Week 8 – Murilo

This week’s readings present a very comprehensive picture of the threats (and potential threats) posed by Iran and of the reasons behind the country’s behavior. I would like to add a couple of comments on some important aspects that I think were only briefly addressed by the authors of the readings.
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The removal of Iran’s Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1954 by a coup, and the subsequent return of Shah Reza Pahlavi to power, are pivotal moments in Iranian history. Mosaddegh was a nationalist left-wing politician, who, during his brief period in power, introduced a range of social and political measures such as social security, land reforms and higher taxes including the introduction of taxation on the rent of land. His government’s most significant policy was the nationalization of the Iranian oil industry, which had been controlled since its inception by British companies. Pahlavi reversed most reforms and gave split ownership of Iranian oil production between Iran and western companies until 1979 (when he was deposed by the Islamic revolution).
The 1954 coup was aided by American and British intelligence agencies – whose intervention was mostly motivated by the losses to British and US oil companies that Mosaddegh’s policies could cause and potential disruptions in oil supply. Pahlavi, by his turn, was a close ally of the West, and turned Iran in one of the “two pillars” of American foreign policy for the region (together with Saudi Arabi). He was also despotic, corrupt, and, in his final years in power, very unpopular.
To a large extent, the fierce anti-imperialistic and anti-American ideology of the post-1979 Iranian leadership can be traced to the coup and to Pahlavi’s dictatorship. Although it is a minor footnote on US and British history books, it is a very important historical moment for Iranians, one that is studied in all schools in the country and informs their views of international politics.
That is a good example of the risks of superpowers intervening in foreign countries, however minor (or justifiable) those interventions might appear to be from the superpower’s point of view. They are never minor from the perspective of the country where the intervention took place and might have large (and disastrous) unintended consequences down the road – with a cost in terms of security sometimes much larger than the one the motivated the intervention in the first place.
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Another pivotal moment of Iranian history is their long and bloody war with Iraq during the 1980s, a war in whose initial stages Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was heavily supported (politically and logistically) by the United States (and Saudi Arabia). One of the major consequences was to reinforce Iran’s perception that their country in a perennially volatile region, surrounded by U.S.-backed adversaries stocked with advanced weapons, and its belief that the United States’ ultimate objective is to weaken and isolate the country. Many authors trace back to that war Iran’s nuclear program and its policy of sponsoring rebel groups in other countries of the region, in order to try to destabilize these perceived enemies.
In that view, the logic behind Iran’s policies is much more defensive, a defensive realist approach, that offensive. The Iranian leadership would be, thus, majorly fighting for the survival of the country, and not for the promotion of a region-wide Islamic revolution.