All the Shah’s Men — Stephen Kinzer

All the Shah’s Men
Stephen Kinzer
258 pages including index
published in 2003

If you read the name Roosevelt, you probably think of the American president during World War II, or perhaps his predecesor Theodore Roosevelt, who gave his name to the teddy bear. But there’s another Roosevelt who has been of some influence in world history, a grandson of Theodore, Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., the man behind the coup against the democratically elected government of Iran in 1953. That was the coup that overthrew a government nominally an ally of the United States, on the behest of a British oil company to install a dictator whose father had had nazi sympathies, who himself would be overthrown a quarter century later in the Islamic revolution of 1979, when Americans were baffled to realise most of Iran hated them, a ahtred that had its roots in 1953.

That 1953 coup is one of those monumental changes in history that are far less well known than they should be. Though not exactly a secret, the American involvement and leadership of the coup is even less known, or at least that was the case when this book was published, in the year the US would invade another former client state, Iraq. These days the sad and sordid story of American meddling in the Middle East is well known, at least to those who paid attention to what happened after 9/11. I’m not sure how much Stephen Kinzer’s book contributed to this though.

On the face of it, All the Shah’s Men is a perfectly servicable history of the coup and the context in which it arose, with some attention to its consequences. Kinzer writes well and keeps your attention, adept at setting the scene. What bothered me however, especially in the later sections, is his ambivalent attitude towards the coup and its American ringleaders. To be sure, he doesn’t portray Kermit as a hero, but he doesn’t really condemn him either. In the last chapter, when he looks back at the inevitability of the coup, he comes close to victim blaming in arguing what the Iranian prime minister, Mossadegh, could and should’ve done to prevent the coup.

Kinzer starts well, in media res, with Kermit Roosevelt’s first, failed coup attempt, before tracing back the history of western interference in Iran. As per usual, it was the British who were to blame, ruling the country indirectly through a series of weak rulers, never permitting an effective state to arise on the borders of their Indian Empire. After World War I, with the discovery of huge oil fields in Iran, British influence in the country grew worse, with the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company making millions sellings its oil without Iran profiting much of it.

He moves on to talking about the political careers of the shah, the ruler of Iran who had been put on his throne by the allies in WWII when his father proved to be slightly too enamoured of fascism. From there Kinzer also follows Mossadegh’s career, showing his integrity and idealism. While the former was ultimately a weak ruler, Mossadegh was an excellent politician and statesman, always operating with the best interests of Iran at heart.

Those interests very much included getting more out of Iran’s oilfields, attempting through negotiation to get a better share of Anglo-Iranian’s profits. British pigheadedness and racism however, both in the company as at governmental level made this futile however and in the end Mossadegh nationalised the company, which was hugely popular in Iran but not so much with the British. These immediately threw a hissy fit, withdrew all their employees (few Iranians working in other than menial positions there) and set out to economically sabotage the country through oil boycotts, as preparation for a possible invasion or other method of regime change.

For this they needed the Americans and as long as the Democrat Harry Truman was in the White House, they had no luck getting their support. All changed with the election of Eisenhower, who brought along the Dulles brothers, one who became the secretary of foreign affairs, the other head of the CIA. These were receptive to the idea of overthrowing Mossadegh and set out to work towards this. Ultimately, through Kermit Roosevelt’s hard work, they succeeded by a mixture of bribery and buying off of high ranking soldiers and police officers, CIA supported newspapers pumping out propaganda and downright hiring mobs to destabilise the country.

Now what struck me was the way Kinzer condemned Mossadegh in his epilogue. He argued that because of his refusal to come to a compromise with the British and their own fears for possible communist interference in the country, the Americans were forced to mount the coup, completely disregarding America’s own moral culpability. Worse, he argues Mossadegh had “helped bring Iran to the dead end it reached in mid-1953” after spending the entire book showing how this dead end had been brought about by British intransigence and CIA meddling! He also faults him for not actually being a dictator and coming down too weak on the coupists after their first, failed attempt.

What also struck me was the blithe disregard for Iranian suffering Kinzer displayed when he attempted to asses the consequences of the coup, in arguing that it “bought the United States and the west a reliable Iran for twenty-five years”. That’s a repulsive but sadly too common way to think about a quarter century of tyranny, torture and murder. Offhandedly musing that perhaps Iran wasn’t ready for democracy in 1953 doesn’t help either, as it shows a breathtaking arrogance considering how Iranian democracy was betrayed by the agents of the same country he belongs to.

In short then, if you know little about how this coup took place and the context in which it happened, this is a reasonable book but it displays all the shortcomings and tunnel vision you’d expect from a “veteran New York Times correspondent”. Somebody in his position, regardless of all the evidence, just cannot get themselves to see the evil that America has done.