Given the growing likelihood of the Gaza maelstrom moving on to a direct military confrontation between the US and Iran, the epic plight of the Iranian people should not be overlooked – a plight which Britain and the Americans instigated back in the 1950s with the removal of their democratic rights and in which hopes for restoration of these rights have been dashed by the political grip of their own clerics.
While Iran’s contribution in wilfully growing the magnitude of the crisis is clear, it is just as clear that the kind of entrenched fundamentalist leadership which has brought this about is not necessarily representative of a population which has not had the freedom to decide who should lead it since the middle of the 1900s.
The plight of the Iranian people starts, as it must, with oil and the usual suspects – Britain and the US. The story goes as follows.
Dating from around the seventh century BCE, Iran (then Persia) is one of the world’s oldest and proudest civilisations. Once dominating a vast swathe of western Asia and the Middle East for more than 12 centuries, its national traditions and achievements date way back to the likes of Cyrus The Great and Darius 1 (also The Great). Its contributions to language, art, culture and science were widely acknowledged and admired. And its wealth was seriously coveted.
Islam, which came to Iran in the seventh century CE, was, in important ways, similar to both Judaism and Christianity, with the genesis of each sharing key prophets and thinkers. Which is unsurprising, given that each of these three towering faiths arose from the lands of the Semites (which includes Arabs and Jews) who remain, ethnically, indistinguishable from each other. Mostly of Persian ethnicity, the Iranians include rich mixtures of Semites and other regional ethnicities.
In more recent millennia, through what became known as ‘The Great Game”, Russia and Britain fought and traded and politicked long and hard throughout the region in order to acquire dominance and riches. Iran and the equally great civilisations of the nearby Indian sub-continent were central to this game. By the end of the 19th century, Britain had thoroughly, insidiously, achieved a controlling influence in Iran – as it had already done with India and much of Arabia and the wider world of Islam.
Interesting, but not in fact that remarkable in terms of the way things were between the rulers and the schemers and their generals over the more or less languid course of history up to that time.
But then along came the big game changer: oil.
It was discovered in Iran in the early 1900s. And, as it turned out, plenty of it. Until then, Britain had not come across a suitably rich find of its own of this energy source of unlimited potential. Well, this wasn’t theirs of course, but never mind. The first oil well in Iran and the Middle East was drilled in 1908, and Britain’s Anglo-Persian Oil Company, later the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, was founded in 1909. Many other big finds would follow throughout the region, but this was the one that got it all going.
Just the year before this discovery, the regional rivalry between Britain and Russia had been called off by way of the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907. This had been in response to moves by Imperial Germany to align with the Ottoman Empire and its ambitions in the region, and it had the effect of leaving Imperial Britain alone to its assigned area of interest in Iran
At this time, the Americans already had plenty of oil, had progressed its uses and had realised its tremendous utility in wealth creation. Britain, never a laggard in wealth creation and then the world’s dominant naval power, was soon to realise that in addition to all of its emerging potential uses, oil, lighter and more efficient than coal, would give it back the weight required for both a faster and longer-range fleet, and for fitting out its ships with bigger, longer-range cannons.
Arising from a formally contracted deal between the APOC and Iran in 1914, in which Iran was to receive a scandalously paltry percentage of the net profits from its oil, everything was going along just fine for Britain until, in 1951, to their horror, the parliament of its compliant, purpose-minted puppet ruler, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, led by its popular newly elected Prime Minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, nationalised AIOC and thus Britain’s by now vast oil interests in Iran. The matter went to court, where its resolution ran into sufficient obstacles, not least of which was the Iranian court’s own doubts about its legal authority to adjudicate, that Britain realised it needed help.
Winston Churchill spoke to Harry Truman who, although he had his hands full with Korea (and Russian backing of Korea’s north) and the American occupation of Japan, saw the point – which was about future energy security and, not incidentally, obscenely fat profits for both countries. On the plausible enough pretext that if this wasn’t sorted quickly, the Russians, by now comprehensively at odds with their former Western allies, might swoop, a coup d’état was quickly arranged by MI6 and the CIA. What a team! Consult the Iranian people who had put Mossadegh in power in the first place? Not a chance!
Government power was centralised under Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the Shah, and Mossadegh was deposed and imprisoned for the rest of his life, for, of all things, treason. AIOC became, now unabashedly, imperiously, British Petroleum and John D Rockefeller’s Standard Oil was quickly on the scene.
The Shah’s ensuing reign of repression and terror, condoned and supported throughout its extravagant existence by the team, began. Big foreign business revelled in it; friends of the Americans celebrated it; the Shah and his family and his hangers-on luxuriated in it; Savak, hard-wired to the CIA and MI6, ran amok; and the consequences for Iran and Iranians were disastrous. The people remained, mostly, impoverished.
By the late 1970s, the people of Iran had suffered enough and, in an epic uprising, the Shah and his sponsors fled as the people turned to their faith and to its leaders as the only available way to expel the robber barons and their Shah. The Americans and their cohort turned their ire on Iran and Iranians and their faith, the mantra for the Americans being that they, the Iranian people, were to blame for what was to become of the Middle East.
In this factual historical context, it does not take much of an understanding of how the great minds of Anglo-American power and greed have functioned, both then and now, to see how, in the aftermath of Hitler’s slaughter of the Jews (while, it can be said, the rest of Christian Europe more or less looked on), the highly emotional prospect of a homeland for them could be used to insert a powerful back-up for the protection of Anglo-American oil interests in the region. Iran and the Shah in the east, Saudi Arabia, then too a work in progress, in the middle and Israel in the west. An Israel which would be bound to have to depend on massive assistance from the West to resist those of the region, as seriously and not unreasonably offended as they were by the theft of such a huge chunk of Palestine.
But it has all come undone.
They — now primarily the Americans — brought about their own expulsion from Iran; built the House of Saud up to such a position of wealth and power and arrogance that it is now more and more ready to thumb its nose at them; and, in their massive support of Israel, created a regime that is now so heavily armed and so mightily self-righteous that it can wreak the kind of havoc on the people of Gaza that would have made Abraham (or Ibrahim) weep. Sure, he would have wept along with the Israelis and everyone else over the viciousness of 7 October, but he would just as surely have condemned them for the disproportionate viciousness of their over-reaction.
Like much of what they have done and what they continue to do elsewhere in the world to impose their wealth and power, the Americans should —, but of course will not — take a major portion of the blame for this whole Middle East conflagration. And, as well, for what is to follow — as this is one conflict from which they can’t walk away — as they did with, for example, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria.
Today, quite predictably, their response to Benjamin Netanyahu showing them who their boss really is, is to escalate: to bring up, fists pumping, two carrier groups and a nuclear submarine.
Just as predictably, the plight of the Iranian people deepens.
Howard Debenham is a former diplomat with a long list of postings including as High Commissioner to Sri Lanka, Consul-General in Bangkok, Tokyo and Washington DC, and State Director for Queensland. He authored ‘Waiting ‘round the Bend – a life in Australia’s foreign service’.
Contributions to Pearls and Irritations
Your contribution will fund quality independent comment and analysis in Pearls and Irritations
Contribute
