‘A HAUNTING and terrible legacy,” wrote the historian. He was talking about what follows America’s use of force to bring about regime change in Iran.
But Stephen Kinzer wasn’t making predictions about the lawless and pointless onslaught now hurled at Iran by the USA and Israel. He was describing the previous one.
In 1953, the CIA and Britain’s MI6 engineered a coup in Tehran which brought down the Iranian government and the prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. Up to then, British imperial influence had dominated Iran, a turbulent parliamentary democracy under the Shah. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company towered over the economy; thousands worked in Britain’s colossal oil refinery at Abadan.
When Mosaddegh nationalised the oil industry, to wild popular enthusiasm, imperial Britain was outraged. In 1952, British diplomats suggested to Washington that a joint “covert operation” might ward off the danger (now seen as largely fictive) of a Communist takeover.
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Fake mobs were hired, phoney riots were arranged and London deluged Iran with lurid anti-Mosaddegh propaganda (some of the BBC’s Iranian service went on strike rather than broadcast it). The Americans called the CIA plot “Operation Ajax”; the British named theirs “Operation Boot”. Launched in August 1953, it was a bungled flop. But Iran descended into chaos, and eventually a combination of Shah supporters and the army arrested Mosaddegh and executed dozens of his followers.
The “haunting and terrible legacy” of 1953 is what we are seeing today. Hatred and suspicion of America (and Britain) was the underlying cause of the Islamic Revolution in 1979 and the deposing of the Shah. The legacy includes catastrophic missed chances. Back then, the European empires were starting to fall apart: colonial nationalism was challenging imperialism all over the world. Accepting Mosaddegh as a nationalist leader and potential partner could have changed the whole future of the Middle East. But the British would make the same ghastly mistake three years later, when they went to war with President Nasser’s Egypt on behalf of Suez Canal shareholders and the route to India.
Now we see that “legacy” being assembled yet again, under our eyes. Liberating the Iranian people from brutal, murderous clerical tyranny – that would be glorious. But American power staggers about the landscape like a drunken giant, bawling abuse but terrified of getting its feet wet. No boots on the ground! The military world asks how you win a war from the air, if bombing, drone attack and selective assassination by missile replace negotiation or the entry of conquering soldiers into sites of government. (Any old byre containing a cowering family and a terrified youth with a smartphone seems to be a “command and control centre” to be blasted apart). And what is the world to make of President Trump’s latest mumblings about “no deal ... only unconditional surrender”?
It’s a fair guess that Trump doesn’t know what “unconditional surrender” means. He probably mixes it up with “armistice”. Unconditional surrender means boots. It means that your forces have to be on the ground, ready to take over supreme responsibility for administration, public order and disarmament. Visions of mighty generals confronting one another in a tent, saluting and signing some abject document represent only a fraction of what has to happen. Generals also wear boots. You can’t do unconditional surrender without some degree of conquering occupation. The Israelis aren’t going to do Trump that sort of favour. Neither are the Kurds.
What Trump probably means – though his miserable crew of third-rate courtiers don’t dare to formulate it – is to reach a point at which the Iranian regime says that it will stop fighting and launching missiles, and will enter talks on how to become a sort of castrated American dependency.
At present, the stubborn survivors of the Iranian theocracy seem disinclined for that. In some ways, their enemies are not doing as well as they pretend. The gigantic fleets, the Armageddon air swarms, have killed many Persian schoolgirls and are reducing districts of Tehran to a semblance of Gaza. But, rather mysteriously, they have not managed (or indeed tried very hard) to fight open the Strait of Hormuz, whose blockade by Iran is strangling the entire Gulf economy and threatening the energy supply of the capitalist world.
It's been suggested that Trump thinks that Iran is like Venezuela. Take out the leader, destroy as much of its military capacity as possible, annex its oil production and leave government in the hands of a reasonably corrupt figure of the old regime. Then walk away.
But Iran is different.
It is a huge, ancient country with a touchy sense of its own history. Urban Iran is sophisticated and very creative, while the mass of the nation is committed to a particularly intense and dramatic tradition of Shia Islam. The two strains don’t cohere easily.
One obvious danger is that an American puppet regime, inevitably supported by a police state, would provoke bloody and long-lasting civil war. Much depends on what kind of army, if any, would be allowed as part of a settlement ending this conflict.
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Today’s war is pretty clearly illegal. It was evidently planned between Trump’s team and Israel, a story which resembles the secret and criminal conspiracy between Britain, France and Israel to invade Egypt in 1956 – the “Suez disaster”.
Not only Britain but the European Union have missed a historic chance to renew the world order, by coming together to denounce the attack on Iran and boldly strike out on a new European strategy of independence from the United States.
Keir Starmer should be seizing this moment as the time to declare a decisive intention to rejoin the EU. But the reflex that the “special relationship” is Britain’s irreplaceable anchor in a stormy world is too engrained in him.
Above all, the UK should not join this conflict. But every day, Britain slips a little further down the slope to war. Time to force a halt. Or we will be haunted by another terrible legacy.
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