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All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror
by Stephen Kinzer
This book is first on my list of what to read next.

Here's a simple little timeline (extremely simplistic and obviously with MANY factors omitted):

- 1950s: Iran oil
- Iranians not properly compensated for their oil, poor treatment and no respect for them
- Prime Minister Mossadegh nationalized oil industry in Iran
- British imperialism and US covert actions, Shah takes power, Iranians angered
- Years and years of CIA covert actions in Middle East
- Foreign entanglements
- More covert actions, political manipulation, intervention, meddling
- Angering and harming and killing innocent people in other countries
- 1979 Iranian revolution, US hostages taken, Shah overthrown
- More foreign entanglements and regime change abroad
- More covert actions, political manipulation, intervention, meddling
- More angering and harming and killing innocent people in other countries
- US relationships with al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein, supporting bin Laden, etc....
- US provided weapons (including chem/bio) to unstable, dangerous "friends" because their enemies are our enemies du jour
- Sept. 11, 2001: Terrorism in US
- Today: Death and other messy conditions in Afghanistan and Iraq

That the past is prolog is especially true in this astonishing account of the 1953 overthrow of nationalist Iranian leader Mohammed Mossadegh, who became prime minister in 1951 and immediately nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. This act angered the British, who sought assistance from the United States in overthrowing Mossadegh's fledgling democracy. Kermit Roosevelt, Teddy's grandson, led the successful coup in August 1953, which ended in the re-establishment of the Iranian monarchy in the person of Mohammad Reza Shah. Iranian anger at this foreign intrusion smoldered until the 1979 revolution. Meanwhile, over the next decade, the United States successfully overthrew other governments, such as that of Guatemala. This book leads one to wonder how many of our contemporary problems in the Middle East may have resulted from this covert CIA adventure.

With breezy storytelling and diligent research, Kinzer has reconstructed the CIA's 1953 overthrow of the elected leader of Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh, who was wildly popular at home for having nationalized his country's oil industry. The coup ushered in the long and brutal dictatorship of Mohammad Reza Shah, widely seen as a U.S. puppet and himself overthrown by the Islamic revolution of 1979. At its best this work reads like a spy novel, with code names and informants, midnight meetings with the monarch and a last-minute plot twist when the CIA's plan, called Operation Ajax, nearly goes awry.

A veteran New York Times foreign correspondent, Kinzer has combed memoirs, academic works, government documents and news stories to produce this blow-by-blow account. He shows that until early in 1953, Great Britain and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company were the imperialist baddies of this tale. Intransigent in the face of Iran's demands for a fairer share of oil profits and better conditions for workers, British Foreign Secretary Herbert Morrison exacerbated tension with his attitude that the challenge from Iran was, in Kinzer's words, "a simple matter of ignorant natives rebelling against the forces of civilization."

Before the crisis peaked, a high-ranking employee of Anglo-Iranian wrote to a superior that the company's alliance with the "corrupt ruling classes" and "leech-like bureaucracies" were "disastrous, outdated and impractical." This stands as a textbook lesson in how not to conduct foreign policy.

Half a century ago, the United States overthrew a Middle Eastern government for the first time. The victim was Mohammad Mossadegh, the democratically elected prime minister of Iran. Although the coup seemed a success at first, today it serves as a chilling lesson about the dangers of foreign intervention. Are Americans well served by such regime-change interventions abroad?

posted by Hal 2:58 PM