Michael N. Escobar
10/20/03
PS 198 - Revolutionary Iran De-Cal
The world of foreign policy is like a multi-sided game of
chess. Moves are made with varying degrees of calculation and skill, and
nothing happens in a vacuum. Everything that happens affects the other
players' sets of options and
levels of risk. In analyzing historical events in international relations, it
is incumbent upon the analyst to take into consideration the historical and
regional context to what happened.
At the time of the coup that overthrew Premier Mosaddeq,
several world events had just happened: key were the 1949 Chinese Revolution
and Iran's 1951 nationalization of its oil industry. The Korean War was ending,
and the Viet Minh guerrillas were harassing the French colonial regime in
Vietnam. Five days before the coup in Iran, the Soviet Union tested its first
hydrogen bomb (Encyclopaedia Britannica). According to Daniel Ellsberg in his
book Papers on the War (1972), after 1949, no U.S. president could
politically afford to be in power while another major country "went Communist"
(dictating that they take actions to forestall Communist revolutions at least
until after they were out of office). In this context, the nationalization of
the oil industry must have seemed to the West as a dangerous flirtation with
socialism, in a country which bordered the USSR. It should be remembered that
India was governed by Premier Nehru, and moving into the Soviet sphere of
influence; as a result, the US sought to bring Pakistan into its fold. A
socialist Iran would make Pakistan's position exceedingly precarious. The
stated policy of the Eisenhower Administration was "stopping communism wherever
it encroached, and rolling it back wherever possible" (Daalder). In 1954, the
CIA would organize a coup d'état in Guatemala, overthrowing the
democratically-elected socialist Jacobo Arbenz
Besides the imperative to fight communism, the prospect of
anti-Western nationalism must have also appeared to the US and Great Britain as
a problem to be eliminated. Syria had experienced a succession of coups between
1949 and 1951 that left the country under the control of Ba'ath (socialist and
nationalist) and SSNP (conservative and nationalist) Army officers (Britannica
2). Col. Gemal Abdel Nasser and other officers overthrew the monarchy in Egypt
in 1952 (Britannica 3). In the background, anti-colonial agitation in Algeria
had been actively repressed by the French since the 1940s; and Israel was
founded in 1948, at the expense of 750,000 expelled Palestinians, which further
catalyzed anti-Westernism in the Middle East. At the same time, Britain's Prime
Minister was colonial stalwart Winston Churchill, who had fought in South
Africa's Boer War of 1900, and was quite used to viewing the Middle East as an
assortment of Western protectorates. This was the man who had called Gandhi a
"half-naked fakir"; the prospect of anti-Westernism in the Middle East must
have seemed as repugnant to him as Communism was to Eisenhower.
In light of the overall strategic picture, the direct
threat to American capital invested in Iran seems less important. As with the
occupation of Hawaii, the building of the Panama canal, and the invasion of
Iraq, pecuniary considerations go hand in hand with larger, more-compelling
motivations of geopolitics. American and Soviet troops were staring each other
down in Berlin; American and Korean troops were fighting in the icy mountains
of Korea; and given the absolute essentiality of oil to industrial economies,
Mosaddeq's nationalization of oil must have seemed to Washington and London to
be an unforgivable mistake.
Works Cited:
Daalder, Ivo H. "Why 1953 coup
resonates 50 years later." The Mercury-News. August 3, 2003.
Ellsberg, Daniel. Papers on the
War. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972.
"Thermonuclear Bomb."
Encyclopaedia Britannica . 2003. Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. 21 Oct,
2003 < http://search.eb.com/eb/article?eu=73964 >.
"Syria."
Encyclopaedia Britannica . 2003. Encyclopaedia Britannica Online.
21 Oct, 2003 <
http://search.eb.com/eb/article?eu=115300 >
"Egypt."
Encyclopaedia Britannica . 2003. Encyclopaedia Britannica Online.
21 Oct, 2003 <
http://search.eb.com/eb/article?eu=108480 >.