With the overthrow of Mossadegh, the Shah, who had been won over by the US on the assurance that he would be get his old throne back was making sure this time around that no one could threaten him off his peacock throne. His needs were extravagant, he could not withstand criticism, any of it led to oppression and brutality and within no time the people had had enough with the result that the anger found voice in the leadership of the Islamic fundamentalists and with them came the dawn of a new regime.
The Shah had mainly survived on US aid which according to some figures was nearly more than $1 billion in the decade following the coup. After he abdicated his throne and ran, he took shelter in the United States. Which mixed with the part the Americans had played in the 1953 coup resulted in a “frenzy of rage” where Iranian radicals stormed the American embassy in Tehran and took fifty-two American diplomats as hostages for more than fourteen months. This was another turning point in American-Iranians relations and have things have only been going downhill since then. Few years down the line we saw a war break out between Iran and Iraq, where the US support was reserved for Iraq which further strengthened the position of Saddam Hussein in the country. It was during this period that the anti-American feeling in the people became intense; the interference by the Americans has been a sour and festering wound all these years. In the US it was also the strengthening of the role of CIA, “covert action came to be regarded as a cheap and effective way to shape course of world events.” The Dulles brothers of whom I mentioned in the last post, were already planning CIA’s second coup d’état, this time it was Guatemala, from then they only moved on to Cuba, Chile, Congo and Vietnam. President Truman who had been steadfast in his opposition to interfering in Iran had warned that any mishandling of the Iran crisis will lead to “a disaster to the free world.”
Obviously the biggest result was the establishment of the Islamic Republic; the fundamentalists who came to power imposed “religious fascism” in the country. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is the current Supreme Leader in Iran, at that time said, “We are not liberals like Allende and Mossadegh, whom the CIA can snuff out.” It’s no secret that the new regime in Iran has secretly funded organisations such as the Hezbollah and Hamas. I have already written on a few issues concerning the Islamic Republic, women, media and religion.
James A. Bill an American historian who spent considerable time researching the effects of the coups points them out clearly when he says, “American policy in Iran during the early 1950s succeeded in ensuring that there would be no communist takeover in the country at the time, and that Iranian oil reserves would be available to the Western world at advantageous terms for two decades afterwards. It also deeply alienated Iranian patriots of all social classes and weakened the moderate, liberal nationalists represented by the organisations like the National Front. This paved the way for the incubation of extremism, both of the left and of the right. This extremism became unalterably anti-American…The fall of Mossadegh marked the end of a century of friendship between the two countries, and began a new era of US intervention and growing hostility against the United States among the weakened forces of Iranian nationalism.”
The events of that day changed Iranian politics, and as we can see the future of the country. Who knows if the coup of 1953 had never happened, maybe, Iran could have been a secular country with secular laws.
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