Jimmy Carter will go down in American history as “the president who lost Iran,” which during his term went from being a major strategic ally of the United States to being the revolutionary Islamic Republic. Barack Obama will be remembered as the president who “lost” Turkey, Lebanon and Egypt, and during whose tenure America’s alliances in the Middle East crumbled.
The superficial circumstances are similar. In both cases, a United States in financial crisis and after failed wars loses global influence under a leftist president whose good intentions are interpreted abroad as expressions of weakness. The results are reflected in the fall of regimes that were dependent on their relationship with Washington for survival, or in a change in their orientation, as with Ankara.
Does anyone remember that many of these U.S. “allies” have (are) run by bloody-handed dictators?
You think Iran has been better off under the Ayatollahs?
Iran was “lost” when the UK and the USA in the 1950’s helped the Shah overthrow the democratic government of Mossadeq. Since then, the USA has been constantly seen as acting against the will of the people of Iran.
Sadly, one might say the same thing about Egypt (Turkey and Tunisia should be fine).
I think I have already mentioned here that Vietnam was lost in 1919, when President Wilson refused to support the rights of the people of VietNam against the occupying colonial power, France, thereby guaranteeing Ho Chi Minh would stick with the USSR 40 years later.
The USA should simply stop acting as the planet’s bastards wrt foreign policy. I wish you people would for once believe in your own ideals, and the Constitution’s, and stop supporting any dictator anywhere for any reason.
The UK would be a lot better off had the US not intervened in WWII.
Exactly! Kicking and screaming, the USA entered WWII with a plan to keep/get Western Europe as democratic as ever. Extend the plan elsewhere too, please!
Soviet dominance would have been fun too.
Honestly. I have the greatest respect for this fantastic blog. But this is puerile.
Whether they are “allies” or not, they will still be run by dictators. Better to have allies than not.
I assume by the way you would not agree to the US effecting regime changes willy nilly just because it does not like a country’s rulers.
Thanks Michael. There just isn’t enough antiAmerca sentiment going around. Thanks for being original
sarcoff
Obama will be remembered as the community organizer that won the Nobel because of his skin color…………..
He brought peace and love to the whole world during his first week in office.
I fell off my chair on that comment!
I bought my house during Jimmy Carter’s “reign”. I was paying 14% interest on it at that time.
I got a good loan – only 12%.
I’m afraid things will continue to get worse this year. And 2012, and a few years after, have the makings for being worse than the Great Depression. Obama’s policies of taxing most of America and sending that money to the urban population will make it worse. People looking for a land of opportunity will likely head to Asia, or Brazil, or New Zealand taking there potential with them.
Other than that…….
I think that the Carter era was worse (so far anyway). The malaise was palpable, and at the time nobody could have forseen that a Reagan would come along to restore American pride and purpose.
Ummm. You mean, if the Egyptians throw off a dictator and embrace democracy then Obama has “lost” Egypt?
The hope surely has to be that the revolution in Egypt produces democracy, and doesn’t get hijacked by extremists – unlike in Iran. The Iranian revolution (not unlike the Russian revolution) started out as a very broad movement that aimed to overthrow a despotic leader. It was only later that the extremists took control.
I think it is extremism that we should worry about, not the removal of a dictator.
omnologos says:
January 31, 2011 at 2:25 pm
You are wrong. The Shah was in power from the 41. In the 50s, he dismissed the PM. Much as if Obama dismissed Hillary. It was not a coup by the Shah but that is the way some would like to portray it as it does make the US look bad, and of course the innocent terrorists look so much better.
PhilJourdan – you have no idea what you are talking about. For a start, I am sure Obama, after dismissing Hillary, would not immediately fly out to Rome.
Iran started being a democracy in 1906, and even to this day, however a sham they are, elections are still organized to lend legitimacy to those in power (even the Supreme Leader is elected by his peers, rather than nominated). When the messy of multiparty politics was destroyed by the CIA in 1953, oppositions started to coalesce against the only institution that was powerful enough to stand up against the Shah, ie the clergy.
And the rest, is history.
I know exactly what I am talking about. You can claim my analogy was poor (more like QE and brown), but that does not remove the fact there was no coup. The Shah was the supreme ruler. Period. It was his to say yea or nay to. Period. All the rest is just another example of ignorance, superstition, and wanting to find a victim, so you have to find a bad guy – where none exist. If you get away from the spook sites, you will see that the firing of the PM in the 50s was all Palavi’s doing. No doubt the US supported him, but he was no puppet then.
you are completely wrong phil. at least according to the CIA
BTW, this was the 5th hit for “operation ajax” on google. not that hard to educate yourself.
well apparently links to the CIA dissappear 😉
so here is the whole article…
All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror
Intelligence in Recent Public Literature
By Stephen Kinzer. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2003. 258 pages.
Reviewed by David S. Robarge
At an NSC meeting in early 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower said “it was a matter of great distress to him that we seemed unable to get some of these down-trodden countries to like us instead of hating us.”1 The problem has likewise distressed all administrations since, and is emerging as the core conundrum of American policy in Iraq. In All the Shah’s Men, Stephen Kinzer of the New York Times suggests that the explanation may lie next door in Iran, where the CIA carried out its first successful regime-change operation over half a century ago. The target was not an oppressive Soviet puppet but a democratically elected government whose populist ideology and nationalist fervor threatened Western economic and geopolitical interests. The CIA’s covert intervention—codenamed TPAJAX—preserved the Shah’s power and protected Western control of a hugely lucrative oil infrastructure. It also transformed a turbulent constitutional monarchy into an absolutist kingship and induced a succession of unintended consequences at least as far ahead as the Islamic revolution of 1979—and, Kinzer argues in his breezily written, well-researched popular history, perhaps to today.
British colonialism faced its last stand in 1951 when the Iranian parliament nationalized the sprawling Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) after London refused to modify the firm’s exploitative concession. “[B]y a series of insensate actions,” the British replied with prideful stubbornness, “the Iranian Government is causing a great enterprise, the proper functioning of which is of immense benefit not only to the United Kingdom and Iran but to the whole free world, to grind to a stop. Unless this is promptly checked, the whole of the free world will be much poorer and weaker, including the deluded Iranian people themselves.”2 Of that attitude, Dean Acheson, the secretary of state at the time, later wrote: “Never had so few lost so much so stupidly and so fast.”3 But the two sides were talking past each other. The Iranian prime minister, Mohammed Mossadeq, was “a visionary, a utopian, [and] a millenarian” who hated the British, writes Kinzer. “You do not know how crafty they are,” Mossadeq told an American envoy sent to broker the impasse. “You do not know how evil they are. You do not know how they sully everything they touch.”4
The Truman administration resisted the efforts of some British arch-colonialists to use gunboat diplomacy, but elections in the United Kingdom and the United States in 1951 and 1952 tipped the scales decisively toward intervention. After the loss of India, Britain’s new prime minster, Winston Churchill, was committed to stopping his country’s empire from unraveling further. Eisenhower and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, were dedicated to rolling back communism and defending democratic governments threatened by Moscow’s machinations. In Iran’s case, with diplomacy having failed and a military incursion infeasible (the Korean War was underway), they decided to take care of “that madman Mossadeq”5 through a covert action under the supervision of the secretary of state’s brother, Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Allen Dulles.6 (Oddly, considering the current scholarly consensus that Eisenhower was in masterful control of his administration, Kinzer depicts him as beguiled by a moralistic John Foster and a cynical Allen.) Directing the operation was the CIA’s charming and resourceful man in Tehran, Kermit Roosevelt, an OSS veteran, Arabist, chief of Middle East operations, and inheritor of some of his grandfather Theodore’s love of adventure.
The CIA’s immediate target was Mossadeq, whom the Shah had picked to run the government just before the parliament voted to nationalize the AIOC. A royal-blooded eccentric given to melodrama and hypochondria, Mossadeq often wept during speeches, had fits and swoons, and conducted affairs of state from bed wearing wool pajamas. During his visit to the United States in October 1951, Newsweek labeled him the “Fainting Fanatic” but also observed that, although most Westerners at first dismissed him as “feeble, senile, and probably a lunatic,” many came to regard him as “an immensely shrewd old man with an iron will and a flair for self-dramatization.”7 Time recognized his impact on world events by naming him its “Man of the Year” in 1951.
Mossadeq is Kinzer’s paladin—in contrast to the schemers he finds in the White House and Whitehall—but the author does subject him to sharp criticism. He points out, for example, that Mossadeq’s ideology blinded him to opportunities to benefit both himself and the Iranian people: “The single-mindedness with which he pursued his campaign against [the AIOC] made it impossible for him to compromise when he could and should have.”8 In addition, Mossadeq failed at a basic test of statecraft—trying to understand other leaders’ perspectives on the world. By ignoring the anticommunist basis of US policy, he wrenched the dispute with the AIOC out of its Cold War context and saw it only from his parochial nationalist viewpoint. Lastly, Mossadeq’s naïvete about communist tactics led him to ignore the Tudeh Party’s efforts to penetrate and control Iranian institutions. He seemed almost blithely unaware that pro-Soviet communists had taken advantage of democratic systems to seize power in parts of Eastern Europe. By not reining in Iran’s communists, he fell on Washington’s enemies list. Kinzer throws this fair-minded assessment off kilter, however, with a superfluous epilogue about his pilgrimage to Mossadeq’s hometown. Intended to be evocative, the chapter sounds maudlin and contributes little to either an understanding of the coup or Kinzer’s speculations about its relevance today.
Kinzer is at his journalistic best when—drawing on published sources, declassified documents, interviews, and a bootleg copy of a secret Agency history of the operation9—he reconstructs the day-to-day running of TPAJAX. The plan comprised propaganda, provocations, demonstrations, and bribery, and employed agents of influence, “false flag” operatives, dissident military leaders, and paid protestors. The measure of success seemed easy enough to gauge—”[a]ll that really mattered was that Tehran be in turmoil,” writes Kinzer. The design, which looked good on paper, failed on its first try, however, and succeeded largely through happenstance and Roosevelt’s nimble improvisations. No matter how meticulously scripted a covert action may be, the “fog of war” affects it as readily as military forces on a battlefield. Roosevelt may have known that already—he and his confreres chose as the project’s unofficial anthem a song from the musical Guys and Dolls: “Luck Be a Lady Tonight.”10
TPAJAX had its surreal and offbeat moments. Kinzer describes Roosevelt calmly lunching at a colleague’s house in the embassy compound while “[o]utside, Tehran was in upheaval. Cheers and rhythmic chants echoed through the air, punctuated by the sound of gunfire and exploding mortar shells. Squads of soldiers and police surged past the embassy gate every few minutes. Yet Roosevelt’s host and his wife were paragons of discretion, asking not a single question about what was happening.” To set the right mood just before Washington’s chosen coup leader, a senior army general named Fazlollah Zahedi, spoke to the nation on the radio, US officials decided to broadcast some military music. Someone found an appropriate-looking record in the embassy library and put on the first song; to everyone’s embarrassment, it was “The Star-Spangled Banner.” A less politically discordant tune was quickly played, and then Zahedi took the microphone to declare himself “the lawful prime minister by the Shah’s order.” Mossadeq was sentenced to prison and then lifetime internal exile.11
The Shah—who reluctantly signed the decrees removing Mossadeq from office and installing Zahedi, thereby giving the coup a constitutional patina—had fled Iran during the crucial latter days of the operation. When he heard of the successful outcome from his refuge in Rome, he leapt to his feet and cried out, “I knew it! They love me!”12 That serious misreading of his subjects’ feeling toward him showed that he was out of touch already. Seated again on the Peacock Throne, the insecure and vain Shah forsook the opportunity to introduce constitutional reforms that had been on the Iranian people’s minds for decades. Instead, he became a staunch pro-Western satrap with grandiose pretensions. He forced the country into the 20th century economically and socially but ruled like a pre-modern despot, leaving the mosques as the only outlet for dissent. Although the next 25 years of stability that he imposed brought the United States an intelligence payoff the price was dependence on local liaison for information about internal developments. The intelligence gap steadily widened, and Washington was caught by surprise when the Khomeini-inspired Islamist revolution occurred in February 1979.
That takeover, according to Kinzer, links the 51-year-old coup with recent and current terrorism.
With their devotion to radical Islam and their eagerness to embrace even the most horrific kinds of violence, Iran’s revolutionary leaders became heroes to fanatics in many countries. Among those who were inspired by their example were Afghans who founded the Taliban, led it to power in Kabul, and gave Osama bin-Laden the base from which he launched devastating terror attacks. It is not far-fetched to draw a line from Operation Ajax through the Shah’s repressive regime and the Islamic Revolution to the fireballs that engulfed the World Trade Center in New York.13
This conclusion, however, requires too many historical jumps, exculpates several presidents who might have pressured the Shah to institute reforms, and overlooks conflicts between the Shia theocracy in Tehran and Sunni extremists in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.
Kinzer would have been better off making a less sweeping judgment: that TPAJAX got the CIA into the regime-change business for good—similar efforts would soon follow in Guatemala, Indonesia, and Cuba—but that the Agency has had little success at that enterprise, while bringing itself and the United States more political ill will, and breeding more untoward results, than any other of its activities.14 Most of the CIA’s acknowledged efforts of this sort have shown that Washington has been more interested in strongman rule in the Middle East and elsewhere than in encouraging democracy. The result is a credibility problem that accompanied American troops into Iraq and continues to plague them as the United States prepares to hand over sovereignty to local authorities. All the Shah’s Men helps clarify why, when many Iraqis heard President George Bush concede that “[s]ixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe,”15 they may have reacted with more than a little skepticism.
Footnotes
1. “Memorandum of Discussion at the 135th Meeting of the National Security Council, Washington, March 4, 1953,” US Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952-1954, Volume X, Iran, 1951-1954 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1989), 699.
2. Kinzer, p. 121, quoting the British delegate to the UN Security Council, Gladwyn Jebb.
3. Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969), 503.
4. Vernon A. Walters, Silent Missions (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978), 247.
5. John Foster Dulles, quoted in Kermit Roosevelt, Countercoup: The Struggle for the Control of Iran (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979), 8.
6. The British had a covert action against Mossadeq in train until he expelled all British diplomats (including undercover intelligence officers) in October 1952. As Kinzer describes, members of MI-6 collaborated with CIA officers in drawing up the TPAJAX operational plan.
7. Kinzer, 120.
8. Ibid., 206-7.
9. Details of the Agency history were publicized in James Risen, “How a Plot Convulsed Iran in ’53 (and ’79),” New York Times, 16 April 2000, 1, 16-17. Lightly redacted versions of the history are posted on two Web sites:
the New York Times at
10. Kinzer, 175, 211, 13.
11. Ibid., 181, 183-84.
12. Ibid., 184.
13. Ibid., 203-4.
14. Such is the theme of Kinzer’s previous venture (with Stephen Schlesinger) into covert action history, Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala, Anchor Books ed. (New York: Doubleday, 1990), wherein the authors ask, “Was Operation SUCCESS [in Guatemala] necessary and did it really advance US interests, in the long range and in the aggregate?” (xiii).
15. David E. Sanger, “Bush Asks Lands in Mideast to Try Democratic Ways,” New York Times, 7 November 2003: A1.
Dr. David S. Robarge, is a member of CIA’s History Staff. This article is unclassified in its entirety.
Historical Document
Posted: Apr 14, 2007 08:15 PM
Last Updated: Jun 27, 2008 06:54 AM
Last Reviewed: Apr 14, 2007 08:15 PM
carter? how could he even be in the running against bush??
and my biggest gripe about obama is he is exactly like bush
well, almost exactly. bush committed actual treason
until obummer stoops that low bush gets my ‘worst president ever’ vote
and all you guys who pretend to favor small unobtrusive government do your credibility no favor by defending every brutal tin-pot dictator propped up by our tax dollars and the cia.
Please. Stop with the droll bullshit. Plame and hubby were known to brag about her CIA job. It wasn’t as if she was in a covert operation. She wasn’t. She was operating a desk. They can bullshit all they want about WMD, but, it is clear Saddam had them and used them. There is even a link in one of Steve’s articles(comment section) that shows a general for Saddam stating he had them flown to Syria. No shit, we gave him over a year to get them out of the country.
But, more importantly, Treason…………..
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.
Run this by me again how anyone could extrapolate the charge of treason to any actions of George W. Bush or any part of his administration. At the very best its idiotic to make such an absurd assertion, at worst, it is simply an assiduously vile attempt at character assassination.
No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.
The Congress shall have Power to declare the Punishment of Treason, but no Attainder of Treason shall work Corruption of Blood, or Forfeiture except during the Life of the Person attainted.
What part of that isn’t clear?
To you and omnologos……….hindsight being what it is, it is particularly easy to go into the minutia of how things went wrong with Iran. But here’s the thing, people deserve the governments they have. After a couple of generations, I should feel some guilt over the actions of the U.S.? No, and screw you for the implications. If the Iranian people had pulled their collective heads out of their posteriors in times past they wouldn’t have this totalitarian theocracy they have today. And screw them, too. As far as I’m concerned, they’ve got a few things coming. They can bitch and moan about the Shaw all they want, but the fact is they allowed him to have power for several decades and to their advantage. Mostly by U.S. and G.B. money.
Now, if we want to extrapolate treason……what about protecting people that we knew we would be fighting next? That bastard Clinton did that very act. And we did fight our friends from Bosnia in Iraq. But we knew we would.
You know, Bush certainly had his flaws. In his last two years, he lost all of my support. But compared to the ‘fore and aft. I’d take him any and every day.
suyts – your words would make sense if the USA would keep out of other people’s troubles, at least most of the time. But they don’t. And so the USA’s actions of year X have consequences on the USA in year X+50. I have already made the example of President Wilson’s mistake in promising freedom only to ally himself to the colonial powers: the consequence of that PLUS the continuous involvement of the USA in the affairs of foreign countries has been the death of an enormous number of US citizens in the Vietnam conflict. Plus all the other consequences of that defeat.
SO it’s not matter of “feeling guilty”…who cares about past “guilt” in international affairs…it’s a matter of recognizing that one sows what one reaps. Compare Eastern Europe to the Arabian Peninsula and check what the USA has reaped from each of those areas, where its intervention has been drastically different.
In places like the Czech Republic and Poland the USA has associated itself with “freedom”. As it should of course be. Guess how many “martyrs” from the Czech Republic have exploded themselves this century (or the past one).
Now compare that to Saudi Arabia.
In Egypt, the USA has always associated itself with Mubarak. It should go without saying that President Obama, even more than President Bush before him, is utterly discredited as a potential ally of any democratic movement over there. The best Hillary could do TO PROTECT THE LONG TERM INTERESTS OF THE USA, is to keep quiet and away.
The reaping and sowing goes both ways. The U.S. only gets involved when people allow it and ask for it. They love our milk and honey, but they don’t like what comes with it? Screw them. Wilson? He was a low life elitist.
I’ll lay it out as simple and base as I can. If they don’t want us there, don’t accept our money and help. Most in this country would be more than happy to see our money, troops, and food stay here. As far as your “drastically different intervention”, you’ll have to explain, because I don’t see it as drastically different other than places like Czechoslovakia /Czech/Slovenia had the wherewithal to do it, in most part, on their own. Sorry, apparently they are a stronger willed group of people, although weak by most western world standards. And let’s not pretend U.S. engagement did not occur. And there aren’t really many parallels to be drawn from eastern Europe to the mid-east.
You mentioned Vietnam. How fitting. A group of people that cried for our help and intervention. A line in a movie……”never fired and only dropped once.” That, of course, was referring to the U.S. supplied weapons for the Vietnamese. You can call it a defeat if you will, but that was the end of Soviet expansionism. It was the showing of our willingness to engage, even in a place of no concern, where even the people of the nation had no willingness to free themselves, the U.S. thwarted the overt expansion of Soviet communism. Yeh, we took a hit there, and I’m still waiting for that world “thank you” note. Its so pathetic that now its a no win situation for the U.S. If we engage and interact, the world calls it nation building or some such. If we don’t engage, and the country devolves into chaos or worse people see it as us allowing genocide or other such nonsense. I’d be perfectly happy to shut our borders and say to hell with the rest of the world. Sadly, the world would call that some form of evil or racism at the very least. The way I see, until the world decides to put its “big boy pants on” and do shit themselves, without our money, troops or food, then they’ve got nothing to say other than “thank you”.
Maurizio, I don’t wish to offend, you often offer great perspectives and views I deem very relevant. But, I think its past time for the world to get over blaming the U.S. for every ill that befalls it. In this global economy, the U.S. has an obligation to protect our interests abroad. When I say “our”, I mean the U.S.’, not some vague notion of the botherhood of man.
interesting james.
you are on to something by connecting bosnia and afghanistan. for example one of my associates who remained in the army said one day he was directing targets for one of osama’s ‘jihadis’ in serbia and the next he was dropping ordinance on osama’s ‘jihadis’ in afghanistan. i could give you lots of examples of this type of thing.
and it is easy to say as an american that people should not blame us for all their problems, but the truth is we do terrible things all over the world just so an investor can get 1.60 instead of 1.40 on his dollar.
we can bitch and moan about clinton and bush, or carter and reagan. but it does not matter who is president. politics are just the front-end for economics. it is all about $$$
peterhodges says:
January 31, 2011 at 9:46 pm
Sorry Pete, you are barking up the wrong tree. You just cited that the CIA was involved. If you go back and read my rebuttal, you will not see me denying or confirming that. Indeed, I did not talk about the CIA. I clearly stated, and stand by my statement that it was not a coup. You have done nothing except waste space arguing a point not being contested by me. If the CIA was involved or not is immaterial. The Shah had the right and authority to disolve the government of Iran. You may not like it, but the truth is not to be liked or disliked. It simply is.
well then talk to the cia….quoting the official historian above
“The Shah—who reluctantly signed the decrees removing Mossadeq from office and installing Zahedi, thereby giving the coup a constitutional patina—had fled Iran during the crucial latter days of the operation.”
that’w why they call them puppet dictators
hey, and looks like one thing we all seem to agree on, is that we ought to really just keep our money and politics at home.
Why should I talk to the CIA? I have not commented on them, only pointed out that the Shah had the authority to disolve the government and therefore it was not a coup.
YOu may want to talk to the CIA about that aspect of it if you please as you seem to be the only one debating it.
President Teddy Roosevelt said “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” Guess which President says “Teleprompt loudly and hoist a white flag!” (To see a related web article that some have banned, Google “Obama Fulfilling the Bible.”)