Mohammad Mossadegh: The Iranian Revolution

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He who commits injustice is ever made more wretched than he who suffers it. -Plato Over a half century ago, in the early morning hours of August 19, 1953, the United States successfully launched it’s first clandestine peacetime CIA sponsored overthrow of a sovereign nation. The Iranian coup d’etat deposed the first, and last, “ popular, democratically oriented government to hold office in Iran” (http://iran.sa.utoronto.ca/coup/web_files/markcoup.html). The regime that replaced the popular Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh was a dictatorship led by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, a ruthless tyrant whose oppressive rule lasted for the next 25 years. It is believed that his policies produced the tensions that led to the 1978-1979 Iranian revolution as well as laying the groundwork for the profound anti-American sentiment and the rise of the Islamic Fundamentalists and the multiple…show more content…
He was against the option of war with Iran or any use of force by the British and let them know that. The American attitude toward a coup dramatically changed after the 1952 election where, “within days of the election, a senior agent of the Secret Intelligence Service, Christopher Montaugue Woodhouse, came to Washington for meetings with top CIA and State Department officials. Woodhouse shrewdly decided not to make the traditional British argument, which was that Mossadegh must go because he had nationalized British property. That argument did not arouse much passion in Washington. Woodhouse knew what would.” In All The Shahs Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror by Stephen Kinzer (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., , Hoboken, N.J., 2003, 2006) Woodhouse later wrote of the issue as “not wishing to be accused of trying to use the Americans to pull British chestnuts out of the fire I decided to emphasize the Communist threat to Iran rather than the need to recover control of the oil
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