Myth-Busting Iranian History for the Uninitiated
Is the west really responsible for the overthrowing an Iranian democracy?
In light of the recent attack on Israel by the Islamofascist regime in Tehran, leftist and anti-western cranks have started rehashing some common and false narratives about Iran.
The key points are usually one of the following:
The Mullahs rule Iran because of the coup that CIA executed against a democratically elected Prime Minister in 1953.
Iran before the Islamic Revolution was a brutal dictatorship.
You can see this sentiment in some of the reactions to this post.
The key phrase that set people off was "flawed monarchy with democratic principles". So let's do a historical review, shall we?
Background
In 1953, Iran had a prime minister named Mosaddegh. His main policy agenda was nationalizing oil, which pissed off the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The British managed to scare the Americans about Iran falling to communism enough that the CIA took it upon itself to remove him from power. The operation was dubbed Ajax.
The Claim
The US government removed the democratically-elected prime minister of Iran and installed a brutal absolute monarchy, which led to the 1979 revolution through which the islamist regime came to power.
Mythbusting
Myth 1: "The US government removed..."
In fact, the US government convinced the Shah to dismiss his prime minister. The Shah relented when the prime minister tried to assume absolute powers (more on this later). While this incident is commonly referred to as a "coup d'etat", it was, in fact, in line with the constitution at the time. The best you can accuse the US government of is persuading the Shah. If you read the first two paragraphs of the account of events on Wikipedia, it becomes clear that the operation mainly consisted of the Shah dismissing the prime minister and appointing a new one.
Mossadegh got wind of the plan to replace him, had the man who delivered the Shah's decree arrested, and refused to give up power. He also mobilized mobs of his supporters to control the streets. The CIA operatives reported back to HQ that the attempt to remove him from power was unsuccessful. Four days later, the newly-appointed PM, however, who was also a general, managed to put together a force of soldiers and demonstrators to storm government buildings and Mosaddegh's house and arrest him.
Here's the key sentence (again from the Wikipedia article):
Despite the CIA's role in creating the conditions for the coup, there is little evidence to suggest that Kermit Roosevelt Jr. or other CIA officials were directly responsible for the actions of the demonstrators or the army on 19 August.
Myth 2: "democratically-elected prime minister"
I'm not going to say anything new or deep here. It's all things you can read on Wikipedia. I'll simply highlight certain key events, and gloss over much detail:
Mosaddegh becomes Prime Minister in 1951; immediately nationalizes oil, kicking out the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and its foreign employees.
The British retaliation along with the "talent exit" cause Iran's oil production and economy to grind to a halt.
Mosaddegh cannot resolve the crisis, which drags on for nearly a year. As the crisis deepens, he calls an election. But since his support base is mostly urban, he first tries to pass a law to increase urban votes. He fails at that. So his next move is to stop the vote count once the urban votes had been counted sufficiently to give him parliamentary quorum. Parliament formed with 57 of 136 seats vacant.
Through this parliament, Mosaddegh gives himself "dictatorial decree" for 6 months to resolve the crisis, at the end of which the crisis continued, so he extends his powers for 12 more months.
By the time the "coup" happened, Mosaddegh had had "emergency powers" for nearly a year. In that time, he made no progress on resolving the crisis with the British, but he did take the opportunity to remove from key positions in the military those who he deemed too friendly to the Shah and replace them with his own allies.
With these highlights, I leave it to the reader's judgement to decide in what sense and to what extent, Mosaddegh was "democratically elected".
Myth 3: The Brutal Monarchy
Things get murkier here.
After the removal of Mosaddegh, the Shah never allowed anyone else obtain that degree of power again. He ensured people loyal to him were in all key government and military positions. The infamous secret police / intelligence service – SAVAK – is established at this time.
It's fair to say there was little political freedom in Iran at this time. Communist parties and the National Front (Mosaddegh's party) were banned. There were other political parties, but all were loyal to the Shah so his agenda was effectively unchallenged.
But was it brutal? Maybe, if you were a communist, islamist, or separatist. There had for years been several armed groups of Marxists and Islamists (and some hybrids) operating within Iran. These were not just political parties. They were guerrilla groups that carried out terrorist attacks, including several assassination attempts on the Shah, and they often had foreign funding. They were the primary targets of SAVAK. When their suspected members/collaborators were arrested, it's fair to say there was little meaningful due-process.
It's difficult to establish exactly how brutal the security regime was, because much of the popular narrative has been written by the very marxists and islamists that SAVAK targeted. Throughout the 70s, there were exiled opposition groups who claimed that there were 25,000-100,000 political prisoners. These claims were repeated by organizations like Amnesty International. The Shah and high-ranking SAVAK officials, in interviews, gave figures around 2,000 to 3,000. In 1977, the Shah invited the International Committee of the Red Cross to investigate Iranian prisons. Their findings counted 3,087.
Similarly, it's hard to establish to what extent torture was used. The Shah did not deny that it was in the early days of SAVAK, but he also stated that we have learned more advance interrogation tactics from the western powers and have no need for torture. The Red Cross inspectors of 1977 reported that approximately one third of the prisoners reported having been subjected to torture or abuse, but the inspectors found no recent evidence of torture.
For everyone else, life was up and to the right. The Shah's crowning achievement (the White Revolution) was put to a referendum, prior to which the vote was extended to women (several years before Swiss women got the right to vote). GDP per capita rose astronomically to a peak in 1978 that has not been surpassed since. Inflation was kept under control and Iranians' wealth and purchasing power constantly increased.
The White Revolution also instituted land reform that removed vestiges of Iran's feudal society by distributing crown lands to the former "peasantry".
Myth 4: The '53 coup caused the '79 revolution
This narrative claims that the '53 coup installed the Shah as a brutal, western stooge, and that said brutality was the cause of the backlash in 1979.
In fact, the revolution of '79 was not a popular uprising against the Shah, nor was the Shah's supposed brutality the central grievance. It was a union of islamists and marxists, who, in a key moment, managed to garner a critical mass of support and take advantage of government missteps.
The primary leader of the '79 revolution, Khomeini, came to prominence due to his opposition to the Shah's White Revolution. He opposed the land reforms and the empowerment of women, the former for reducing the role of the clergy and the latter for being contrary to religious dogma. During the revolution itself, he was supported by a variety of marxist and islamist factions, who, much like westerners, foolishly thought of him as a spiritual old man who will go away once things cool down.
In other words, key actors in Iran's political arena were: the Shah and his allies, the marxists, the islamists, and some separatists. The Shah was the most liberal of the bunch, and opposition to him was by reactionary forces who played victim while he was in power but were, in fact, most opposed to his liberalization.
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From WWII onward, there was a constant stream of political crises, often initiated or supported by some foreign meddler that tried to either push Iran to the eastern block, carve it up into smaller republics, or turn it into a pseudo-marxist theocracy. Democracy, as we understand it in the west in 2024, was nonexistent and impossible. Even during the prime ministership of Mosaddegh, political conflicts were often resolved by various factions deploying armed mobs of supporters to the streets, not by parliamentary debate.
This was the landscape in which the Shah operated. In the 26 years after the Mosaddegh incident, he turned Iran into the jewel of the Middle East. His father took over a feudal society in 1925. Over the span of 54 years, the Pahlavi dynasty turned Iran into a modern state. They celebrated Iranian culture, history, and heritage, and in doing so gave future generations a lofty vision of what their country could be.
In today's American politics, we have two primary groups: the far left, who believe only white-cis-heterosexual European men can be evil; and the isolationists, the conservatives who distrust the "American deep state" and want to reduce its influence and turn their focus inward. The myth of the 1953 coup serves both of their narratives. Both groups are, ironically, the inheritors of the colonial mindset: they can only view the world through a lens where the only free agents are people like them.
So if Iran today is ruled by unsavoury mullahs, that must be the west's fault. They then search all the way to 1953 to conclude that it was the "coup" that caused this mess. You could write an alternative history where the west does not intervene in Iran in 1953 and the Shah does not remove him and then the country becomes a beacon of democracy. I think such a history would not be too plausible. Had Mosaddegh successfully hung on to power, I think far more plausible would have been that we would have had an Islamic Republic or something like it far sooner, foregoing nearly three decades of progress.