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Did the U.S. Oust Iran's Prime Minister in 1953?

(Washington Times) Sean Durns - The Islamic Republic of Iran likes to claim that the U.S. is solely responsible for toppling the democratically-elected Iranian leader Mohammad Mossadegh in a 1953 coup - so that Iran's anti-U.S. attitudes are understandable, even justified. But as Ray Takeyh, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, noted in a 2014 Foreign Affairs article, in the years prior to the 1953 coup, the U.S. was providing economic assistance to Iran - "assistance that helped ease the pain" of a British blockade which followed Mossadegh's push to nationalize the country's oil. It was Mossadegh who rejected every U.S. attempt to broker a solution between the British and Iran. As the country's economy suffered, its citizens grew increasingly critical of their prime minister. Finally Mossadegh lost control of the military and fled. As Takeyh noted, "The documentary record reveals that the Eisenhower administration was hardly in control and was in fact surprised by the way events played out." Post-coup, U.S. diplomatic cables cited Iran's military "and great numbers [of] Iranian civilians inherently loyal to [the] Shah" as crucial. The writer is a senior research analyst for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA).
2018-08-31 00:00:00
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