Ben Shapiro

But let's go all the way back to 1950, the height of the Cold War.

Iran was essentially aligned with the West at that time.

We, of course, had developed their oil resources, so had Britain.

Meanwhile, Stalin and the Soviet Union were looking directly at Iran.

Now, the reason I say elected is because the Shah actually is the one who had the power under the Iranian constitution to both appoint and remove prime ministers, sort of like the president names a Supreme Court justice and then the Senate confirms.

In fact, the Shah did this a lot.

As Peter Thoreau pointed out at Tablet magazine between 1953 and 79, the Shah would appoint and dismiss 10 more prime ministers, including Mossadegh twice.

So what went wrong?

Well, Mossadegh tried to essentially centralize all power.

He tried to break the constitution.

He dissolved the parliament unconstitutionally.

He was ruling by decree.

He nationalized the oil industry, essentially seizing Western assets, and he was aggressively cozying up to the Soviet Union.

The United States and the British looked at this and decided that it was a bad idea to have a Soviet puppet state sitting on top of some of the largest oil reserves on planet Earth, that handing the keys to the Middle East and the Soviet Union was actually kind of stupid.

So, the CIA helped support the Shah in removing Mossadegh.

The Shah issued what was called a farman, that was a royal edict, terminating Mossadegh as prime minister.

Mossadegh refused to leave.

The entire military infrastructure backed the Shah.

Some demonstrations broke out, and eventually Mossadegh acknowledged disaster.

That's the whole story.