Chapter 1: What historical events led to the rise of Iran's current regime?
Whenever you open Axe or TikTok, you're guaranteed to be subjected to the most backward, historically illiterate takes imaginable about a lot of things. These days, a lot of those takes involve Iran. Axe will tell you that the United States is the aggressor in the region.
They'll tell you that if we just played nice, if we just apologized to Iran for our history, then peace would break out everywhere. Yeah, so that's bullshit. So as the war in Iran continues, let's look at exactly how we got here from the beginnings of the conflict right up until the current day.
Essentially, I did what no other president was willing to do.
If you've ever argued with a college sophomore who just took an intro to Middle Eastern studies class, they will immediately shout Operation Ajax at you. That, of course, is the operation the CIA initiated in 1953 to remove Mohammad Mossadegh, who was the prime minister of Iran. They will tell you that Iran was a beautiful, flourishing, utopian democracy until the evil, nefarious CIA swooped in
overthrew Mossadegh and installed a brutal dictator in the Shah. Therefore, everything that Iran does today is simply understandable blowback for American imperialism. Now, what's weird about this is a few things. First of all, let's point out the Shah was removed by the Ayatollahs. So why the Ayatollahs would be upset with the United States for removing Mossadegh
who was a Marxist secularist in 1953, is confusing. 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.
They saw Iran as an asset. Back in 1946, Stalin had actually attempted to set up a puppet regime in Iran, and he failed. Well, 1950 ends, now 1951, and a man named Mohammad Mossadegh is elected by the so-called Majlis, that is, the parliament.
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.
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Chapter 2: How did the 1979 Iranian Revolution change the political landscape?
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. We didn't overthrow a regime.
The Shah was in charge the whole time. We weren't even against the military infrastructure. They were on the Shah's side. We didn't send arms to the insurgents. We helped the Shah do the thing that he had the constitutional ability to do. Well, under the Shah for the next two and a half decades, Iran was a staunch U.S. ally. The Shah pushed through the so-called White Revolution.
He modernized the country. He expanded women's rights. He secularized the education system. He built up the economy. Again, if you look at pictures of Tehran in the 1970s, it looks a lot like L.A. in the 1970s.
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Chapter 3: What role did the United States play in the 1953 coup in Iran?
People are wearing Western clothing. They're going to the movies. They're living relatively normal lives. But rapid modernization bred heavy resentment among radical traditionalists, and the Shah was an autocratic leader. He did use secret police to crush political dissent. And of course, because he was an autocrat, this also created corruption issues.
And so you ended up with this bizarre coalition of weird bedfellows, Marxist college students and radical Islamist clerics, all united by sheer hatred of the Shah. Which brings us to 1979, the year everything went completely off the cliff. The Shah fell ill with cancer, and he grew isolated from the people. Mass protests, strikes, religious processions swelled in the streets.
The state's will to repress collapsed. The Shah ran from Iran, ostensibly for medical treatment. The revolution then took off from there. Having recorded sermons and smuggling tapes in Iran from exile in Paris, Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran triumphant and prepared to leverage the chaos to create an Islamic revolution.
He stepped into the power vacuum and his return was welcomed by moronic Westerners who perceived him as a sort of anti-imperialist. French intellectual and complete piece of human dreck, Michel Foucault, called Khomeini a saint.
He wasn't really a saint since he began executing thousands of political opponents, purging the army, subjugating women with compulsory hijab laws, and establishing a medieval theocracy. The new Mullah's regime made its central organizing principle abundantly clear. They didn't say, we don't like America's foreign policy. They didn't say, we'd like to renegotiate our trade deals.
They chanted death to America, they burned American flags, and they officially branded the United States as the Great Satan and Israel as the Little Satan. To prove they meant it, in November of 1979, radical Iranian students, with the blessing of the new regime, stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and seized 52 American diplomats and staff as hostages.
This would become the first great test of American will in the Middle East with regard to the new Iranian regime. And President Jimmy Carter completely failed. He rang his hands, he botched a rescue mission, and then he spent the rest of his term begging the Ayatollahs for mercy. For 444 days, a year and 79 days, the Iranian regime humiliated the United States on live television.
Jimmy Carter tried asking nicely for our citizens back. He sat in the Oval Office looking impotent. The Ayatollahs learned a very crucial lesson. Having a weak American president was useful, and you could take hostages and basically do what you wanted. The Iranian hostage crisis was American weakness embodied on the global stage. Well, how do we know?
Well, literally the very moment that Ronald Reagan was sworn into office as president, they released the hostages. Weird how that works. The Ayatollahs looked at Ronald Reagan, who projected strength, and realized that they had a problem, so they backed down. Papers were signed, the hostages were put on a plane, our fellow Americans finally came back home.
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