Following Iran’s missile barrage into Israel last week, carried out in retaliation for Israel’s assassinations of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders, vice president and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris called Iran a “destabilizing, dangerous force” in the Middle East, opening a new chapter in a long history of US hawkishness against Iran. This past Monday, she went even further, calling Iran the United States’ “greatest adversary.”
A Long, Violent History
For those familiar with this history, it’s hard to hear such statements without hearkening back to New Year’s Eve, 1977, a year before the Iranian Revolution broke out. In the heat of growing civil unrest in Iran, US president Jimmy Carter attended a lavish state dinner with the shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, where Carter toasted, “Iran, because of the great leadership of the Shah, is an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world.”
Ironically, the toasts were preceded by a long US history of destabilizing Iran — a history marred with covert operations and clandestine interventions. Twenty-four years earlier, during “Operation Ajax,” the CIA, in collaboration with the British MI6, had orchestrated a coup that ousted the democratically elected Iranian prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh, who had won on a platform of nationalizing Iranian oil and taking it back from Western control. The coup set into motion the destruction of the country’s budding democracy and would haunt Iranians for decades to come.
Starting in the late 1940s, in the heat of the Cold War, the Harry Truman administration embraced the young shah as an important partner in the emerging anti-Soviet alliance in the Middle East, despite mounting Iranian resentment of the shah’s corruption and his reckless sales of Iran’s resources to foreign companies to finance his lavish lifestyle. The shah’s spending spree led him to sell exclusive rights to Iran’s oil and natural gas to Western multinational oil companies, mainly the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), which exploited Iranians and exported millions of barrels of oil that made fabulous profits while paying Iran virtually nothing.
Resentment of the shah soon gave rise to popular dissent. In October 1949, Mossadegh, a longtime critic of the Pahlavi dynasty and a vocal advocate for Iran’s right to control its own oil industry, founded the National Front, a broad coalition that included both middle-class moderates and members of the left-wing Tudeh Party. Mossadegh and his allies soon held the balance of power in the Iranian parliament, known as the Majles, where they ran on the platform of sharing oil profits between Iran and AIOC, citing the example of other multinational oil firms operating in Venezuela and Saudi Arabia.