Mohammed Reza Pahlavi during the 1953 Iranian coup
Shortly after Israel bombed Iran, the BBC “journalist” Laura Kuenssberg interviewed Prince Reza Pahlavi.
You couldn’t make it up if you tried. His father, the Shah of Iran, became dictator in 1953 after the United States and Britain launched a coup against a democratically-elected government.
“The root cause of the problem is the Iranian regime,” Prince Reza Pahlavi told the BBC.
But if you want to understand why the Iranian regime is in power, you needn’t look further than the Pahlavi dynasty and its Western apologists.
Iran was never colonised by the European Empires, but it has suffered a series of bloody interventions. The reason? Oil.
In 1909 the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, a forerunner to BP, was set up as a subsidiary of Britain’s oil corporations. It struck a deal with the Qajar rulers of Iran, then known as Persia, that gave it control of the country’s oil fields.
For a mere £20 million in today’s money and 16 percent of profits, the British corporation grabbed over 500,000 square miles.
The First World War saw Britain tighten its grip on Iran oil—and the state as a whole. Winston Churchill, then head of the Royal Navy, declared, “We must become owners, or at any rate the controllers at the source of supply of oil.”
The British state took a 50 percent stake in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company to ensure it had a decisive say in global capitalism. Britain saw the war as a major opportunity to carve up the Middle East and gain control of neighbouring Iraq, tipped to have vast oil fields.
But the British faced a major problem. The First World War unleashed a wave of revolutions and revolts, primarily in Russia in 1917, against the imperialist slaughter and the ruling classes responsible for it.
The old Persian state was disintegrating amid a deep crisis and resistance from below. A rebellion against the monarchy and British domination of Iran had broken out in Gilan province in the north in 1915.
The rebels fought the Persian state’s imperialist backers, Britain and Tsarist Russia. And after the 1917 revolution, the anti-imperialist insurgency looked to the new workers’ republic in Russia as an ally.
In stepped Reza Pahlavi, a middle class cavalry officer who promised to restore law and order and develop a new Iranian state. He launched a coup in 1921—and would go on to install himself as Shah (king) of Iran in 1925.
British imperialism backed Pahlavi’s coup and saw him as a bulwark against Soviet Russia and someone who would safeguard its oil interests.
Britain got its way carving up the Middle East along with the French Empire, and worked with US oil corporations to exploit the region’s resources.
Following the Second World War, the US replaced Britain as the dominant imperialist power.
A key flashpoint came in the early 1950s as the West tried to maintain its control of the Middle East in the face of anti-colonial, nationalist challenges.
In 1951, liberal nationalist Mohammad Mosaddeq was elected the prime minister of Iran. The British government—led by Labour titan Clement Attlee—was furious with his plans to nationalise the Anglo-Iranian oil company. How dare a state use its oil wealth to invest in development, rather than lining the British state’s coffers?
Mosaddeq soon clashed with the Shah—son of Reza Pahlavi who launched the coup and father of the present prince.
The Shah remained loyal to Britain and was determined to maintain control of the country’s military. After Mosaddeq resigned in protest, the British installed a puppet prime minister, Ahmad Qavam.
But a wave of protests broke out and faced down the Shah’s troops, who murdered 67 protesters. And just five days later, Mosaddeq was reinstated as prime minister.
So, Britain began plotting a military coup to install Fazlollah Zahedi—a Nazi sympathiser—as prime minister.
One of Britain’s first steps was to torture and murder Mohamoud Afshartous. The police chief had drawn up a list of Iranian officials who were working with Britain and the US to undermine the government.
When asked if he was part of the assassination, British MI6 agent Norman Darbyshire subsequently said, “Yes.”
By 1953, Tory prime minister Winston Churchill and Republican president Dwight Eisenhower approved “Operation Ajax”. MI6 and the CIA had the go-ahead to overthrow Mosaddeq and persuaded the Shah to appoint Zahedi as prime minister.
The initial coup on 16 August failed and the CIA ordered its agents to withdraw from Iran. But Darbyshire had a back-up plan that involved US-paid provocateurs infiltrating protests that had erupted in response to the coup.
That was used as a pretext for the military to ramp up repression, and tanks and troops attacked Mosaddeq’s house on 19 August.
Outrageously, Mosaddeq was accused of “treason”, deposed and held in solitary confinement until his death in 1967.
British, European and US corporations got their hands on Iranian oil once more. The Shah became an absolute ruler and built a brutal dictatorship that suppressed the working class and democratic organisations.
His notorious secret police, the Savak, terrorised Iranians while he was feted in Washington DC, London, Berlin and other Western capitals. He crushed Mosaddeq’s liberal nationalist National Front party and the left, chiefly the Tudeh Communist Party.
Iran became a key pillar of US imperialism in the region and an ally of its watchdog state, Israel.
The Shah’s regime was torn down in the Iranian Revolution of 1979 that saw mass protests, strikers and working class self-organisation. Unfortunately, the Iranian left was outflanked in the revolution by the Islamist forces that went on to set up the present Iranian regime.
The fact that the BBC parade Pahlavi as an “authority” on Iran today is a foul reminder of the West’s bloody history of intervention.
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