Book Review
Stephen Kinzer. John Wiley and Sons, New Jersey, USA. 2003
ISBN 0-471-26517-9 (cloth), ISBN-67878-3 (paper)
With Iraq trampled under boots, Ghadafi tamed, and N Korea in possession of an A-bomb and a tested delivery vehicle, Iran has risen to the top of the list of states that stand in the way of the American model of global dominance. So this book, which actually came out in 2003 remains topical just when the Iranian presidency passes over to an echo of the “Islamic Revolution” in an effort to forestall the tragic path of neighbouring Iraq and ward off the expected US assault on the country.
All the Shah’s Men is the story of the US engineered coup in 1953 – Operation Ajax - then, as now, with the active assistance of the British, which toppled Mohammad Mossadeq’s government, the democratically elected prime minister of Iran. Mossadeq had become a thorn under the imperialist nails. Riding a wave of national anger at the blatant theft of Iranian oil by the British, he had had led the mass movement that had the audacity to nationalise Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.
In the early 50’s Iran had experienced a period of relative freedom. The despotic Reza Shah had been deposed by the combined invasion of British, American and Soviet troops in September 1941, who had replaced him with his feeble-willed son, Mohammad-Reza. The last allied troops had left Iran in 1945 when the Soviet occupying army was forced out of Azerbaijan after a US ultimatum. The withdrawal spelt the end of the Soviet-supported Autonomous Republic of Azerbaijan [1].
During the next decade a succession of weak, and pro-British, prime ministers came and went, appointed by the Shah, closely advised by the British Embassy. Meanwhile the Iranian working class, and in particular the oil workers, were becoming increasingly organised and militant, under the leadership of the Tudeh Party [2]. The relatively open political sphere and the freedom allowed anti-British sentiment to grow and be vented openly. The rising anti-British feeling focused on, and targeted, the absurdly unequal oil concessions which were nothing but an undisguised plunder of the country’s wealth by an “exceptionally profitable” Anglo-Iranian, according to a State Department report. As the clamour for nationalisation of oil spiralled the British persuaded the Shah to appoint general Razmara, chief of staff, and despite his pro-Nazi affiliations during the war, a British protégée. His assassination paved the way for Mossadeq and his newly formed National Front to take on the premiership and inspire (and cajole) the Iranian parliament (Majles) to ratify the law nationalising the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.
The US were at first not too unhappy at the bloody nose given to their imperial rival in the Middle East. US-owned ARMACO had just signed a major contact in neighbouring Saudi Arabia. They brushed off British pressure – through Clement Atlee’s Foreign Minister Herbert Morrison - to unseat Mossadeq. They did however make their own overtures to the Shah – inviting him and his wife Soraya to a state visit in 1949, unprecedented both in length (it lasted several weeks) and in pomp.
To some British readers, Labour foreign minister Morrison’s vehemently expressed imperialist ambitions on Iran might come as a surprise. Yet nothing shows the colonial mentality better than Kinzer’s quotes. A British diplomat commissioned by the “Working Party on Persia” wrote that the typical Iranian was motivated by an “unabashed dishonesty, fatalistic outlook [and] indifferent to suffering…. is vain, unprincipled, eager to promise what he knows he is incapable or has no intention of performing, wedded to procrastination, lacking in perseverance and energy, but amenable to discipline. …Although an accomplished liar, he does not expect to be believed…” This caricature was not entirely off the mark given that many of Iranians the British had dealings with were in one way or another in their pay, or as Anglo-Iranian Chairman Fraser puts it “when they need money, they will come crawling on their bellies”. Kinzer is at his best illustrating the rather stupid, condescending, uncompromising, and ultimately short-sighted views of British politicians, both Labour and Conservative.
When President Truman, a Democrat, was replaced by the Republican Eisenhower, the plans for the coup that ultimately toppled Mossadeq were set in motion. The prime drivers in the seat were the Dulled brothers – John Foster heading the State Department and Alan the CIA chief. For them Iran was a key link in the chain of states they were building in those early years of the Cold War to contain what they saw as Soviet expansionism southwards towards the Indian Ocean. It was also a wonderful opportunity to supplant the old imperial power – Great Britain - in its traditional playground.
The echoes of today are uncanny:
Both Dulles brothers had close links to oil-based big business – Sullivan and Cromwell – echoing the oil-links of today’s team in the white House. Norman H Schwartzkopf Sr. who did so much to draw the Shah away from his traditional pro-British leanings into the US camp is the father of another Norman who led the Desert Storm invasion of Kuwait and Iraq in 1992. And then there were an unending string of politicians, headed by the Shah himself, who were pawns in the hands of the then dominant imperial power – Britain. The Shah is shown appointing and removing prime ministers at British behest. Many senior clerics in Iran, including the fiery Kashani who in the 1920’s had played an important role in the anti-British uprising in what is now southern Iraq, are also shown to be hand-in-glove with the British.
It was the Dulles brothers who orchestrated the coup, with the help of the extensive network of agents the British had established in Iran over the preceding century. The key players were Kermit Roosevelt, a grandson of the US president, the Shah’s sister Ashraf (curiously not given the space she rightly deserves in this book), Averell Harriman, a highly educated US diplomat and Cold War warrior, and the British agents the enterprising Rashidian brothers and their “subversive network of journalists, politicians, mullahs, and gang leaders” – and last but not least, a posse of thugs, ruffians, extortionists, and sundry unsavoury crooks.
The rest is predictable – what the US and other western security services have perfected over the years: secret meetings, destabilising operations where paid thugs masquerading as Tudeh sympathisers would beat up bystanders and burn down shops, paid up crowds pretending to be spontaneous pro-Shah demonstrators, turncoat commanders changing allegiance through dollar or promises of jobs, outright savagery and the inevitable cock-ups. This was the trial run for what was to become an art form – how to disguise a military takeover as a spontaneous uprising, or as in Chile, a popular clamour for the “rule of law” which the army “dutifully” supplies. The next adventure was in Guatemala – a more military affair. We saw the same tactics used in Indonesia a decade later – where a million leftists and sympathisers were massacred using lists provided by the CIA. The technique has now become so sophisticated as not to require the military at all: witness the flow of “orange revolutions” in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan.
Kinzer whizzes through these events breathlessly, as if he was describing a detective story. While his style makes it very readable it follows that he makes many statements without specifying the source. What comes over from his narrative is the utter cynicism of western politicians regardless of their place in the official “left-right” spectrum.
Sadly what is strikingly missing in this narrative is the people of Iran, who appear fleetingly. Indeed the only Iranians that appear on the streets are the CIA-funded thugs organised by the Rashidian brothers. The only time the Iranian people really appear on the scene is 12 years after Mossadeq’s death, in the memorial gathering in his Ahmadabad estate on the morrow of the revolution, one of the largest gathering in modern Iranian history. Yet the Iranian people were the moving force of the anti-colonial movement embodied by Mossadeq – both in their organised form as oil and other industrial workers, and as huge crowds attending the National Front meetings, gathering in their tens of thousands in front of the Majles pushing their representatives, and being shot down in the streets in July 1953 in defence of their hard won freedoms. Operation Ajax may have put an end to the Iranian peoples yearning to run their own affairs – but it triggered off a series of nationalist movements in the Middle East – kicking the British out of Suez, toppling the puppet monarchy in Iraq and boosting the anti-colonial movements everywhere (from Algeria to Vietnam).
Stephen Kinzer’s subtitle expresses the link between the CIA-British organised coup, marking the beginning of the end of the nationalist movement in the Middle East, and the tragedy of the Middle East today. The failure of Mossadeq to muster popular support to counter the coup – which had indeed failed in its first attempt - was indeed prophetic. It was the first demonstration of the inherent weakness of the native bourgeoisie in Iran, echoed later in the rest of the Middle East.
Alongside this one has to note the weakness of the Iranian working class, despite its organisation, especially in the oil sector. The finger of blame has to be pointed at the Tudeh Party. The fact that the Tudeh, with its extensive secret network within the military, its large (and well organised) membership and undoubted influence within the organised working class, did not counter, or even attempt to counter Operation Ajax, showed the ultimate feebleness and subservience of the official “communist” movement represented by the Tudeh Party to the policies of Moscow – something Kinzer does not develop.
Over the next two decades this combination of an ideological and class failure was to see the ultimate demise of both the left and nationalist movement and the rise of the Islamists who were able to forge the yearning for an end to imperialist rule into a yearning for an unattainable utopia based on populist interpretations of the Islamic scriptures.
But the rise of political Islam should not be viewed as inevitable. To blame the weakness of the native bourgeoisie to resist the imperialist and Islamist onslaught masks the failure of the left to take the opportunities offered. The heroic sacrifices of the Iranian left in the 60’s and 70’s, a clear attempt to cleanse the ineffectual policies and ultimate failure of the Tudeh Party, was also misdirected. To address this failure is essential if a progressive alternative to the dual quagmires of neo-liberal imperialist project and obscurantist Islamism is to be avoided.
Mehdi Kia
1. See iran bulletin – Middle East Forum Series II no 2, 2005.
2. For an account of these exciting and turbulent years see Ervand Abrahamian, Iran between two revolutions, Princton, NJ, Princton University Press, 1982.