recommended to the shah by the Majlis who appointed him prime minister. That is factually how the government worked. It is also important to note that in 1952 Mossadegh stopped the counting of an election that it looked like he was going to lose. In 1953 Mossadegh organized a referendum to dissolve the parliament and vest sole power in the prime minister. This gave the shah the excuse he needed to remove Mossadegh and triggered Anglo-American support for the Shah and Iranian army to remove Mossadegh.
The CIA certainly helped the Shah get generals on side and plan the coup, this is not in dispute. However the idea that Mossadegh was democratically elected is not really true, and the idea that the coup was entirely carried out for external reasons is entirely false.
Ray Takeyh a professor of Near East studies who wrote The Last Shah: America, Iran, and the Fall of the Pahlavi Dynasty (Yale University Press, 2021) holds the position that the coup was internally driven. We also know from declassified document that the CIA thought the coup had failed and that their part was rather insignificant, but Iranian on the ground under their own direction carried out the coup.[1]
[1]https://web.archive.org/web/20150603235034/https://www.forei...
You’re being too liberal with meaning of “illegal” here.
There was a referendum to dissolve the Parliament then.
edit: typo
>The ballot was not a secret one. Separate polling places were provided for those voters favoring dissolution and those against, and the vote had to give his name, his address and the number and place of issuance of his identity card.
Time Magazine from the same month in 1953 [2]:
> Da’s in 1946. Last week Premier Mohammed Mossadegh, the man in the iron cot, topped them all with 99.93%.
> This is the way he did it. Having unconstitutionally dissolved the Majlis, Mossadegh ordered a national referendum to judge his act, crying: “The will of the people is above law.” The 1906 Iranian constitution (which Mossadegh as a young revolutionary helped put across) requires a secret ballot.
From a 1953 article in The Middle East Journal [3]:
>Two days after the bloody confrontation of Tudeh mobs and security forces on August 11, 1953, Mosaddeq’s government arrested a large number of its opponents again.
So here we see Tudeh thugs attacking his opponents, and the man himself jailing the opposition.
> Two of Mosaddeq’s closest associates, Dr.Karim Sanjabi, a founder of the National Front and Minister of Education and Dr. Ghol-am-Hossein Sadiqi, the Minister of the Interior advised against dissolving the Majlis and holding a referendum. Both argued that the Majlis had supported Mosaddeq and that it had been the King who had appointed Prime Ministers since the Constitutional Revolution of 1906 subject to parliamentary approval. Without the Majlis, the Shah would be free to oust the Prime Minister and appoint another. Mosaddeq’s reply to both had been the same: Shah jor’at-e in kar ra nadarad [The Shah would not dare].
We also see that Mossadegh's own advisors were cautioning him against trying to dissolve the Majlis, and reminding him that it would allow the Shah to constitutionally remove him. We clearly see a picture of a man, Mossadegh trying to become a dictator.
It would be too much to unpack here but the role of Ayatollah Kashani is also relevant in the story.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1953/08/04/archives/mossadegh-gets-9...
The link from TIME is an op-ed? Who’s the writer? That’s not a source, credible or otherwise.
- https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/7...
Venezuela is about to be turned into another Vietnam. Iran is next. I remember invading them in a mission in BF3. The USA itches to implement what its media anticipated.
Most Europeans seem to be fine being under the EU where they don’t get to vote those bureaucrats in.
The political power in the EU comes from the national governments (directly and via the European commission) and the EU parliament. The members of parliament are elected. The national governments are also formed out of elected parliaments. There's also a body of administration and bureaucracy that comes out of these power structures, just like there is, by necessity, in any government ever, democratic or not.
Insinuating that this somehow equates to authoritarian forms of government appears deeply ignorant or dishonest to me.
In the end, your argument can be used against the other levels of government. National governments of not directly elected officials and bureaucrats and remote parliaments dictating to whole regions, who lord it over cities and communities, who oppress individual people, who should not have to cede a bit of their sovereignty to anybody else to decide or act on their behalf.
Nothing is perfect, nor is the EU, but with your line of thinking, you effectively deligitimize every practical way of organizing government as "colonial".
Maybe that's what you want, maybe you misunderstand and don't care if you do. There are many reasons good and bad to dislike the EU. Yours just appears to be nonsensical.
China is an interesting counterfactual. Circa 2010 when Xi came to power, the CPC also essentially destroyed the CIA's footprint in the country, something that was not widely reported in the West. And PRC has done very well since...
The PRC was doing just as fine before they executed all the CIA's agents. I don't see any relation. There's never been any hint from either the US or China that those agents were doing anything other than passive intelligence collection, as opposed to actively interfering in domestic Chinese politics. And in any event, the scope of historical CIA operations has always been overblown. In every case I'm aware of, the CIA leveraged a tipping point already well underway to nudge things one way or another. Developing countries are often already highly unstable and prone to regular disruptive power shifts; it's a major cause of their poverty and inability to fully develop. And in many of the outright coups the CIA has been implicated, the extent of the CIA's involvement was simply talking to and making promises to various power players already poised to make a power grab, Chile being a prime example--the Chilean Senate was the architect of the coup, and the CIA merely offered safe harbor to nudge Pinochet, who was waffling because he wasn't convinced it would succeed. The exceptions were during the middle of the Cold War, ancient history in modern foreign affairs.
The KGB/FSB has always been lauded for opportunistically taking advantage of preexisting situations with small but smart manipulations, but that's just how intelligence agencies have always worked in general. When your interventions are too direct and obvious, which they always will be if you're creating a crisis from scratch, you risk unifying the country, Iran being a prime example.
Beyond being self-contradictory (CIA is passive but also they interfere on key issues) this is just false. The West has spent a lot of (covert) resources undermining China in the past decade in Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Taiwan, trade and tech wars, COVID, and so on. All attempts which have failed dramatically, perhaps partly due to the lack of IC penetration into society and government.
I said the CIA's intelligence network in China which was dismembered was passive, the same way China's network in the US is passive, not that the CIA is passive everywhere else. But maybe you wouldn't describe either as passive, which is fair, but I don't think that definition fits with how most people conceive of what active political manipulation looks like. Note also I didn't mean to imply that promoting a coup by offering safe harbor is passive in the same sense; I would definitely categorize that as direct domestic political disruption, just not of the kind Hollywood or conspiracy theories depict, which is what people assume when CIA involvement is implicated.
And I'm not sure what you're talking about regarding Hong Kong, Xinjiang, or Taiwan. Is public criticism interfering in domestic politics? Sanctions arguably are, which the US uses regularly around the world, but in the context of China, it's always about money and trade wars and international disputes. The US is active militarily in Taiwan in terms of training and arms supplies, but this is largely at Taiwan's insistence, and the US does much less than Taiwan wants. And none of this involves direct CIA involvement beyond the intelligence collection and sharing networks, both with and without the local government's approval.
I'm curious if you have specific examples. I know the US has proposed sanctions for China's policies in Xinjiang, but I don't remember anything actually coming of it. If I'm misremembering, that's fair, and I understand why China would consider actual sanctions domestic political interference, but note that this is also a cultural divide between Chinese and Western political philosophies--the latter is much more moralistic, and interventions against perceived human rights abuses aren't necessarily considered to violate the principle of state sovereignty.
From the US, Russia and china to local powers like Israel, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Iran themselves.
Either you're a scholar studying the region, if not your comment feels naive at best
What's problematic is Phoenix agriculture is the focus on extremely water hungry crops like alfalfa and not really the presence of agriculture in general.
This is entirely an artifact of arcane water law in the US. Any rational allocation would make alfalfa untenable there.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d'%C3%A9tat
> not because the facts of the US backed coup damaging Iran are at all in dispute.
I mean, they are, GP just admitted they stand corrected[0] and "democratically elected government" of Mossadegh is factually incorrect. Other comments have pointed out he was installed not by the people, but by the Shah and Majles, stopped 1952 elections when they didn't go his way, then tried to dissolve parliament and vest power solely in himself
In the events that followed his popularity rose and he tried to gather a government but was blocked by the shah, which made him even more popular, to the extent that the armed forces backed off from containing the demonstrations. It's against this background he sent a bill to the majlis that would give him six months of emergency powers to push through with his political program and the nationalisation, which was approved.
After those six months he asked for another twelve months and got it, but his base had started to wither away and allies switched sides because the reforms didn't have enough effect fast enough in the international climate they were in. I.e. trade boycott and foreign influence operations and so on, which of course hurt his constituents. Some of his allies were also afraid that he might turn against them, hence they turned on him.
Churchill convinced Eisenhower that Mossadegh were going to deport the shah, and then they launched the coup.