(With thanks to Bonnie.)

The people of Iran had for centuries been repressed by corrupt rulers and foreign powers – in this period, the British. Mossadegh was a genuinely incorruptible politician – passionately nationalist, and a secular, pious, and progressive Muslim. He wanted nothing more for Iran than a decent life and future for the Iranian people. In 1952 he committed the unforgivable sin of nationalizing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which, in the finest imperialist tradition, had become filthy rich while maintaining the vast majority of Iran’s population in abject poverty. The British government held a 51% share of Anglo-Iranian. Mossadegh was phenomenally popular with virtually all Iranians except the de-nationalized elites who had benefitted from their arrangements with the British: die-hard monarchists, military right-wingers, and much of the up-scale business class. Only a heartless wretch can read with equanimity Kinzer’s contrast between the sumptuous living standards of Anglo-Iranian’s British managers and the squalid conditions the company provided for its workers. In fact, Anglo-Iranian was in direct violation of promises made to Reza Shah, the immediate monarch’s father, to provide decent working and living conditions for its Iranian laborers. The de-nationalized sectors would be instrumental in the plot to depose Mossadegh, even though many of them had to be bribed to overcome their fear of reprisal in case the coup failed. Mossadegh was such a decent man, however, that it is unlikely that any plotters would have received much more than a slap on the wrist.

America's first covert action against a soverign government was code-named Operation Ajax by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. (The British retained their original code name: Operation Boot.) Mohammad Reza Shah had replaced his father, Reza Shah, as monarch when the British forced the latter from the throne in 1941. In the subsequent opening of political space, Mohammad Mossadegh attained formidable political powers, and effectively nullified the influence of the younger, child-like monarch. During the CIA-organized violence against Mossadegh, the Shah had fled the country; the successful coup returned him to the Peacock Throne in triumph. But whereas the Shah had literally been a puppet of the British for over a decade, with a new-found independence born of the effective end of British influence in Iran he soon gathered total power in his own hands and established one of the most brutally repressive regimes the world has known. Washington loved him. (See Ryszard Kapuscinski’s The Shah of Shahs, Vintage, 1986.)

Kinzer’s meticulously researched work is virtually bullet-proof. The only reasonable conclusion we can draw is that the post-war anti-communism that gripped America, and which provided the excuse to remove Mossadegh form power, was at best a true psychopathology, and at worst, genuinely evil. That psychopathology went on to beget many other CIA-sponsored covert actions against progressive Third World governments, which over time inspired the virulent, global anti-American sentiment that so puzzles millions of well-meaning but historically naive Americans today. Kinzer is entirely correct, and not alone, in his observation that "it is not farfetched to draw a line from Operation Ajax through the Shah’s repressive regime and the Islamic Revolution to the fireballs that engulfed the World Trade Center in New York."

(For example, Monty Woodhouse, the British agent who snuck into Washington in January 1952 to persuade the Dulles brothers to support a coup against Mossadegh, observed in his 1982 memoirs: "It is easy to see Operation Boot as the first step towards the Iranian catastrophe of 1979. What we did not foresee was that the Shah would gather strength and use it so tyrannically, nor that the US government and the Foreign Office wold fail so abjectly to keep him on a reasonable course. At the time we were simply relieved that a threat to British interests had been removed." By then, of course, it was too late. As one of Iran’s top religious leaders, the Ayatollah Ali Khameinei said, "we are not liberals like Allende and Mossadegh, whom the CIA can snuff out." Considering that the Shah’s father, whom the British had both installed and deposed, was himself a vicious tyrant, Woodhouse reveals nothing less than colossal stupidity; on his part, and on the part of the British government. We are reminded of the not-so-famous quip by [I believe] George Bernard Shaw: "power does not corrupt; fools corrupt power when they attain to it.")

"All the world’s a stage," said the Bard, and with the overthrow of Mossadegh, the U.S. government set on that stage the first act of a long-running tragic farce. From the coup against Guatemala’s popular and progressive president Arbenz the next year, in 1954, through Vietnam, through president Reagan’s criminal attack on Nicaragua, millions of people have died, either through direct military action, or through massively disrupted economies. And for what? For nothing more than to feed the appetite of the U.S. business community.

President Bush and his advisors are directing the current act of this farce. Rather than engage in honest soul-searching toward understanding the sources of global American sentiment, and genuine effort toward making America respected and honored once again, the Bush administration instead has effectively adopted the mentality of our British forbears: military might, globally deployed, brutally employed if necessary, will subdue our enemies and ensure our security. Thus has the Bush administration made it virtually impossible for the American people to engage in a collective examination of the national soul — to genuinely understand that other nations have legitimate aspirations that do not fit the American plan for them, and that many of them have legitimate grievances against the U.S. Thus are we, as a nation, kept in an state of junvenility, continually marching to the drums of war, while we are lulled into moral complacency by memories of our quintessential fantasy hero and his blazing six-shooters: John Wayne.