In August 1953, Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq, regarded by the Eisenhower administration as too weak in the face of growing Communist influence in Iran, was forced from office by street violence engineered, in part, by CIA operatives with the help of British counterparts. The acquiescence of certain Iranian political and clerical elites facilitated the coup. The young Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, who had fled the country in the midst of the violence, was restored to the throne.
As years went by, more and more Iranians became alienated from a regime that seemed to identify with US political purposes and culture at the expense of Iran’s own cultural and religious traditions. All this culminated in the Shah’s overthrow in 1979, the advent of the Islamic revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini and the attendant hostage crisis, which ended in 1981.
Today, with the future of US-Iranian relations a principal item on our post-Saddam Hussein agenda, we would be well advised to recall that regime change in 1953. Mosaddeq was hardly a democrat, but to most Iranian readers of history, his ouster halted an evolving democratic impulse that the Shah’s increasingly rigid rule ultimately killed. As hostages in the 1979 seizure of the US Embassy, when we railed about our status, a typical response from our captors was that the US government had taken an entire country hostage in 1953, so we had no basis to complain.
While the exact dimensions of US involvement in the Shah’s restoration to power remain a matter of historical debate, the US thereafter was seen as the real power behind his throne, setting the high-water mark of foreign intrusion into the body politic of Iran. In the 19th century, it was the Russians under the czars, in occasional collusion with the British. In the 20th century, the Soviets in Azerbaijan and the British in the oil-nationalization crisis before the ouster of Mosaddeq meddled in Iranian affairs.
Khomeini built on this historical “foreign-hand’’ theme in Iranian politics to accomplish his revolution with the rallying cry of America as the Great Satan. Today, that theme continues to politically underpin the clerical leadership’s hold on power, even in the face of clear evidence that a majority of Iranians favors dialogue with the United States.
The revolution, from its beginnings, has been out of touch with Iran’s national and cultural traditions. Khomeini’s doctrine of “veleyati i faqui’’ — the concept of the supreme leader as God’s representative on Earth — is out of line with Shiite doctrinal traditions. The provision for a separate executive — today in the person of President Mohammad Khatami — is demonstrably unworkable. The result is that Iran’s immense human and material potential is hobbled by a failing governmental structure. Students are again on the street protesting the theocracy’s denial of their desire for greater political and personal freedom.
Regime change in Tehran is inevitable. But it must come from within. Iran is not Iraq. It is big; it is populous: 70 million and counting. It is overwhelmingly Shiite. Its people are culture-proud and intensely nationalistic. Change will come, but it can and should be “soft’’ change.
Playing our cards wisely, there are ways we can encourage it. Iran is confronted on both its eastern and western borders with a US military presence. Contact is inevitable, and so is dialogue, albeit limited for the present to discussions in Geneva on what were billed as “practical matters’’ — before we summarily ended them in the aftermath of the suicide bombings in Saudi Arabia and the suspicion of Iranian involvement in support of Al-Qaeda elements. If there is such evidence, that is all the more reason for contacts to resume, as counterintuitive as that seems.
The United States and Iran have shared interests in seeing progress toward cohesion in Afghanistan. The reality of our presence in Iraq and the Gulf states virtually dictates the need to start thinking seriously about a regional focus on long-term security arrangements.
This is no time for a Mosaddeq repeat. Outside involvement risks derailing the momentum for change already under way in Iran, change that could eventually force the theocracy to collapse of its own weight. As an old expression has it, patience is a bitter cup that only the strong can drink.
— Laingen is a former hostage and now president of the American Academy of Diplomacy.
