We never meant things to get out of hand the way they did in Iran. Let's agree about that to begin with, let's agree that the CIA's role in replacing a democratically elected but left-leaning leader in the 1950s with a dictator, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was understandable in the context of Persia's vast oil fields, and the widespread belief at the time that we were on the strategic defensive against an ascendent and nuclear Soviet Union. Let's agree that yes, there were excesses, as there often are, even in our society today. There was CIA-condoned torture – a lot of it – so much so that if you were to ask an Iranian immigrant from that time about the Shah, he or she would likely tell you that life under the Shah was about as bad as it later became under the Clerics – but Persia was right next to the Soviet Union, and this was an existential fight. Sometimes you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet, especially when the free world is on the line.
Iran was supposed to be a lock, for us, like it had been for the British. And the thing about America is that it's better than Britain – in many ways, it's just Britain 2.0. More freedom. Better PR. Hotter chicks, with better teeth. That's the promise of America – bigger, beefier, less nonsense, and we can tell the difference between a bad guy and a good guy. Above all, the implicit bargain between America and its overseas pals is simple: you love us, we've got your back.
The type of revolution that occurred in Persia, coming when it did, after Vietnam, was unthinkable. A safely pro-US country turned its back on us, and started calling us "The Great Satan." Worse than couching its rhetoric in a language we shared, the language of religion, they didn't even ally with the Soviet Union. A defection along rational lines from our system to that of the Soviet Union would have stung, but was also easy to rationalize – we'd just allowed ourselves to get beat by the Vietnamese, because of weak and liberal politicians. In other words, had Persia gone Red like everyone else, well, that's because we were beating ourselves. We were too weak. That was the national narrative at the time. And when you're losing due to some decision you made, when you're losing due to omission, it's almost like you didn't lose at all, right? It's not like fighting fair, mano e mano, and getting slapped down by someone stronger.
But Persia went for something new, and pre-enlightenment. They went in the opposite direction of the Soviet Union. They rejected Western systems entirely, and embraced a pre-colonial, theology-based organization instead. It's pointless to debate the merits of their system – anyone who'd claim Iran ended up better off as a theocratic despotism is either an extremist, an ideologue, or a buffoon. They slapped our hand away, and that of the Soviet Union. They said, essentially, that they hated us so much, they were willing to invent their own model, to hell with our science, to hell with a better life, to hell with all of it. If they were going to torture their own citizens, they were going to do it their own way, by god, and they did. The smack from that hand-slap has resonated, awfully, throughout our foreign policy ever since.
The greatest sin you can make against the United States of America is to hate us. Is to reject our love. Iran compounded that sin doubly – by threatening Israel, which is still a part of their official rhetoric, and by the aforementioned bad timing of their revolution occurring on the heels of our defeat in Vietnam.
It doesn't take a genius to draw parallels with the current situation in Iraq and Syria. In ISIS (or ISIL, or IS, or Daesh) we see a similar impulse: a group of people who have discounted and rejected American assistance, save in a way that is supremely irritating (taking the plundered ammunition, vehicles, and weapons of our fallen proxies). To a certain constituent group with which we've become acquainted these last two decades, that we never suspected existed before, ISIS and Iran represent a clean break with the West, a positivist assertion of a moment in history when ethnic and religious social groups could exist outside a post-enlightenment, post-rational framework, and the colonialism and exploitation that went along with it. To ISIS and Iran, there's no fundamental difference between America and the Soviet Union.
I'm against intervening militarily in Iraq and Syria, and have written why at length elsewhere. Regardless of whether you think I'm full of s*** or not – many feel that way – one has to acknowledge that America's behavior in the Middle East has been desultory, reactionary, and short-sighted, which is why, in part, we keep encountering groups that profess to hate us. Once we begin to acknowledge that we were partly (although again, understandably) responsible for creating the conditions where a thing like Iran or ISIS could exist in the first place, we will have taken the first necessary step toward avoiding the mistakes that we will, left to our own devices and current foreign policy, create again in ten or twenty years, and then again after that. The lesson of Iran shouldn't be that we must be at loggerheads with an entire people – but that time heals all wounds, and it's okay for a group to not love us without America going ballistic in response.
An incisive and eloquent analysis of a revolution often downplayed in conversations surrounding the Iraq war(s), Adrian. I think you’re right to say our anger over Iran coming on the heels of the Vietnam War really shook us. We fundamentally understood Communism even if we despised it. What happened in Iran and what is happening in Syria now terrifies us because it does not fit neatly into our categories and assumptions about modernity – it does not reject our economic system so much as everything we thought true about progress.
And the real genius of this piece comes in your conversation about love – this is what makes these people seem so horrible. They are not claiming to have a better economic system. We can’t buy our way into their hearts. They don’t even seem to think love matters. And it’s really hard to stomach the idea of a people who do not privilege materialism and our sentimentalism like we do. It seems to reject one of our most sacred American values – our idea of ourselves as well meaning – as not false but unimportant. Maybe if we stopped acting like a hurt ex-boyfriend, and acted a bit more rationally, starting with the fact that these people are actually people and not just useful foils for our own sense of goodness, we might have workable diplomatic relations by, I don’t know, the forty-year anniversary of Bush Jr.’s Iraq war.
Anyway – really liked this one.
I can’t say for sure, but I’m pretty confident that our conversations on the subject several years ago influenced my thinking on this piece. People who claim that nations act rationally when it comes to diplomacy or foreign policy need only see how the current spat between America’s DoS and Israel resembles a playground scuffle: DoS calls Netanyahu chickenshit, and Netanyahu responds by calling DoS and Obama chickenshit, and threatens to address the U.S. Congress, bypassing the president – really, both sides acting like badly-behaved children. Mature behavior on the international level is the exception, not the rule, and only violence or the threat of violence seems capable of galvanizing sufficient popular opinion for positive action. Preferably violence that can be portrayed or described in retrospect by a Navy SEAL.
Very interesting piece, Adrian. I think we could put even more emphasis on the first part of your discussion in which you state that the CIA’s role in the overthrow of a democratically-elected leader of Iran was strategically understandable. First of all, Mosaddegh, the democratically-elected Prime Minister, was not replaced with a dictator. Shah Pahlavi was already in power since taking over in that role from his father in 1941 and continued in power until 1979. In the meanwhile there were elected Prime Ministers as well, with Mosaddegh being elected in 1951 and replaced with a hand-picked General by the CIA in 1953. Mosaddegh nationalized the British-run Oil industry when the British wouldn’t negotiate any type of favorable terms for the Iranians. The US initially supported Mosaddegh and was against the British. Eisenhower’s new administration, however, was convinced by the British that Mosaddegh needed to be removed to regain the British oil interests, and the CIA set out to overthrow him immediately.This little history lesson should shed light on the current situation in Iran and the greater Middle East. Mosaddegh was highly popular and remained so for long after this coup. This overthrow was one of the main sources for discontent that led to the later revolution and overthrow of the Shah in 1979, which caught the US so off-guard. The point is that greedy British and American oil interests led directly to a large part of the problems of Iran today, 60 years later. The choice was continuing the exploitation of weaker countries for their oil and other resources in a neocolonial relationship, or supporting democracy. We choose neocolonialism, and then lost even those resources when the people of Iran “stopped loving” America.
I suppose one other thing to say is that the US talks about supporting and spreading democracy, and human rights, but this is mostly rhetoric. It only supports these things when there is no economic cost. The Iranian coup was the first such event by the US/CIA in the Middle East, but we can find many earlier examples from Latin America, and many later examples almost everywhere else in the world. When we intervene for economic self-interest, the results are almost always negative.
My final point is that I’m not sure how much the people of Iran chose the theocrats and pre-colonial system that still control that country. Like any armed revolution, there was more than one interest at play and the initial secular and liberal reformers were quickly overpowered by a small but aggressive Islamist faction. Not much different from some of the results so far from the recent Arab Spring, as in Syria.
Those are great points, David, and I couldn’t agree more. We wring our hands collectively and lament the national inability to stay focused, or pay attention to the places we’ve wrecked through our casual inattention, and the real question we should be asking is this: “why is the system constructed so that only massive and situational outrage over a catastrophe compels just action overseas?” Or at home, for that matter. Also, thanks for clearing up the points where my accounting of the Iranian Revolution was sloppy.