(For an opposite — and vastly overwrought — view of this history from the left, check out this post from Matthew Taylor at Mondoweiss.)
This reading of history may or may not be true — I can’t say I have the personal documentation to prove it either way. (Certainly, some of Iran’s clerics — but not all; some opposition figures are mullahs, too — have culpability in last summer’s repression of democracy, as Takeyh rightly adds at the end of his piece.) But I can say that all I have read on the subject presents the CIA efforts — “Operation Ajax” — as a major part of the coup. Stephen Kinzer’s excellent book, “All the Shah’s Men,” is one such source, as is the memoir of CIA operative who organized the covert actions, Kim Roosevelt (Takeyh mentions the latter, and dismisses it as a self-serving inflation of the U.S. role).
But another question about this op-ed is, why now?
It is fair enough to ask the historical question at the anniversary of the event — if the clerical structure did play such a role, it should cop to it, of course — but it seems out of place, amid the heated rhetoric of bombing runs on Iran, to blame the “mullahs” for sins that the last two Democratic administrations have admitted to. In 2000, then-Secretary of State Madeline Albright confirmed a U.S. role in the 1953 overthrow and in his Cairo speech in June of 2009, Obama admitted it as well (“In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically-elected Iranian government.”).
As noted before here at LobeLog, Takeyh wrote another Post op-ed last month that seemed to be enabling the hawks who call for a strike — a step-by-step of how to prepare the diplomatic and military logistics of such a bombing run. The fact that Takeyh is a liberal-leaning centrist, and a Democratic adviser casts his positions on Iran in a different light.
If this article were to be accepted as policy, as the ideas of think-tank scholars are meant to be, the roll-back of previous U.S. admissions would certainly feed into the paranoia of both the clerics currently in charge as well as ordinary Iranians. The U.S. administration of Barack Obama, so far as they would be concerned, would obviously not be trustworthy, immediately quashing any potential further negotiations.
It may be that the trust deficit between the United States and Iran is already too great. But why, at this late stage, push the sides further apart?
]]>Washington Times: In an editorial, the über-hawkish DC daily echoes John Bolton (referenced in our last entry here) and calls for a strike against Iran’s Bushehr reactor before fuel rods are inserted in the plant. Their revised timeline gives the United [...]]]>
Washington Times: In an editorial, the über-hawkish DC daily echoes John Bolton (referenced in our last entry here) and calls for a strike against Iran’s Bushehr reactor before fuel rods are inserted in the plant. Their revised timeline gives the United States or Israel just two days to act — though they state that it might not be so bad to wait because the radiation-fallout that Bolton seeks to avoid would be a way for a potential strike to “hinder Iranian attempts to get it back up and running.” The editors opine that “action is needed,” but admit that it’s unlikely.
NY Times.com: At the Opinionator blog, Robert Wright offers a nuanced reading of Jeffery Goldberg‘s recent Atlantic story on the likelihood of an Israeli military strike on Iran in the coming year (50-50, Goldberg says). Wright says that while there is a “bit of channeling” Bibi Netanyahu, “the piece is no simple propaganda exercise.” Wright concludes that while the piece is, if anything, a poor piece of war propaganda, it is instructive because it answers questions about the weak Israeli public (and private) reasons for bombing, and also offers the United States a map for constructing a plan to avoid that scenario, especially given that the piece offers “no sound rationale for bombing Iran.”
Arms Control Wonk: Joshua Pollack, an occasional U.S. government consultant, laments that the arms control community — “nuke nerds” — are not playing a big enough role in discussions over what to do about Iran’s nuclear program, often only speaking amongst themselves in acronym-heavy jargon. So he offers, in plain English, a little parsing about the different views of Iran’s nuclear goals: What, for instance, does “going nuclear” even mean? “If Iran is going to achieve breakout capability at a hidden facility somewhere — call it Son of Qom — then bombing Natanz won’t address that problem,” write Pollack. “The name of the game today isn’t bombing, it’s intelligence.” (Hat Tip to Laicie Olson)
Washington Post: On the anniversary of the 1953 coup d’etat that unseated the democratically elected and secular Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh (and re-installed the dictatorial Shah), Council on Foreign Relations fellow Ray Takeyh examines the events and offers an unusual account that places the blame for the failure of democracy fifty-seven years ago squarely on the same societal forces responsible for last summer’s squashing of democratic expression: Iran’s clerics.
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