A Long, Violent History

For those familiar with this history, it’s hard to hear such statements without hearkening back to New Year’s Eve, 1977, a year before the Iranian Revolution broke out. In the heat of growing civil unrest in Iran, US president Jimmy Carter attended a lavish state dinner with the shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, where Carter toasted, “Iran, because of the great leadership of the Shah, is an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world.”

Ironically, the toasts were preceded by a long US history of destabilizing Iran — a history marred with covert operations and clandestine interventions. Twenty-four years earlier, during “Operation Ajax,” the CIA, in collaboration with the British MI6, had orchestrated a coup that ousted the democratically elected Iranian prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh, who had won on a platform of nationalizing Iranian oil and taking it back from Western control. The coup set into motion the destruction of the country’s budding democracy and would haunt Iranians for decades to come.

Starting in the late 1940s, in the heat of the Cold War, the Harry Truman administration embraced the young shah as an important partner in the emerging anti-Soviet alliance in the Middle East, despite mounting Iranian resentment of the shah’s corruption and his reckless sales of Iran’s resources to foreign companies to finance his lavish lifestyle. The shah’s spending spree led him to sell exclusive rights to Iran’s oil and natural gas to Western multinational oil companies, mainly the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), which exploited Iranians and exported millions of barrels of oil that made fabulous profits while paying Iran virtually nothing.

Resentment of the shah soon gave rise to popular dissent. In October 1949, Mossadegh, a longtime critic of the Pahlavi dynasty and a vocal advocate for Iran’s right to control its own oil industry, founded the National Front, a broad coalition that included both middle-class moderates and members of the left-wing Tudeh Party. Mossadegh and his allies soon held the balance of power in the Iranian parliament, known as the Majles, where they ran on the platform of sharing oil profits between Iran and AIOC, citing the example of other multinational oil firms operating in Venezuela and Saudi Arabia.

Backed by the British government, AIOC refused to compromise. The Majles responded by nationalizing the Iranian oil industry. Shortly after, Mossadegh was elected prime minister, and immediately announced plans to wrest control of Iran’s oil fields and refineries from the UK.

The West was quick to retaliate. When Mossadegh moved forward with nationalization, the British and US governments joined forces to press the shah to oust his new prime minister, threatening an international embargo on Iranian oil, while secretly planning a coup in Tehran.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave his blessing to the plan. The coup architects were US secretary of state John Foster Dulles, a rabid anti-communist who dismissed Mossadegh as a Russian stooge and “madman,” and Allen Dulles, the new CIA director, who had close ties with MI6, the British intelligence service, and an enthusiast for covert operations against nations he deemed vulnerable to Soviet subversion or takeover. Kermit Roosevelt, a grandson of Theodore Roosevelt and a veteran CIA covert operator, was dispatched to Tehran to oversee the plan.

US and British agents carried out what they branded as a “countercoup” against the newly elected government, which entailed distributing lavish bribes to mobilize hundreds of pro-shah mercenaries, who stormed into the streets chanting anti-government slogans and staged violent clashes with Mossadegh’s supporters. Meanwhile, Western-friendly general Fazlollah Zahedi and right-wing military officers, along with the Iranian secret police, known as SAVAK, moved to restore order and crack down on dissent, rounding up Tudeh Party militants, arresting Mossadegh, and reinstating the shah.

Just the Beginning

In the name of fighting Communism, the United States helped sabotage a thriving democracy in the Middle East. To cite American historian Douglas Little: “Having convinced themselves that Iran was about to fall to communism, Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers had encouraged pro-American forces to overthrow a democratically elected Iranian leader and place an increasingly autocratic ruler back on the Peacock Throne.”

The 1953 coup, known in Iran as the 28 Mordad coup d’état, was a prelude to a long history of US covert regime change operations against democratically elected leaders across the Global South. Two decades later, in Chile, the United States infamously conspired to overthrow the elected socialist president Salvador Allende, helping usher in an authoritarian right-wing dictatorship.

In Iran, the 1953 coup was just the beginning. As Iranian resentment against the shah grew, the United States responded with a new convert operation in Iran in the early 1960s. Shortly after his inauguration, John F. Kennedy hatched his own plan to counter civil unrest in Iran: a “White Revolution.” In April 1962, Kennedy, fresh off the Bay of Pigs debacle, invited Shah Pahlavi to Washington, where the two leaders reviewed a “blueprint for stability in Iran.” Nine months later, the shah unveiled his White Revolution, a package of modernizing, “top-down” reforms designed to avert radical “bottom-up” change along the lines of Fidel Castro’s red revolution in Cuba. In the spring of 1963, US Peace Corps volunteers descended on Iran to preach American modernization, and as hundreds of US corporations began investing in the shah’s “economic miracle,” millions of barrels of oil flowed from Iran to the United States’ Cold War allies in Asia and Western Europe.

Meanwhile, Iranian opposition leaders, led by Ruhollah Khomeini, mocked the shah as an American puppet, and denounced the US-backed reforms as “Westoxification” (Gharbzadegi in Persian).

By late 1960s, US officials believed Iran was basking in the shah’s White Revolution. They cheered as the shah clamped down on dissent, while toasting his decision to exile Khomeini, who they saw as nothing but an “annoying Islamic rabble-rouser.”

In came Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. Desperate to boost US expansion in the Middle East and get out of the Vietnam quagmire, the Nixon administration eyed monarchical Iran as a US proxy. In 1972, the pair visited Tehran, where they presented the shah with their “Nixon doctrine”: in exchange for the United States’ help in ensuring political stability in Iran, the United States would permit the shah to purchase nonnuclear weapon systems from the US arsenal, including helicopter gunships, jet fighters, and guided-missile frigates.

The shah embraced the new Nixon Doctrine with enthusiasm, embarking on lavish purchases of $13 billion worth of US military hardware from the increased revenue generated by skyrocketing oil prices following the 1973 Arab-Israeli War and the Arab oil embargo. But the oil boom only alienated the Iranian middle and working classes, who viewed with growing disdain the shah’s wasteful spending on US arms. Riots erupted in the streets of Iran and were met with a brutal crackdown by the shah, with US blessing.

From his exile in Iraq, the increasingly popular Khomeini condemned the bloodshed, calling for the overthrow of the US-backed tyrant. The Iranian Revolution was soon underway.

On January 16, 1979, Shah Pahlavi boarded a Boeing 707 at Tehran’s Mehrabad airport and headed, after a brief stop in Egypt, for exile in the United States. For many Iranians, giving refuge to the shah was a bitter reminder of the CIA’s conspiracy to overthrow Mossadegh: the United States, it seemed, was a rogue superpower that rewarded reviled tyrants and punished legitimately elected leaders.

After the Revolution

Two weeks after the shah fled, Khomeini returned to Iran for the first time after fifteen years in exile, promising to establish an Islamic Republic and vowing to cleanse the country of all remaining influence of “the Great Satan.” Khomeini and his supporters beat down the left-wing forces that had aided in overthrowing the shah and soon created their own authoritarian state, albeit one that garnered popular support for its opposition to US imperialism.

Yet the United States continued to wallow in denialism. US elites rarely bothered to understand Islamist political movements, or Khomeini’s particular brand of Shi’ism. They never acknowledged that festering anti-American sentiments in Iran were not religious or cultural in origin, or the product of a “clash of civilization” or some other ahistorical nonsense but had roots in the United States’ long history of meddling in the country and its support of the shah’s dictatorship.

When Ronald Reagan took office in 1980, Iran had been locked in an increasingly bloody war with Iraq, which lasted for eight years and claimed half a million lives, most of them Iranians. Eager to settle old scores with Iran, the Reagan administration sided with Iraq, providing Saddam Hussein with weapons and aircraft, military intelligence, and billions of dollars of credit. This did not prevent Reagan from illegally approving an “arms for hostages” deal with the Khomeini government in the scandal widely known as the Iran-Contra affair.

The Iran-Iraq war ended in a stalemate. Emboldened by his US partnership, Hussein invaded Kuwait three years later, and the United States was soon fighting its former ally and new pariah in Iraq.

Locked in Hostility

Since then, US policy toward Iran has been marred by past grievances and locked in ahistorical hostility. Not to be upstaged by his predecessors, Bill Clinton adopted a policy of “dual containment,” which employed crippling economic sanctions and preemptive military threats to weaken Iran, culminating in signing into law the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act of 1996 (ILSA).

Meanwhile, Iranian leaders attempted to mend bridges with the United States with a series of goodwill gestures. In May 1997, Iranians elected Islamic moderate and reformist Mohammad Khatami as president, who would extend an olive branch to the United States, only to be met with the Clinton administration’s deep animosity and suspicion, and its unwavering demands that Iran end its nuclear research program, as expressed in the Iran Nonproliferation Act of 2000.

Under George W. Bush, neoconservatives made destabilizing Iran an official policy, again despite Iranian outreach. Hours after 9/11 unfolded, Khatami sent condolences to Bush, while thousands of young Iranians held a candlelight vigil in the streets of Tehran. Bush responded by branding Iran a terrorist regime and a member of “the Axis of Evil,” along with Iraq and North Korea. (Or the “Curse,” in Benjamin Netanyahu’s newest version, which includes Gaza and Lebanon.)

When, fourteen months later, US troops invaded Iraq to depose Saddam Hussein, it was Khatami’s turn to condemn the United States. Some of Bush’s top advisers, including Vice President Dick Cheney, privately welcomed the prospect of an Israeli preemptive strike against Iran’s Bushehr nuclear complex, and even plotted regime change in Tehran. Unsatisfied with his wanton destruction of Iraq, Bush himself would order the Pentagon to plan an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, as the former president boasts in his memoirs.

By persistently opting for economic punishment and seeking military solutions to weaken the country, the United States has always gotten it wrong on Iran — whether it was the CIA overthrowing the democratically elected Prime Minister Mossadegh; or Carter giving refuge to the authoritarian shah; or Reagan sending weapons to Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War; or George W. Bush rebuffing an Iran nuclear deal, or Donald Trump sabotaging Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran and carrying out the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, or the Biden administration warmongering against Iran in a time of mounting regional conflict, stoking the flames of a wider war — on top of sending thousands more US troops to the region and securing a $8.7 billion military aid package for Israel.

The United States has worked to destabilize Iran for nearly a century. With the Democratic presidential nominee once again trotting out hawkish tirades against Iran while backing Israel’s new assault on Lebanon, American officials seem to have learned nothing from history.