Interesting connection is that Norman Schwarzkopf Sr. helped train both the Iranian national police and what later became SAVAK, and negotiated with the Shah to return to Iran... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Schwarzkopf_Sr.
His son was the American general that led the first Gulf War, Operation Desert Storm/Shield.
You can draw a line directly from the coup in 1953 to the revolution in 1979, so it's pretty fair to blame the US for the revolution and what came after.
I can recommend the documentary Coup 53 [0] on this subject. The rest of the episodes of End of Empire have kindly been uploaded to YouTube and are worth a watch.
Not just Iran, but also Egypt. ->https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_FF 70+ years of darned military junta rule. With a small 1 year break between July 2012 and July 2013.
I met an exiled Iranian in Paris 13 years ago, and spent multiple nights in his appartement, drinking and talking (and testing his weed shipment :/ ).
He told me his clan/family was from northeast Iran, with presence in Afghanistan. They were allied to the Shah in 53 (not for his first coup though), and allied to both US and UK. He told me his 'import export' businesses was family business since the 50s: the US actually furnished them with both equipments and weapons and started their drug operation. He said his clan used and was used by the US twice, once against Iran democracy, the second time against the USSR in Afghanistan, and both times they ended up with nothing but troubles.
They ended up exiling most of their clan to western capitals in the 90s. They still have land there I think.
It's interesting to see how the perspective on this is shifting in Iran to the point that nowadays, it became controversial to call this a coup. In the royalist version of events, it is Mosaddegh who attempted a coup. Mosaddegh had lost is parliamentary majority, but was still very popular. A held a referendum to dissolve parliament and give himself as prime minister the power to make law. The Shah responded by dismissing Mosaddegh. The Shah had the constitutional right to do this, because Parliament was not in session.
That's of course only part of the story, and it completely ignores the role of Britain and the US. But what is interesting to me is not so much what exactly happened, but how peoples' view on history changes with shifting political moods. A generation ago in Iran, basically everyone agreed that this was a coup by Western imperialist powers. Today, with growing opposition to the political system, comes a questioning of the "official" history as thought in schools. Young people are today looking for different (but equally one-sided) versions of the story in which the roles of good and bad get reversed.
So many Americans naively believe this fairy story about their country, when the reality is a lot darker and more brutal. The intervention in Iran was neither an isolated event, nor was even close to the first coup that the US perpetrated at the behest of business interests. Starting with Samoa and Hawaii in the 1800s, an extremely violent occupation of the Philippines in the early part of the 20th century, and interventions in Honduras, Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, The Dominican Republic and Costa Rica, the US had a long history of this sort of behavior before Iran. Often undertaken under the guise of fighting communism or some other nebulous threat, these acts were in fact naked money grabs intended to secure the dominion of US corporate interests, established during colonialism, over land, labor and assets like oil, lumber and precious minerals in countries where local governments were attempting to seize back control of these assets, and in many cases grant them back to the often poor and rural communities that should have owned them in the first place.
Tim Weiner's book Legacy of Ashes is a good overview of the many "interventions" the US undertook to replace regimes that threatened the economic domination of the West. For the lazy, Wikipedia provides a decent list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
It's a bizarre sort of internal contradiction that allows people to believe in the overwhelming power of the United States while refusing to accept that the exercise of that power has shaped pretty much everything about the modern world. From Korea, where the US propped up a puppet regime staffed by Japanese collaborators post-WW II, leading to a civil war and partition, to Iran, to Russia, which was bankrupted and impoverished by US interests after the end of the Cold War. Those same interests then hand-picked a certain Vladimir Putin as a successor to their man Yeltsin. Unfortunately, most Americans are entirely ignorant of what actually occurred during these events because they were either never reported in the news, or reported in the distorted and propagandistic fashion that the US media tends to adopt.
They've done it so many times at this point that they don't actually have to bother sending in the CIA, they just make their preference clear and let the "or else" remain unspoken.
Putin didn't have that kind of power nationally during the Yeltsin years. He was powerful in St. Petersburg, but he would never have risen to national prominence had Yeltsin not hand-picked him as his successor. Yeltsin, in turn, was propped by a coalition of Western interests who had helped him orchestrate a slate of "market based" reforms known as shock therapy, which in effect bankrupted the country while simultaneously conducting a fire sale of everything valuable to western business interests. People forget, but when Putin rose to power the American press lavished him with praise as "someone we could do business with", and Putin even broached the idea of joining NATO with President Clinton at one point. Had Bush not (needlessly) pulled out of ABM treaty a year later, the first in a series of utterly pointless provocations of a country we at that point viewed as a potential ally, our relationship with Russia might look very different today.
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His son was the American general that led the first Gulf War, Operation Desert Storm/Shield.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_Shah%27s_Men
"Following the nationalizations in 1979 and the outbreak of the Iran–Iraq War, over 80% of the economy came under government control.[34]"
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coup_53
He told me his clan/family was from northeast Iran, with presence in Afghanistan. They were allied to the Shah in 53 (not for his first coup though), and allied to both US and UK. He told me his 'import export' businesses was family business since the 50s: the US actually furnished them with both equipments and weapons and started their drug operation. He said his clan used and was used by the US twice, once against Iran democracy, the second time against the USSR in Afghanistan, and both times they ended up with nothing but troubles.
They ended up exiling most of their clan to western capitals in the 90s. They still have land there I think.
That's of course only part of the story, and it completely ignores the role of Britain and the US. But what is interesting to me is not so much what exactly happened, but how peoples' view on history changes with shifting political moods. A generation ago in Iran, basically everyone agreed that this was a coup by Western imperialist powers. Today, with growing opposition to the political system, comes a questioning of the "official" history as thought in schools. Young people are today looking for different (but equally one-sided) versions of the story in which the roles of good and bad get reversed.
Tim Weiner's book Legacy of Ashes is a good overview of the many "interventions" the US undertook to replace regimes that threatened the economic domination of the West. For the lazy, Wikipedia provides a decent list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
It's a bizarre sort of internal contradiction that allows people to believe in the overwhelming power of the United States while refusing to accept that the exercise of that power has shaped pretty much everything about the modern world. From Korea, where the US propped up a puppet regime staffed by Japanese collaborators post-WW II, leading to a civil war and partition, to Iran, to Russia, which was bankrupted and impoverished by US interests after the end of the Cold War. Those same interests then hand-picked a certain Vladimir Putin as a successor to their man Yeltsin. Unfortunately, most Americans are entirely ignorant of what actually occurred during these events because they were either never reported in the news, or reported in the distorted and propagandistic fashion that the US media tends to adopt.
https://theintercept.com/2023/08/09/imran-khan-pakistan-cyph...
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