The U.S. & Iran: A History of Imperialist Domination, Intrigue and Intervention

by Larry Everest

04 November 2007

Part 1: Iran and Imperialism's “Great Game” of Empire

For over 100 years imperialist domination of Iran has been enforced by the U.S. and other powers through covert intrigues, economic bullying, and outright military assaults, even invasions. This history is crucial to understanding the real motives for U.S. threats today—including the real threat of war, even nuclear war.

This is the focus of this series. Part 1 begins in the mid-19th century, with Iran a prime target of rival powers in imperialism’s “great game” for global dominance and control.

In 1889 Lord Curzon, the British Viceroy of India, wrote that Iran and its neighbors were “the pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a game for the domination of the world,” and where “the future of Great Britain…will be decided not in Europe” (Amin Saikal, The Rise and Fall of the Shah, p. 13).

For over 150 years, with the global spread of capitalism and the rise of imperialism, Iran and the Middle East have been the target of a handful of Western powers who have wanted to gain control of the region and its resources, while preventing their rivals from doing likewise.

The forms and battle lines in this struggle for dominance have evolved and changed, but capitalism remains a system driven by the interconnected compulsions of economic competition between rival firms and strategic competition between rival nations; securing ready access to markets, investment opportunities, and natural resources is essential. And this demands control of vast stretches of the globe, particularly in the Third World, or oppressed, countries, where the overwhelming bulk of humanity lives.

In the Middle East, this has meant enslaving whole countries, robbing them of self-determination and wealth, imposing brutal tyrannies, impoverishing whole populations, killing thousands upon thousands, and crippling growth and development in all spheres. In response, there have been waves of resistance, guided by various ideologies and programs, which have in turn sparked further imperial intrigues and aggressions. Deep national, social, and class divisions run through the Middle East, but foreign domination has been—and remains—the main obstacle to a more just social order.

Imperial Battle for Control

At the turn of the 19th century, Iran was a backward, feudal society. Most people lived in the countryside and toiled on the land, and the country included different tribes, loosely held together by a common religion and a weak central monarchy. The monarch’s word was law from which there was no redress.

From the late 1700s on, Iran had suffered a series of military defeats and had to give up territory to European powers, particularly Britain and czarist Russia. Beginning in the second half of the 19th century, Iran became a focal point of a prolonged struggle between Russia and Great Britain over who would acquire territory and gain political and economic control. For the British, Iran was a crucial communications link to the Indian subcontinent—the “crown jewel” of its empire—and a buffer against Russian expansionism. Russia in turn viewed Iran as key to protecting its southern flank and preventing British encroachment.

Both powers sought to exploit Iran’s ethnic, religious and tribal differences and keep the central government weak and dependent. Iran was robbed through economic and political concessions which sold the right to exploit Iran’s wealth and resources for a pittance.

The Rise of Oil

Petroleum’s skyrocketing importance to global capitalism in the early 1900s made imperialist dominance of Iran and the Middle East more strategically significant than ever.

It was long known that oil could be found in the southwest part of Persia (which became Iran in 1935), and in 1901 William D’Arcy, an Englishman, purchased an exclusive 60-year concession covering 500,000 square miles, over five-sixths of the country today. The concession gave him the exclusive right to develop and exploit Iran’s oil. The very cheap price was: 20,000 British pounds in cash, 20,000 pounds in stock and 16% of profits to the Iranian government. In close collaboration with the British state, D’Arcy established the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (which later became Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and finally British Petroleum) to exploit the concession. BP became one of the world’s largest oil companies; it was founded solely on Middle Eastern oil. (Larry Everest, Oil, Power & Empire: Iraq and the U.S. Global Agenda, p. 30)

In 1907 Britain and czarist Russia signed a secret treaty—the “Convention of St. Petersburg”—to partition Iran between them, with Russia taking the northern half, and Britain the southern, which—not coincidentally—included all major oil producing sites. Iran’s government was not even consulted.

Anglo-Persian began pumping oil in 1908, making Iran the first country in the Middle East where oil was commercially exploited on an industrial scale, but it was World War 1 that established oil’s centrality to empire in the modern age. At the time, navies were the prime instruments of global reach and power; oil-fueled ships were faster and ranged farther than the older coal-fired models. In 1912 Britain’s First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill converted the British fleet to oil, making oil vital to British naval supremacy and global hegemony. After the defeat of Germany in World War 1, Britain’s Lord Curzon declared that the Allies had “floated to victory upon a wave of oil.” (Everest, p. 31)

But the importance of petroleum for imperialist powers went far beyond its military significance. It became an essential economic input whose price impacted production costs, profits, and competitive advantage. It became an instrument of rivalry: controlling oil meant exercising leverage over those who depend on it and over the world economy as a whole. And Middle East oil became a source of enormous “super-profits” which were critical to the operation of capitalism in the home countries. Iranian oil played an important role in stimulating Britain’s domestic industrial development. Winston Churchill called Iranian oil "a prize from fairyland beyond our wildest dreams." (Stephen Kinzer, All the Shah's Men, p. 39).

The vast gulf between the imperialists and their victims was epitomized in Abadan – a sprawling city in southwest Iran where Anglo-Persian built its oil refinery operation. Iranian oil official Manucher Farmfarmaian described the two worlds colliding there:

“Wages were fifty cents a day. There was no vacation pay, no sick leave, no disability compensation. The workers lived in a shantytown called Kaghazabad, or Paper City, without running water or electricity, let alone such luxuries as iceboxes or fans. In winter the earth flooded and became a flat, perspiring lake. The mud in town was knee-deep, and canoes ran alongside the roadways for transport… Summer was worse… The dwellings of Kaghazabad, cobbled from rusted oil drums hammered flat, turned into sweltering ovens… In every crevice hung the foul, sulfurous stench of burning oil… In the British section of Abadan there were lawns, rose beds, tennis courts, swimming pools and clubs; in Kaghazabad there was nothing, not a tea shop, not a bath, not a single tree.” [Manucher Farmfarmaian and Roxane Farmfarmaian, Blood and Oil: Inside the Shah’s Iran (New York: Modern Library, 1999), quoted in Kinzer, p. 67]

The brutality and humiliation of colonial domination repeatedly gave rise to mass resistance by the Iranian people. In 1905 a democratic movement rose among the new urban middle class and by summer 1906 nationwide demonstrations demanded a democratically-elected parliament and an end to the absolute rule of the Shah. Iranian teachers, intellectuals, artisans, tradesmen, businessmen, as well as farmers and laborers, and even an influential section of the Islamic clergy, all participated. A constitution was drafted, and by the end of 1906, the Majlis (parliament) opened. This “Constitutional Revolution” was reversed in 1908, when the Shah sent thugs, backed by the Russian-trained Cossack Brigade, to attack the Majlis. In 1911, backed by Britain and Russia, the Shah shut down the parliament and arrested many delegates.

World War 1: Dividing the Region and the Spoils

During World War 1, Iran was again a battleground of rival imperialist powers. It had declared neutrality in the war, but British forces quickly invaded southern Iran to guard Britain’s oil lifeline and there was heavy fighting in Iran.

The Western powers—the British and French in particular—claimed they were fighting World War 1 to free the Middle East from the yoke of feudal, authoritarian Ottoman rule. In fact, they were fighting to determine which European power would control the Middle East—for its strategic location and its vast oil potential.

While promising independence to the region’s peoples, the British, French, and Russians were secretly negotiating to carve up the Middle East between them. The world only knows of this because in 1917 Lenin’s Bolsheviks overthrew Russia’s Czar and, as an act of internationalism, published the Czar’s secret treaties, including the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, which the revolutionaries discovered in the Foreign Ministry archives.

Russia’s revolutionary government repudiated Sykes-Picot—which had given Russia Constantinople (now Istanbul); land on either side of the Bosphorus Straits; and large chunks of the Turkish provinces bordering Russia. The new revolutionary government also annulled all Czarist claims on Iran, encouraged Iran to resist British domination, and pledged friendship to Iran and support for its independence and territorial integrity.

The British, however, stepped up their intervention in Iran, resolving “to stop at all costs the spread of communism to Iran, and to use [Iran] as a front-line base in its anti-Bolshevik campaign,” including by aiding Russian counter-revolutionaries in northern Iran. (Saikal, p. 17)

In 1919 Britain imposed the Anglo-Persian Agreement on Iran, giving Britain exclusive control over "Iran's army, treasury, transport system and communications network.” To secure this power, the British “imposed martial law and began ruling by fiat." (Kinzer, p. 39) Beginning in 1921, the British supported a series of military coups by the ruthless Reza Khan, who ultimately declared himself the new Shah in 1926. This began the Pahlavi dynasty where Reza Shah, as a puppet of British imperialism, carried out brutal repression against any rebellion from among the Iranian people.

The U.S. Fights for a Share of the Oil Spoils

Because, up to this point, the United States had not been a major player in the Middle East, many in the region saw the U.S. as a reform-minded nation without an imperialist agenda. This mis-perception was heightened by President Woodrow Wilson’s “14 Points” declaration which followed the war and verbally upheld the right of self-determination for nations.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes a fierce imperialist rivalry for oil and power was brewing. After World War 1, fears rose of a global oil shortage. In 1920 the U.S. vigorously protested the monopolization of Middle East oil by Britain and France, and a huge struggle between rival oil cartels (and their respective states) ensued.

By 1928 the British were forced to give U.S. firms a cut of Iraqi oil, thanks to America’s rising global power and the leverage exerted by U.S. firms: Standard Oil (now Exxon) supplied half of Britain’s oil. Oil historian John Blair described the resulting “Red Line” agreement as “an outstanding example of a restricted combination for the control of a large portion of the world’s supply by a group of companies which together dominate the world market for this commodity.” (Everest, pp. 38-39)

Part 2: The U.S. Seizes Control in Iran: The CIA’S 1953 Coup D’etat

For over 100 years imperialist domination of Iran has been enforced by the U.S. and other powers through covert intrigues, economic bullying, and outright military assaults, even invasions. This history is crucial to understanding the real motives for U.S. threats today – including the real threat of war, even nuclear war. Part I of this series explored the rivalry between European imperialists over who would rob Iran of its oil and viciously exploit the people of the country up to and after World War 1. Part II exposes how in the aftermath of World War II, based on emerging as the dominant power in the world, the U.S. overthrew the nationalist secular government of Mohammed Mossadegh, and installed the brutal and oppressive rule of a loyal administrator – the Shah in Iran.

The U.S. Seizes Control In Iran: The 1953 CIA Coup

Based on its position as the number one global power coming out of World War 2, the U.S. moved throughout the world to rip colonies away from its rivals and institute oppressive relations with much of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Iran was a key prize. In 1953 the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) orchestrated a coup d’etat that returned Iran’s monarch, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, to power. This was a turning point in Iranian – and Middle East – history. The coup put a brutal tyrant and U.S. client on the throne, crushed his opponents, and turned Iran into a key client of U.S. imperialism. It signaled the U.S. ascent to regional dominance, taking over from Britain. And it planted the seeds for Iran’s 1979 revolution, which brought Islamic fundamentalist clerics to power – ushering in the new, tense and dangerous chapter in U.S.-Iranian relations we’re in today.

Oil, The Middle East & The Rise Of U.S. Imperialism

Petroleum’s military and economic importance grew enormously after World War 1. New oil-based industries, such as auto, rubber, petro-chemicals, and plastics, had arisen and expanded. The economies and militaries of the U.S., Europe, and Japan were more and more dependent on petroleum. A 1944 U.S. State Department memo called oil “a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history.”

During World War 2, the U.S. rulers focused increasing attention on the Middle East because of its strategic location at the intersection of Africa, Asia and Europe, and because most of the world’s oil reserves are located there. U.S. strategists realized that controlling this region was crucial not only to winning the war, but to emerging as the globe’s dominant imperialist power afterward as well.

Seizing Middle East dominance meant first, edging out the British and French as the region’s dominant power. Second, containing or suppressing the post-war nationalist and anti-imperialist movements rising across the region. Third, preventing the then-socialist Soviet Union from gaining influence or power.

All three of these challenges came together – very sharply – in Iran after the war’s end.

In 1946, the first post-war confrontation between the U.S. and the Soviet Union took place over Iran. At the time Britain still occupied southern Iran and the Soviet Union occupied the north (where it had helped set up Soviet Republics, really mini-states, in Iranian Azerbaijan and Kurdistan). The wartime alliance between the U.S. and the Soviets was breaking down and turning into all-out hostility and the Cold War. President Harry Truman wrote: “[I]f the Russians were to control Iran’s oil, either directly or indirectly, the raw material balance of the world would undergo serious damage and it would be a serious loss for the economy of the western world.” ** Amin Saikal, The Rise and Fall of the Shah, p. 33. [For an important discussion of the real nature of World War 2, and the role of the U.S. in that war, see “Bringing Forward Another Way,” by Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA – in particular Part 6 – available at revcom.us]

Truman considered Iran so strategically crucial that he threatened to drop a “super-bomb” – a nuclear weapon – if Soviet forces didn’t withdraw. This was no idle threat; the year before the U.S. had dropped not one, but two atomic bombs on Japan. Soviet forces soon withdrew.

Iran: Mass Anger & Oil Nationalization

Iranians had suffered enormously as a result of what one historian called “social disorder, political disarray, and economic hardship,” during World War 2. (Saikal, p. 26) When the war ended, Iran’s political instability continued, along with a rising tide of anger against British imperialism.

This anger focused on the enormous gap between the riches Britain reaped from Iran’s vast oil wealth (which the British still exclusively controlled) on the one side, and the paltry sums paid Iran and the crippling poverty which was the lot of most Iranians on the other. For instance, in 1947, Anglo-Iranian Oil Company reported an after-tax profit of £40 million ($112 million in U.S. dollars), while paying Iran only £7 million. (Stephen Kinzer, “All The Shah’s Men,” p. 67)

Conditions for oil workers were so bad that riots broke out in Abadan (where most oil production took place) in 1946 after striking workers were attacked by criminal gangs organized by the British. On May First, International Workers Day, 1946, tens of thousands of people marched in Tehran and Abadan under the leadership of Iran’s Tudeh Party (a non-revolutionary, pro-Soviet communist party). (Kinzer pp. 52, 65)

By the late 1940s, a broad movement to take control of the country’s oil wealth was gaining momentum. It coalesced in the National Front, a diverse alliance under the leadership of a bourgeois nationalist politician, Mohammed Mossadegh. By April 1951, Mossadegh had enough support to pass a bill in Iran’s parliament (Majlis) nationalizing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), which the Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi felt compelled to sign. A week later, Mossadegh was named Prime Minister. Iran’s nationalization was a defiant and unprecedented act in the Middle East, where oil production was controlled and run by foreign imperialist monopolies.

Britain & The U.S. Lash Back

Iran’s oil nationalization struck at key British imperialist interests: AIOC was the largest single overseas commercial asset of the British empire and a crucial source of oil. The British worried that the nationalization could ripple through the region and prove a telling blow to their empire, already reeling in the aftermath of World War 2.

The British struck back by organizing an international boycott of Iranian oil, going to international courts, and by covertly organizing to overthrow Mossadegh. After initially standing aside, by 1953 the U.S. joined the British in plotting a coup. The U.S.-Soviet confrontation was growing very sharp and U.S. officials were concerned that Iran was in danger of falling under Soviet control, and that only a "regime change" would cure the problem.

The CIA put Kermit Roosevelt (President Teddy Roosevelt’s grandson) in charge of the operation inside Iran and on April 4, 1953 allocated $1 million to “bring about the fall of Mossadegh,” and “bring to power a government which would reach an equitable oil settlement, enabling Iran to become economically sound and financially solvent, and which would vigorously prosecute the dangerously strong Communist Party." (Declassified CIA history at: the New York Times)

Mossadegh and the oil nationalization were widely popular – in 1951 the nationalization was unanimously approved by the Majlis and in 1953 Mossadegh won a national plebescite by a landslide – and the British were widely hated. (Kinzer, pp. 82, 165) So the CIA moved methodically to forge an anti-Mossadegh alliance, which included monarchists, military leaders, and other propertied Iranians, while dividing and weakening Mossadegh’s National Front.

The National Front was a loose coalition of diverse political forces, including the Tudeh Party, Iranian nationalists and ultra-nationalists, and Islamic fundamentalists. The U.S. and British paid particular attention to winning over the Islamic fundamentalist forces grouped around Ayatollah Seyyed Abolqassem Kashani (a mentor of Ayatollah Khomeini, who would take power in the 1979 revolution). These clerics had been hostile to the Shah’s father Reza for undercutting Islamic institutions and tradition. They initially joined the anti-Shah alliance, bringing their considerable influence among the impoverished urban masses. But the clerics feared the growing influence of the Tudeh Party, which Mossadegh tolerated for his own purposes, much more. This concern, plus hefty bribes by the U.S. and British, led them to turn against Mossadegh and support the CIA-led coup.

The British-led boycott of Iran’s oil was wearing on Iran’s propertied strata. Using Iranian operatives, the CIA also organized incidents and spread propaganda aimed at confusing and paralyzing the population, and turning them against Mossadegh.

August 19, 1953 – A Day Of Infamy In Iran

On August 15, 1953, after months of organizing, the Shah signed orders to arrest Mossadegh and appointed the pro-U.S. General Zahedi as Prime Minister. CIA operatives in Tehran broadly publicized the Shah’s order to oust Mossadegh. Bribes were paid to military officers and $50,000 was handed out to organize criminal gangs to rampage through Tehran's streets, while shouting pro-Mossadegh slogans. Then pro-coup police units were sent to break up the "mobs" and to restore order.

On August 19, CIA-paid gangs began taking over public squares and shouting, "Long live the Shah! Death to Mossadegh!" A military assault began against Mossadegh's residence, and after many attackers were killed, an army unit with tanks broke through to capture the house. Mossadegh escaped, but surrendered after it was clear all was lost. General Zahedi rode to Radio Tehran atop a tank to proclaim his victory. The Shah told Roosevelt, ”I owe my throne to God, my people, my army – and to you.” (Kermit Roosevelt, "Countercoup: The Struggle for the Control of Iran," p. 199-202).

The Coup’s Bitter Aftermath

After the coup, the name of Iran’s new nationalized oil company – National Iranian Oil Company – was kept, but full control of production and sale of Iran’s oil was returned to a consortium of international oil corporations, which now included five American oil giants. They were given 40 percent of Iran’s oil, Anglo-Iranian Oil’s (later renamed British Petroleum) share was reduced to 40 percent, and French and Dutch companies were given the other 20 percent. Rising nationalism in Iran and across the region had forced the oil giants to raise Iran’s cut of oil profits to 50 percent, but Iranians were not allowed to inspect the books, and one oil historian called the deal “one of the most attractive contracts of the oil industry in the Middle East, as far as terms of payment are concerned.” (Kinzer, p. 196; Larry Everest, Oil, Power & Empire, p. 44; Rashid Khalid, “Resurrecting Empire,” p. 91.)

The Shah was, for the first time, firmly in power, thanks to the U.S., and his opponents were dispersed, demoralized, or suppressed. He reigned for the next 25 years, a loyal instrument of American imperialism in Iran and the region, his rule enforced by brutality and terror.

The 1953 coup profoundly impacted Iranian politics and consciousness – a day of infamy to millions – for decades afterward, and planted seeds that would grow into the 1979 revolution.

Part 3: Iran 1953-1979: The Nightmare of U.S. Domination

For over 100 years, the domination of Iran has been deeply woven into the fabric of global imperialism, enforced by the U.S. and other powers through covert intrigues, economic bullying, military assaults, and invasions. This history provides the backdrop for U.S. hostility toward Iran today – including the real threat of war, even nuclear war. Part 1 of this series explored the rivalry between European imperialists, up through World War 1, over who would control Iran and its oil. Part 2 exposed how the U.S. overthrew the nationalist secular government of Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 and restored its brutal, oppressive, and loyal administrator – the Shah – to power. Part 3 and Part 4 examine what 25 years of U.S. domination under the Shah’s reign meant for Iran and its people, and how it paved the way for the 1979 revolution and the founding of the Islamic Republic.

The conventional narrative, repeated at every turn by the government and media, is that what the U.S. does around the world, whether it is economic treaties, political pressure, even war, is aimed at overcoming poverty, tyranny, and oppression, and giving other countries the benefits of democracy, modernization and the “free market.” But what the United States spreads around the world is imperialism and the political structures to enforce that imperialism. And what happened in Iran under the U.S.-installed and backed Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi showed the bitter reality of this truth.

After the 1953 CIA-organized coup, the Shah and the U.S. moved to crush the widespread anti-U.S., anti-Shah opposition, solidify the Shah’s grip on power, and bring Iran firmly under U.S. control – politically, economically, and militarily.

The Shah immediately formed a military government and put Iran under indefinite martial law. The U.S. poured military advisors and aid ($504 million between 1952 and 1961) into Iran, reorganizing, training, and expanding the Monarchy’s police, military and, in 1957, its dreaded secret police – SAVAK.¹

Opposition groups which had backed the overthrown Prime Minister Mossadegh, including the broad-based National Front and the pro-Soviet Tudeh Party, were immediately outlawed. All forms of political organization and activity – even literary gatherings – were banned. Massive arrests, unjustified detentions, institutionalized torture, summary tribunals, prison-murders, and executions were the order of the day. Newspapers, magazines, books – even leaflets – were outlawed if they criticized the government or the U.S. Censorship was enforced so strictly that the number of publications soon dropped from 600 under Prime Minister Mossaedegh (1951-53) to around 100.²

Parliament’s limited independence was stripped away, and candidates were now chosen by the regime. A “two-party” system was begun in 1957 – with both the “Nationalist Party” and the “People’s Party” initiated and controlled by the Shah. Iran’s educational system was reorganized to institutionalize pro-Shah loyalty and propaganda.

Iran's Oil Economy: “Ownership Without Control”

The U.S. also moved to prop up the Shah by reviving Iran’s economy by integrating it more deeply into the U.S.-dominated world market as a producer of cheap oil, as well as a market for Western goods and investment. Between 1952 and 1961, the U.S. funneled $631 million in economic aid into Iran – the largest amount to any non-NATO country.³ By the 1960s, there were more than 900 U.S. economic and technical experts in Iran. They shaped Iran’s economy, including drafting economic plans and helping create Iran’s leading bank (the Industrial and Mining Development Bank). U.S. direct private investment soared to $200 million, and the U.S. became Iran’s leading trade partner.

Oil revenues still accounted for the bulk of Iran’s exports and state revenues. After the 1953 coup, it would have been politically difficult to go back to the old system of open foreign ownership. Instead, a new agreement was drawn up giving formal ownership of Iran’s oil to the state-owned National Iranian Oil Company (which had been created by Mossadegh) and increasing Iran’s share of the profits to 50 percent. Britain’s monopoly on Iranian oil was broken, and U.S. and other oil giants became part of a new Consortium with exclusive rights to purchase oil from the Shah’s regime.

Behind the scenes, this Consortium was still in charge due to Iran’s dependence on its equipment, technical expertise, and global marketing networks, as well as the Shah’s overall dependence on the U.S. For instance, the eight Consortium members operated under a secret agreement (only revealed in 1974) spelling out the terms on which each would buy Iranian oil and how they would collectively restrict production to avoid a supply glut and decline in profits. Historian Amin Saikal writes, “The international oil companies were placed in such a powerful position that they could run the Iranian oil industry as their interests dictated. They increased and decreased production and prices, and finally controlled supply and demand in markets, to whatever degree and in whatever way suited them best.” Saikal calls this “ownership without control,” which “enabled the consortium to make the real decisions on Iran’s economic growth.”⁴

Iran lost tens, probably hundreds, of millions as a result. Meanwhile these kinds of arrangements helped Western capital earn an estimated $12.8 billion in profits from Middle Eastern oil between 1948 and 1960.⁵

The “White Revolution” – Imperialist Plans, Unintended Consequences

Building Iran’s economy around extracting oil created an island of industrial development linked to global imperialism in a sea of feudalism and small-scale production. In the late 1950s, over 70 percent of the people still lived in rural areas, mostly as tenant farmers or small landholders, mired in poverty. Some 400-450 feudal landlord families (including the Shah’s) owned more than half the land.⁶ When I visited Iran in 1979 and 1980, Kurdish peasants described being taxed by the village lords for everything from holidays to water, animals, and crops, and being forced to turn over up to 40 percent of their crop. Big landlords had absolute political power in the villages. Peasants had to ask permission to get married or take trips to town. One notorious landlord forced peasants to bring their fiancées to him on the eve of their weddings.

By the early 1960s, the U.S. government was very concerned about the stability of the Shah’s regime (and there was even secret discussion of ousting him). Iran had been hit by runaway prices and food and fuel shortages, and rumblings of discontent were growing louder. Meanwhile, various kinds of nationalist, anti-imperialist revolutions were rippling across the globe – Vietnam, Latin America, Egypt, and Iraq in the 1950s – which were often fueled by peasant struggles for land and liberation from feudalism.

In 1963, the Shah, under the direction of the U.S., embarked on a far-reaching program of economic, political and social reform. Designed by U.S. policymakers and Harvard professors, this so-called White Revolution was a comprehensive imperialist effort to head off upheaval from below, strengthen the Shah’s regime, and turn Iran into a modern, more industrial society with a growing middle class and wider opportunities for foreign capital. Time magazine described this as “a grand design that is intended to wrest Iran from the middle ages into modern industrialized society,” which was realizable thanks to “extensive land reforms and a massive literacy drive,” along with “annual oil royalties worth more than $500 million and an influx of $2 billion in foreign investment capital.”⁷

In the end, however, the White Revolution helped destabilize Iran and contributed to the situation which led to the Shah being overthrown.

This “revolution” was never intended to mobilize the peasantry or thoroughly uproot feudal relations – economically, politically or socially.⁸ Large landowners and landlords were ordered to sell land to sharecropping peasants. Coupled with a program of selling state-owned industries to private investors and encouraging capitalist agribusiness and co-operatives, land reform helped “move landlord capital into industry and other urban projects and to lay the basis for a state dominated capitalism in city and countryside,” historian Nikki Keddie writes. It also undercut the political power of feudal landowners, while linking them more closely to a strengthened Monarchy.⁹

Landlords were entitled to keep at least one-sixth of their land (including their best) and spread their holdings over several villages, so they maintained considerable economic and social power. Only 30 percent of all villages were even covered, and nine years into this “revolution,” only 20 percent of peasant families (700,000 out of 3.5 million) actually received land, often in parcels too small to be viable. Incomes remained abysmally low – 80 percent of those in rural areas received a mere $200 or less a year in 1972.

Roughly 40 percent of Iran's villagers were landless laborers who didn’t benefit from the "land reform" at all. Nearly 600,000 families were forced to leave the land and migrate to urban areas, contributing to a huge swell in Iran’s urban population during the 1960s and 1970s.

Areas like Kurdistan, which suffered intense national oppression, were barely touched by the White Revolution. Some 80 percent of the people still lived in villages. In the mid-1960s, more than half of Kurdish families (on average five to six people) lived in a single room. Most of their dwellings had neither electricity nor running water.¹⁰ This was still largely the situation when I visited after the 1979 revolution. Many villages had no running water, electricity, schools, or hospitals. One farmer told me, “Many are unemployed, none of us can rely on one piece of land; it’s too small and poor and we have too few animals. One has to try to get two or three jobs to eat and not to die.” Another commented, “We have nothing here, no jobs and no schools, no electricity and no hospitals – no life and no future.”

Land reform, granting women the vote, and opening Iran up to greater foreign influence drove important segments of the Islamic clergy to vocally oppose the White Revolution. Iran’s clerics had long been part of the feudal order and establishment, and had joined popular struggles against foreign imperialism and its client monarchs when they feared that Islam, traditional feudal social relations, and the role of the clergy were being undercut. Some leading clerics were big landowners and the clergy overall drew much of its financial support from religious endowments based on land ownership.

In 1963, riots broke out in Qom and Tehran after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had been placed under house arrest for speaking out against the White Revolution. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, were shot by the Shah’s troops. The next year, after Khomeini publicly denounced the granting of legal immunity for all U.S. government personnel in Iran, Khomeini was forced into exile in Najaf, Iraq. But through these events, Khomeini emerged as a leading cleric and opponent of the Shah, who would return 16 years later, after the Shah’s overthrow, to found Iran’s first Islamic Republic.¹¹

Footnotes

1. Ali Reza Nobari, ed., Iran Erupts, p. 143; Ali M. Ansari, Confronting Iran, p. 41. [back]

2. Nobari, p. 64. [back]

3. Ansari, p. 41. [back]

4. Amin Saikal, The Rise and Fall of the Shah, pp. 50-51. [back]

5. Larry Everest, Oil, Power & Empire – Iraq and the U.S. Global Agenda, pp. 57-58. [back]

6. Fred Halliday, Iran: Dictatorship and Development, pp. 106-07, 110. [back]

7. Time, Feb. 11, 1966. [back]

8. Nikki Keddie, Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution, p. 144; Ansari, p. 46. [back]

9. Keddie, p. 145. [back]

10. Gerard Chaliand, ed., A People Without a Country: The Kurds and Kurdistan, p. 113. [back]

11. Ansari, p. 49; Dilip Hiro, Iran Under the Ayatollahs, p. 47. [back]

Part 4: Iran in the 1970s: Oil Boom, Breakneck Development, Seething Discontent

For over 100 years, the domination of Iran has been deeply woven into the fabric of global imperialism, enforced through covert intrigues, economic bullying, military assaults, and invasions. This history provides the backdrop for U.S. hostility toward Iran today – including the real threat of war. Part 1 of this series explored the rivalry between European imperialists up through World War 1 over which one would control Iran and its oil. Part 2 exposed the U.S.’s 1953 overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh’s secular, nationalist government and its restoration of its brutal client the Shah to power. Parts 3 and 4 examine what 25 years of U.S. domination under the Shah’s reign meant for Iran, and how it paved the way for the 1979 revolution.

During the 1970s, the agrarian reforms of the White Revolution (see part 3), skyrocketing oil revenues, and Iran’s new role as the U.S.’s Persian Gulf gendarme combined to bring rapid – and destabilizing – social, political, and economic change. Oil income shot up from $22.5 million in 1954 to over $19 billion in 1975-76. By mid-decade, nearly half of Iran’s people lived in urban areas (up from 30 percent a decade earlier). Tehran’s population soared by 2.5 million people between 1961 and 1978. Industry and manufacturing tripled in size compared to the 1950s, and Iran’s middle class was growing quickly.¹

The Shah bragged that Iran would soon have one of the world’s five biggest economies. The U.S. imperialists saw Iran as a model of development, an island of stability, and a crucial Middle East outpost.

Yet billions in oil revenues didn’t lead to balanced, self-reliant economic growth or a better life for most Iranians. Oil revenues propped up the Shah’s repressive tyranny. Iran’s oil sector and a few other more technologically developed industries remained islands linked to foreign capital, technology, and markets, but disconnected from most of the rest of Iran’s economy.

Iran’s oil industry was very capital intensive (machine and technology heavy), employing only 42,000 Iranians out of a 1972 labor force of nearly 10 million.² Oil technology and equipment were imported, so its development didn’t lead to either technological development of the economy as a whole or less dependence on selling oil. Instead, by 1977, over three-quarters of Iran’s government revenues came from petroleum.³

Most manufacturing was still done in very small, labor intensive workshops. Traditional goods – like carpets, handicrafts and agricultural goods – continued to make up more than 80 percent of Iran’s non-oil exports. Fewer worked in rural areas and on the land, but feudal and semi-feudal relations remained widespread and per capita agricultural output stagnated. Newer urban industries were often concentrated in “import substitution” manufacturing. There, high-end consumer goods – like cars – were assembled using imported parts and technology.⁴

This kind of imperialist-driven economic growth made Iran even more addicted to imports of technology, up-scale consumer goods, military hardware, and food. Iran’s imports jumped from $400 million in 1958-59 to a staggering $18.45 billion in 1975-76, including some $2.6 billion in food. This giant tab sucked up most of Iran’s oil income, wiped out many small Iranian businesses, and reinforced foreign capital’s overall stranglehold.⁵

These changes also sharpened social divisions. Foreign companies made huge profits in Iran, ranging from 30% to 200% rate of return on investments, while the Shah and capitalists and landowners closest to his regime made immense fortunes. Iran’s small upper strata and growing professional and technical middle class enjoyed rising incomes, some becoming quite wealthy.

At the same time, millions were being driven off the land and pulled into sprawling urban shantytowns without water, sewage, or electricity. Sixty percent of Iranians remained illiterate, life expectancy was 50 years, and 139 of every 1,000 children died in their first year.⁶ When I visited Iran in 1979, a construction worker told me about working on a new palace for the Shah’s mother. He made $3 a day, barely enough to pay cab fare to and from work, and buy a lunch of bread and cheese. He couldn’t afford Tehran’s skyrocketing rents, and had to live with his brother’s family to survive.⁷ Uprooted from the countryside and set adrift in the cities, many shanty dwellers became a key base of support for Ayatollah Khomeini and Islamic fundamentalism. Khomeini, a reactionary theocrat, would emerge as the leader of Iran’s 1979 revolution.

A British magazine captured Iran’s crazy-quilt, lopsided growth: “Iran is being Westernized in all the wrong places. Modern bottling plants for Pepsi, Coke, and Canada Dry have sprung up all over the place, while in the filthy poor quarters of the cities people still drink from the jubes – open water courses that run down the sides of the streets, collecting all manner of rubbish. Teheran airport is one of the finest in the Middle East, yet there is still no adequate road and rail system. A tall Hilton hotel is being built, while hundreds of people sleep in the streets.”⁸

Iran: America's Persian Gulf Gendarme

The Shah’s role heading up a U.S. military outpost in the Persian Gulf and on the Soviet Union’s southern border also skewed Iran’s economy and society, and amplified other problems.

U.S. military advisors had been operating in Iran since the early 1940s. But U.S. direct involvement in Iran's military greatly increased after the 1953 coup. By 1954, three different U.S. military groups were operating in Iran, directing the expansion of Iran’s Shah’s army, forming a modern air force and navy, training Iranian officers, and overseeing weapons purchases.⁹ Iran was a key member of a sequence of U.S. regional military alliances.

In the early 1970s, Iran’s importance as a U.S. military ally took a leap. U.S. President Nixon, then in the throes of the Vietnam War, announced the U.S. was going to rely more heavily on allies and clients to police key regions. Iran, along with Saudi Arabia and Israel, would be one of U.S. imperialism’s “pillars” in the Middle East.

To fulfill this role, Iran embarked on a massive military buildup and spending spree. Huge bases were built in the north to monitor the Soviets and along the southern coast to police the Persian Gulf. Between 1972 and 1975 alone, Iran spent $35 billion of its $62 billion in oil revenues on the military – mainly on purchases from the U.S. and other Western powers. By the late 1970s, nearly 8,000 U.S. military advisers and technicians were stationed in Iran.

In the wake of Israel’s 1967 and 1973 wars seizing Palestinian and Arab lands, anger and resistance rose across the region. The Shah stepped in and supplied Israel with 90 percent of its oil. The Iranian military helped crush an anti-imperialist guerrilla movement in the Dhofar province of Oman. The Shah conspired with the Nixon administration to manipulate and then betray Iraq’s Kurds in order to weaken the Saddam Hussein regime. (In 1975 the unsuspecting Kurds were decimated by Iraqi forces, with thousands killed and some 200,000 driven into Iran.)

SAVAK: U.S.-Trained Torturers

A decade of breakneck development, fueled by imperialism and oil revenues, effected rapid economic, political, social, and cultural changes – in a highly unstable way. The U.S. and the Shah built up elements of a modern economy and infrastructure, but in a narrow, lopsided manner. Feudal relations weren’t fully uprooted, and in many ways were reinforced and incorporated into these imperialist-driven transformations. Millions of rural labors and peasants were still locked in poverty, and those driven into the cities remained largely left out of the more modern segments of society. These changes also alienated powerful segments of society whose authority was rooted in regressive, feudal relations and ideas. These included some merchants and landlords, as well as significant segments of the Islamic clergy.

The newer middle and upper classes did grow and prosper, but were denied a political voice. Tens of thousands of students went abroad as part of the Shah’s modernization. They were radicalized by both the situation in Iran and the anti-imperialist and revolutionary movements sweeping the world. They, in turn, brought an open, seething hatred of the Shah’s regime to countries where they studied, and often militant anti-imperialism and internationalism.

The Iranian students had a powerful impact on the countries where they studied. This included the United States, where they made millions aware of the role the U.S. government played in propping up the Shah’s tyranny – and what this meant for the Iranian people. And their revolutionary sentiments and solidarity with people struggling inside the U.S. brought an internationalist consciousness against a common enemy. Few who encountered anti-Shah students will ever forget their marches of unabashed defiance and seemingly boundless energy, going for miles. Or their booming chants: "The Shah Is a Fascist Butcher, Down with the Shah!" "The Shah Is a U.S. Puppet, Down with the Shah!" The Shah dispatched his secret police abroad. But their efforts to intimidate and suppress the students failed. All this reverberated profoundly back in Iran, where such open contempt and opposition was suppressed. And these students would play a crucial role in the downfall of the Shah in 1979.

Both the more traditionally-minded as well as the newer, more secular classes were humiliated and outraged by the Shah’s subservience to the U.S. In the face of widespread deprivation, he insisted on pursuing America’s imperial objectives, ostentatious consumption, and grandiose royal displays.

So the Shah’s U.S.-driven politics and economics ended up turning both traditional and new segments of society against his rule.

To keep the lid on, the Shah increasingly turned to his dreaded secret police – SAVAK. Founded in 1957 under the CIA’s direction (and later with assistance from Israel’s intelligence police, Mossad), SAVAK’s mission was finding and stamping out any and all opposition. It had the authority to arrest and detain suspects indefinitely and ran its own prisons. Torture was routine: “electric shock, whipping, beating, inserting broken glass and pouring boiling water into the rectum, tying weights to the testicles, and the extraction of teeth and nails.”¹⁰ In 1975, the London Times reported that prisoners were forced to watch their children “savagely mistreated.” One man reported, “I found it so unbearable, that that I wished I had a knife so that I could kill my son myself, rather than see him suffer like that.”

SAVAK dispatched its agents all over the world to monitor and punish dissidents, anti-Shah students in particular. Communist, radical, and secular forces were SAVAK’s main targets. Some clerics were also jailed, exiled, or suppressed, even as the Shah continued to reinforce Islam and the clergy. In 1976, Amnesty International reported that Iran had the “highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture which is beyond belief. No country in the world has a worse record in human rights than Iran.”¹¹

The U.S. was directly and deeply involved in SAVAK’s operations. By the 1970s, an average of 400 SAVAK agents were trained in the U.S. every year. A former CIA analyst on Iran admitted the agency instructed SAVAK in torture techniques. “We’re keeping the Shah in power through our agents,” one intelligence officer stated, “who are training their agents in Iran.”¹²

But this too would soon backfire. Underneath a facade of stability, Iran was heading toward a revolutionary eruption, and the founding of a reactionary Islamic theocracy.

Next: The 1979 revolution and the Islamic Republic.

Footnotes

1. Fred Halliday, Iran: Dictatorship and Development, pp. 10, 15, 138-9; S.D., “Iran: The Forging of a Weak Link,” A World To Win (AWTW), 1985/2, p. 38 [back]

2. Halliday, pp. 176, 179 [back]

3. Halliday, pp. 138-39; Nikkie R. Keddie, Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution, p. 162 [back]

4. Halliday, pp. 176, 10, 182; Ali Reza Nobari, Iran Erupts, p. 32; Keddie, p. 160-161 [back]

5. Per capita agricultural output was the same in 1973 as in 1961. Halliday, pp. 160, 126-128 [back]

6. Halliday, p. 13 [back]

7. Rents in Tehran had risen 15 times over between 1960 and 1975 (and another 100 percent the next year), Halliday, p. 190 [back]

8. Ali M. Ansari, Confronting Iran, p. 45 [back]

9. Amin Saikal, The Rise and Fall of the Shah, p. 54 [back]

10. Federation of American Scientists [back]

11. William Blum, Killing Hope, excerpt at Third World Traveller [back]

12. Nobari, p. 144 [back]

Part 5: The 1979 Revolution and the Rise of Islamic Fundamentalism

For over 100 years, the domination of Iran has been deeply woven into the fabric of global imperialism, enforced through covert intrigues, economic bullying, military assaults, and invasions. This history provides the backdrop for U.S. hostility toward Iran today – including the real threat of war. Part 1 of this series explored the rivalry between European imperialists up through World War 1 over which one would control Iran and its oil. Part 2 exposed the U.S.’s 1953 overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh’s secular, nationalist government and its restoration of its brutal client the Shah. Parts 3 and 4 examined what 25 years of U.S. domination under the Shah’s reign meant for Iran and how it paved the way for the 1979 revolution. Part 5 examines how both the 1979 revolution and the U.S. response fueled the rise of Islamic fundamentalism.

In December 1977, then-President Jimmy Carter toasted the Shah, calling Iran an “island of stability” in a sea of turmoil. A few weeks later, a small anti-Shah demonstration of religious students took place in Qum. It was violently repressed by the regime’s forces. This wasn’t unusual, but what ensued was. A cycle began, unleashing deep wells of dissatisfaction and anger. The Shah’s repression spurred more protests. When those were repressed, even more protests followed. Within a year of Carter’s toast, a wave of revolution was sweeping Iran. On one day alone more than 10 million people – one of every three Iranians – took to the streets demanding the end of the monarchy. In January 1979, the hated Shah was forced to flee, and in February Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his followers took power.

Iran’s revolution, the consolidation of an Islamic theocracy, and the actions the U.S. imperialists took in response would have a profound impact. They would help undermine the U.S. grip on the Middle East and fuel the rise of anti-U.S. Islamic fundamentalism. The revolution and its aftermath turned Iran from a pillar of U.S. dominance to one of its main obstacles in the region. Over these decades, imperialism and Islamic fundamentalism ended up reinforcing each other – even as they clashed.

The U.S. – Dazed & Confused

Iran’s revolution blind-sided the U.S. rulers. Even in August 1978, when the tidal wave of upheaval was about to crest, a CIA report concluded that “Iran is not in a revolutionary or even a ‘pre-revolutionary’ situation.”

In fall 1978, after the Shah’s “bloody Friday” massacre of thousands of demonstrators failed to stem the tide, the imperialists were forced to confront the magnitude of Iran’s upheaval. Yet they remained paralyzed by infighting over how to respond. Some in the U.S. ruling class argued for a last-ditch military coup. Others worried that this would provoke an even more profoundly revolutionary upheaval, and possibly push the masses toward Iran’s secular revolutionary left.

At the time, contention with Soviet imperialism was the U.S.’s chief driving necessity, and many ruling class strategists felt that Khomeini and the clergy in Iran could be a force against the left and the Soviets. They also assumed that the clerics would cede power to their pro-U.S., technocratic allies. One senior U.S. official wrote in February 1979, Khomeini’s movement “is far better organized, enlightened, able to resist communism than its detractors would lead us to believe.”

Neither option was a good one for the U.S. ruling class, and its freedom to impact events in Iran dwindled quickly as the revolution surged. In the end, the Carter administration decided to try to deal with the new Islamic Republic. The U.S. maintained diplomatic relations with Iran, and attempted to build ties with forces in the new government.

Khomeini had long advocated a rule of Islamic "jurists" (scholars and clerics), which would reimpose Islamic ideology and social relations within the confines of Iran’s existing social and economic structures. This represented the interests of sections of Iran’s feudal and bourgeois strata and entailed reconfiguring Iran’s role in the region and its relationship to U.S. imperialism. But it did not entail rupturing from imperialism’s overall domination of Iran, much less uprooting feudalism. Khomeini and his followers viewed their new state as a model for the entire Islamic world. Meanwhile, the U.S.’s huge CIA presence in Iran was focused on the Soviet Union – one former official told author Robert Dreyfuss that "virtually no one in the Carter administration had any idea of who Khomeini was until it was too late."

The Seizure of the U.S. Embassy

On November 4, 1979, the U.S. received another rude awakening. Islamic students seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran with Khomeini’s blessing, took its personnel hostage, and demanded the exiled Shah be returned to face trial.

The triggers for the takeover were, first, the U.S. decision to admit the Shah (then dying of cancer) into the U.S. for medical care. And second, a meeting in Algiers between Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and Iran’s Prime Minister, Defense Minister, and Foreign Minister, all of whom were allied with Khomeini but were pro-U.S. and basically secular in their orientation.

The Khomeini forces, who organized and led the takeover, seized on popular anger at the Shah and the widespread fear that the U.S. might be conspiring to return him to power as it had in 1953. However, Khomeini and the clerics’ primary objective was to discredit and oust secular forces, consolidate a monopoly of power in their hands, and establish an Islamic theocracy.

The Middle East “Arc of Crisis”

Shortly after the embassy takeover, in December 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.

The Soviet invasion gave Moscow control of a key buffer state between Iran and Pakistan and put its forces closer to the Persian Gulf. It came in the wake of what one former Reagan official called stepped-up “competition for influence with the United States throughout the Middle East, Indian Ocean, Horn of Africa, Arabian Peninsula and Southwest Asia regions.” U.S. officials also worried that their client regimes in the Persian Gulf were vulnerable to Iranian-inspired Islamist agitation. In sum, they felt the U.S. was facing an “arc of crisis” stretching from Afghanistan through Iran to Saudi Arabia.

The U.S. Counters – Arming and Organizing Islamic Fundamentalists

The U.S. imperialists launched a multi-dimensioned and aggressive response focused on buttressing pro-U.S. oil sheikdoms in the Gulf and defeating the Soviets’ moves. They were framed by Carter’s January 23, 1980 State of the Union declaration that “Any attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s National Security Advisor, called this “Carter Doctrine” a “strategic revolution in America’s global position.” Controlling the Gulf was now as important to the empire as its alliances with Europe and Japan. It was backed by a major expansion of the U.S. military presence in the region.

One key component of this strategy, which would come back to haunt the U.S., was mobilizing Islamic forces against the Soviets, particularly in Afghanistan (something done previously in Algeria, Turkey, Jordan, Egypt, and Israel). “The theory was, there was an arc of crisis, and so an arc of Islam could be mobilized to contain the Soviets,” one former Carter official explained.

Ironically, this was now taking place after the region’s first Islamist seizure of state power.

In July 1979, some five months before the Soviet invasion, the U.S. had begun a covert campaign to destabilize Afghanistan’s pro-Soviet government by arming and funding the Islamist opposition. The goal, according to Brzezinski, was “to induce a Soviet military intervention.” After the Soviets invaded, Brzezinski wrote Carter: “We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.” Over the next decade, the U.S. government funneled more than $3 billion in arms and aid to the Islamic mujahadeen, helping create a global network of Islamist fighters, some of whom would form the core of Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda.

Giving the Green Light to Iraq’s 1980 Invasion of Iran

Another major prong of the U.S. counter-attack was punishing Iran in order to force it to release the U.S. embassy personnel and curb its Islamist agitation in the region. The strategy here was to try and put pressure on and contain the Islamic Republic – not overthrow it. Khomeini’s government was brutally clamping down on Iranian leftists, keeping its distance from the Soviet Union, and maintaining the flow of Iranian oil to the West – all of which coincided with key U.S. interests. The U.S.’s overarching concern, as Brzezinski put it, was forging “an anti-Soviet Islamic coalition.”

The U.S. had limited military resources in the region and feared that any major military move against Iran could provoke a U.S.-Soviet confrontation that could slide into nuclear conflagration. During the Iranian revolution and in its immediate aftermath, the U.S. and the Soviets engaged in a series of veiled high-stakes threats backed by military maneuvers and nuclear alerts, as each warned the other to stay out of Iran.

Given these constraints, the U.S. opted to work through Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, whose secular nationalist regime was ideologically and politically threatened by Iran’s Islamic revolution (including because 60 percent of Iraq’s population were Shi’ites who were oppressed under Saddam's rule). In the spring and summer of 1980, the U.S. encouraged an Iraqi attack on Iran (possibly including via a direct meeting between Hussein and either Brzezinski or high-level CIA agents in Jordan). On September 22, 1980 Iraq invaded southwest Iran.

Reagan’s “October Surprise”

The Carter administration viewed Iraq’s invasion as useful to U.S. interests, but when Iraqi forces drove deep into southern Iran it became apparent that Hussein had greater ambitions. So the U.S. declared that it was against “any dismemberment of Iran,” and promised to airlift $300-$500 million worth of arms to Iran if the hostages were released.

Nothing came of this offer because of a secret behind-the-scenes conspiracy between Iran’s clerics and powerful right-wing forces in the U.S.

The U.S. rulers viewed the seizure and holding of the Tehran embassy and 52 of its personnel for 444 days as a global humiliation. The media labeled it “America held hostage,” and establishment commentators complained that the U.S. had been turned into a “pitiful giant,” incapable of imposing its will even on a Third World country. The utter failure of Carter’s April 24, 1980 attempt at a helicopter rescue of the hostages added insult to injury. Ronald Reagan’s backers were deeply frustrated by the constraints on U.S. power generally and felt a Reagan victory in the 1980 presidential election was crucial to strengthening U.S. imperialism’s global dominance and aggressively taking on their Soviet rivals.

These Reagan backers (including many who would be leading neocon hawks in George W. Bush’s administration) feared that if Carter won the hostages’ release he would win re-election. So they worked to make sure this didn’t happen. Over the summer of 1980, Reagan’s top advisors made a secret agreement with the Islamic Republic: if Iran continued to hold the hostages through November’s election and Reagan won, he would lift the economic sanctions imposed by Carter and allow Israel to ship arms to Iran. Former Carter official Gary Sick called it “nothing less than a political coup.”

Iran’s Ayatollahs agreed because they wished to prolong the Embassy crisis and the Iran-Iraq war in order to pose as anti-imperialist fighters, outflank and crush their opponents, and firmly consolidate their theocracy. Reagan did win, and on January 21, 1981, the day he was inaugurated, Iran sent the U.S. embassy personnel home.

Gulf Stalemate, Soviet Defeat, and the Rise of Islamic Fundamentalism

In the short run, this U.S. offensive worked. The Iran-Iraq war dragged on for 8 years with neither side winning a clear victory. The Islamic Republic’s energies were absorbed in the war and domestic political struggles, and the U.S.’s regional clients survived. In Afghanistan, the Soviets were forced to withdraw their forces in 1989, suffering a major defeat which contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the U.S. victory in the “Cold War.”

Yet in many ways, these U.S. measures – indeed even its victory over the Soviets – unleashed new contradictions and sowed the seeds of the enormous difficulties the U.S. is now facing in the Middle East-Central Asian region.

For one, the U.S.-backed proxy wars in the Persian Gulf and Afghanistan exacted an enormous toll. Conservative estimates place the death toll in the Iran-Iraq War at 367,000 – 262,000 Iranians and 105,000 Iraqis. An estimated 700,000 were injured or wounded on both sides, bringing the total casualty figure to over one million. The 1979-1989 Afghan war took the lives of more than a million Afghans (along with 15,000 Soviet soldiers) and a third of the population was driven into refugee camps. This contributed greatly to the overall suffering and dislocation in the region, which became a primary source of anti-U.S. Islamism.

The Iran-Iraq war helped the Khomeini regime firmly consolidate power, and it would use that power to promote Islamist movements across the region. Dreyfuss points out, “The religious revolution in Iran did more than kick the props out from underneath America’s most important outpost in the region. It crystallized a fundamental change in the character of the Islamic right, one that had been taking shape since the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood decades earlier. As it gained strength in the ’70s the Islamic right grew more assertive, and parts of it were radicalized…..and took on a more pronounced political character.”

Arming and training of the Afghan and Islamic Mujahadeen created a fighting force that would soon turn on its U.S. and Saudi sponsors and become a huge problem for them. The U.S.-Mujahadeen victory over the Soviets emboldened the Islamists – believing they’d defeated one superpower, they now felt they could defeat the other. The collapse of the Soviet Union also strengthened Islamic fundamentalism ideologically (secularism and Marxism had supposedly failed) and politically (a major backer of secular and nationalist forces had fallen).

Over the course of the 1990s and into the new millennium, the Islamist trend became a bigger and bigger problem for the U.S. empire.

References

Bob Avakian, “Why We're in the Situation We're in Today…And What to Do About It: A Thoroughly Rotten System and the Need for Revolution,” available here

Robert Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game – How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, pp. 217-230.

Larry Everest, Oil, Power & Empire: Iraq and the U.S. Global Agenda, Chapter 4 – “Arming Iraq, Double-Dealing Death in the Gulf”

Larry Everest, “Islamic Revivalism and the Experience of Iran,” Revolution magazine, Fall/Winter 1989

Part 6: The 1980s—Double-Dealing, Double-Crossing, and Fueling the Gulf Slaughter

For over 100 years, the domination of Iran has been deeply woven into the fabric of global imperialism, enforced through covert intrigues, economic bullying, military assaults, and invasions. This history provides the backdrop for U.S. hostility toward Iran today – including the real threat of war. Part 1 of this series explored the rivalry between European imperialists up through World War 1 over which one would control Iran and its oil. Part 2 exposed the U.S.’s 1953 overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh’s secular, nationalist government in order to restore a tyrannical client, the Shah. Parts 3 and 4 examined the impact of 25 years of U.S. domination via the Shah, and how it paved the way for the 1979 revolution. Part 5 explored the 1979 revolution and the U.S. response, including how both fueled the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. Part 6 exposes the imperialist logic, cynicism – and necessities – behind Ronald Reagan’s 1985-86 “arms-for-hostages” gambit to Iran.

In 1986, President Ronald Reagan sent a personally inscribed Bible and a key-shaped chocolate cake – along with offers of millions in military hardware and a new strategic relationship – as a gesture of goodwill to Iran’s Islamic Republic, then led by Ayatollah Khomeini. Some 16 years later, in 2002, President George W. Bush condemned Iran as part of an “axis-of-evil,” and has since targeted Iran, openly threatened it with a military attack, and refuses to normalize relations.

This seemingly dramatic shift is the product of dramatic global changes and therefore different opportunities and necessities confronting U.S. imperialism in the years between Reagan’s offer and Bush’s threats.

But there is also continuity here. The shift from Reagan to Bush may seem stark, but both were attempting, in different circumstances and with different tactics, to advance U.S. imperialist interests – including strengthening U.S. domination over Iran and the whole region.

The U.S. offer of military aid to Iran was in the midst of the bloody 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war. This war was launched by Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, with a bright green light from the Carter administration. The Islamic Republic had just taken power in Iran following the 1979 revolution overthrowing a hated American puppet – the Shah. The White House calculated that Iraq’s attack would weaken the new Republic, prevent it from threatening U.S. clients in the Persian Gulf, and force it to release the U.S. personnel that were being held at the U.S. embassy.

Reagan’s offer didn't come about because the U.S. imperialists had come to like or accept Iran’s new rulers. Far from it. The U.S. was stung by the Shah’s fall and saw the new Khomeini regime as an impediment to U.S. political, military, and economic control of Iran. And the U.S. was increasingly concerned about Iran’s efforts to promote anti-U.S. Islamist currents and play a larger role in the Middle East – such as in 1982 dispatching 1,500 Revolutionary Guards to Lebanon during its war with Israel to help found the armed group Hezbollah. In 1984, the U.S. put Iran on its list of countries supporting “terrorism.”

Fears of Soviet Coup in a “Geopolitical Pivot”

However, by 1985, the U.S. had an even bigger worry: that the Soviet Union could score a major geopolitical coup in the struggle for power in Iran after Ayatollah Khomeini (then in his 80s), died.

After the end of World War 2 – and especially since the 1960s – U.S. actions in the Middle East were primarily shaped by its global rivalry with the Soviet Union, an imperialist power with a “communist” cover. This contention, including in Iran, had placed major constraints on what the U.S. could and couldn’t do. For instance, one reason the U.S. hadn’t directly or massively intervened militarily in the region was the fear that the Soviets would come to the aid of the targeted country and gain a new beachhead. And there was also the possibility that such a confrontation could spiral toward nuclear war.

As a result, during the 1980s, while the U.S. stepped up its military presence in the Persian Gulf, it was still forced to work through regional states – like Iraq – that it often despised and distrusted. Sometimes the U.S. was reduced to trying to play one side off against the other or use unreliable regional states as proxies. The Iran-Iraq War was a case in point, illustrating both the cynical depravity of America’s ruling imperialists – but also their limited options.

Domination of the Middle East – for both its vast energy resources and its strategically central location – had been a pillar of U.S. global power and the functioning of U.S. capitalism since the end of World War 2. What made the prospect of Soviet gains so threatening was that Iran is what Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski called a “geopolitical pivot” – a country whose fate can shape global geopolitics. Iran is large – four times the size of Iraq. It is strategically located – dominating the Persian Gulf geographically with 1,000 miles of coastline, bordering the energy-rich Caspian Sea, standing between the Soviet Union and the oil fields of the Middle East, and linking the Middle East and Central Asia. And it has the world’s second or third greatest oil reserves.

A June 1985 draft National Security Directive worried: “Soviet success in taking advantage of the emerging power struggle to insinuate itself in Iran would change the strategic balance in the area.” A debate ensued in the Reagan administration, and ultimately those pushing for attempting to open a strategic dialogue with Iran’s leaders prevailed. National Security Advisor Adm. John Poindexter wrote, “We have an opportunity here that we should not miss…if it doesn’t work, all we’ve lost is a little intelligence and 1,000 TOW missiles. And if it does work, then maybe we change a lot of things in the Mideast.”

The U.S. sent several high-level missions to Iran to attempt to work out a deal. Beginning in the fall of 1985, the U.S. began secretly shipping TOW anti-tank missiles, Hawk missile parts, and Hawk radars to Iran, first via Israel and, beginning in early 1986, directly to Tehran. The immediate goal was the release of U.S. personnel held by Islamists in Lebanon. But the broader objective was building links and gaining leverage with Iran’s rulers and heading off any Soviet efforts to do likewise.

What U.S. Imperialists & Iranian Theocrats Have in Common

Reagan’s offer of “arms-for-hostages” also reflected an appreciation by the U.S. rulers of what the imperialists had in common with Iran’s theocrats. For all its anti-U.S. posturing, the Islamic Republic’s program was never about breaking free of the imperialist-dominated world order. Iran’s clerics explicitly upheld capitalism and private property. Iran’s economy was still geared to producing oil for the world market (80 percent of its government revenue still comes from oil sales), and it still relied on various technological and marketing agreements with global multinationals to do so. Iran welcomed foreign investment. Iran’s clerics preserved (and in many ways strengthened) the traditional class and social relations which were the internal basis of imperialism’s dominance. And they butchered those in Iran – communists, leftists, revolutionary intellectuals, and democrats – who were part of the struggle against U.S. domination of Iran.

Of course, for Reagan and his officials, cutting a deal never meant treating Iran with mutual respect and equality. The point was to incorporate and subordinate Iran in a U.S.-dominated order – through a mix of inducements, threats, and bloody double-dealing. The goal remained, as The New York Times put it in 1984, “that both [Iran and Iraq] should lose” and that their “mutual exhaustion” would further U.S. interests in the region. So in true Mafia godfather fashion, as Reagan was dispatching envoys, gifts, and arms to Iran, his team had also set up a secret intelligence link with Iraq, giving it near real-time battlefield intelligence to use against Iran. And Reagan himself sent Saddam a secret message urging him to step up the bombing of Iran.

In the fall of 1986, the U.S.’s Iran initiative collapsed (for a number of reasons, including deep distrust between the two governments and divisions among the U.S. rulers) after the arms-for-hostages arrangement was revealed by a Lebanese magazine. This, plus growing fears that Iran might defeat Iraq, led the U.S. to tilt decisively back to Iraq. It stepped up military and intelligence aid and increased its direct naval presence in the Gulf. On July 2, 1988, the U.S. warship Vincennes shot down an unarmed Iranian passenger jet – killing all 290 onboard. The U.S. claimed it was an accident, but the Iranian leadership apparently read it as a not-so-veiled threat: “halt the war or face further American attacks.” On July 18, just 16 days later, Khomeini accepted a UN cease-fire resolution.

By that time, thanks in large part to U.S. encouragement for and direct aid in the mutual slaughter, an estimated 367,000 to 262,000 Iranians and 105,000 Iraqis had been killed, and 700,000 were injured or wounded on both sides.

References

Larry Everest, Oil, Power & Empire: Iraq and the U.S. Global Agenda, Chapter 4 – “Arming Iraq, Double-Dealing Death in the Gulf”

Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard – American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, p. 41

Part 7: 1991-2001: The Soviet Collapse, the Growth of Islamic Fundamentalism, and The Intensification of U.S. Hostility Toward Iran

For over 100 years, the domination of Iran has been deeply woven into the fabric of global imperialism, enforced through covert intrigues, economic bullying, military assaults, and invasions. This history provides the backdrop for U.S. hostility toward Iran today – including the real threat of war. Part 1 of this series explored the rivalry between European imperialists up through World War 1 over which one would control Iran and its oil. Part 2 exposed the U.S.’s 1953 overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh’s secular, nationalist government in order to restore a tyrannical client, the Shah. Parts 3 and 4 examined the impact of 25 years of U.S. domination via the Shah, and how it paved the way for the 1979 revolution. Part 5 explored the 1979 revolution and the U.S. response, including how both fueled the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. Part 6 exposed the imperialist logic – and necessities – behind Ronald Reagan’s 1985-86 “arms-for-hostages” gambit to Iran. Part 7, traces the escalation of U.S. hostility toward Iran – from the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991until 2001, when George W. Bush took office.

The Soviet Collapse – A Geopolitical Earthquake

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was a geopolitical earthquake – opening both new opportunities for and new threats to U.S. imperialism. In one swift stroke, the main rival to U.S. global power had (at least temporarily) been removed. America’s theoreticians of empire sensed a historic opportunity to forcefully extend U.S. global dominance and deal decisively with a raft of impediments – to create an unchallenged and unchallengeable empire.

This new mix of opportunity and necessity reshaped Washington’s approach to Iran. During the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the U.S. not only drove Saddam Hussein from Kuwait but destroyed much of Iraq’s military and industrial infrastructure – while Iran remained neutral. Afterward, the Islamic Republic’s leaders took some tentative steps to normalize relations with the U.S., which had been broken when the U.S. Embassy was seized in 1979. The Ayatollah Khomeini had died two years earlier and a new, more pragmatic leadership under President Rafsanjani had come to power. And Iran was eager to attract new foreign investment and trade to prop up its economy.

The U.S. wasn’t interested. The Islamic Republic was still an obstacle to U.S. aims on a number of fronts. The Soviet collapse hadn’t resolved the knot of problems the U.S. faced in the Middle East (in fact it exacerbated some) and it opened up a Pandora’s box in Central Asia,. The U.S. was increasingly bumping up against Iran in both regions. And now with the Soviet Union gone, U.S. strategists no longer felt the need to balance Iran and Iraq. Instead they could move more directly against both.

“Dual Containment” – Preserving the U.S.-Dominated Status Quo

The Clinton administration adopted a policy of “Dual Containment,” with punitive economic sanctions against Iran and Iraq, aimed at weakening and isolating both. Clinton and company feared that Iran’s regional needs and ambitions and the growth of Islamic fundamentalist movements could jeopardize the U.S.-dominated Middle East order.

Iran’s 1979 revolution and its anti-U.S., Islamist message still reverberated with people living under brittle pro-U.S. tyrannies in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, Jordan, and Egypt. The Soviet Union’s demise had weakened (sometimes fatally) many pro-Soviet parties and movements. This further strengthened Islamic fundamentalist trends, which were becoming the main pole of opposition to the U.S. and its clients. The Iranian revolution and then the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan emboldened Islamists who could now argue that if they had helped bring down the Shah and then a superpower, why couldn’t they do the same to the United States?

As the region’s main Islamist state, Iran represented an ideological challenge to U.S.-led imperialist globalization and “modernization.” The Islamic Republic represented a pole of opposition to some of the U.S.’s political objectives in the region, as well as a source of inspiration (and sometimes direct support) for various Islamic trends.

The Clinton administration viewed the U.S.-sponsored Israeli-Palestinian “peace process,” which was aimed at ending the Palestinian struggle and strengthening Israel, as crucial to undercutting anti-U.S. sentiments and strengthening U.S. control of the region. But Iran was an obstacle here – both because of its political support for the Palestinians and its material support of Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Islamic Palestinian forces.

The U.S. also worried about Iran’s potential to become a major force in the region due to its size, location, vast oil resources, and its efforts to reach out to global powers. The fact that the U.S. 1991 war on Iraq had weakened it as a regional bulwark against Iran added to these worries.

Iran, meanwhile, was eager to attract foreign investment precisely to expand oil production and build its industrial and military infrastructure. In the early 1990s, Iran offered the U.S. oil giant Conoco $1 billion to help develop its oil and gas industry. This sparked a furor in the U.S. and led to the imposition of sanctions in 1995, blocking any U.S. companies from investing in Iran’s oil and natural gas industries (later expanded to punish foreign firms who did so).

A New “Great Game” in Central Asia

The Soviet collapse also had enormous repercussions for the U.S. – and Iran – in Central Asia. Suddenly, states formerly part of the Soviet Union possessing vast energy resources – Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan (today the site of the world’s largest oil development project) – were independent and up for grabs. Fierce competition was quickly underway between the U.S., Russia, China, as well as European powers for access, influence and control. Former Carter official Zbigniew Brzezinski warned, “For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia…America’s global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained.”

Iran sought to expand its historic, geographic, cultural, and linguistic ties with these new republics. It also sought inclusion in the new energy arrangements centering on the construction of oil and gas pipelines from Central Asia to outlets for the global market. Iran lies between the energy-rich Caspian Sea to the north and the Persian Gulf to the south, and already had a network of pipelines. So why not transport oil and gas through Iran?

As Revolution noted, “If the pipes go south through Iran to its refineries and harbors, then the U.S. containment of Iran is broken…. The U.S. vetoed any Iranian route and insisted the pipes run over Afghanistan – to Pakistan.” (See “Afghanistan: The Oil Behind the War,” Revolutionary Worker (now Revolution ) November 4, 2001)

In the 1980s and 1990s, the U.S. and its ally Saudi Arabia were also covertly organizing and bankrolling anti-Iranian Sunni fundamentalist groups (including the Taliban) in order to isolate Iran and counter Iranian-inspired Shia Islamists, particularly in Pakistan and Afghanistan. These covert intrigues further fueled reactionary religious fundamentalism and sectarianism across the region.

The Clash Over Grand Strategy in the 1990s

U.S. strategy toward Iran was shaped by sharp debate within the bourgeoisie that took place during the 1990s over post-Soviet global strategy. The neocon strategy was articulated in 1992 by top officials in the George H.W. Bush administration (who returned to power under Bush II). It called for wielding U.S. military power to preemptively knock down potential rivals and establish unilateral global hegemony.

During his eight years in office, Clinton championed Washington’s “right” to act unilaterally and shape the global environment by force if need be, while emphasizing acting in alliance with other imperialist powers, an overall posture the administration called “assertive multilateralism.”

Clinton was not hesitant to use military force, as in the NATO intervention in the former Yugoslavia, the military preservation of the no-fly zone over Iraq, and the taking out of targets in Sudan. And he pushed for NATO expansion into the former Soviet Bloc. But this was still in the context of a more traditional “multi-lateral approach” (in which the U.S. always had the final say and veto power). Further, there was a considerable focus by the Clinton administration on strengthening the U.S. economic hand globally, and aggressively pushing forward with imperialist globalization and things like “free trade agreements” in the interest of U.S. finance capital.

Clinton never adopted a strategy of regime change toward the Islamic Republic, but while emphasizing the stick, also dangled the carrot of better relations. U.S. bullying was, in the words of Clinton’s “Report to Congress on National Security Strategy” (January 11, 2000), “aimed at changing the practices of the Iranian government in several key areas,” while “signs of change in Iranian policies” were viewed “with interest…”

The neocons felt the Clinton administration was squandering the victory of the Cold War, allowing events to drift and threats to build. They considered Clinton’s approach too multilateral (vs. unilateral) and his efforts to forge a new wave of globalization (in the interest of U.S. imperialism) too economically focused. What these neocons saw was an opportunity to radically reshape global relations through a hard line, unilateral and vast step-up in the application of military force and an aggressive program of “regime change.”

Their view was that even though Saddam Hussein was not a major threat to the U.S., the Middle East needed to be radically reshaped or else it would keep generating anti-U.S. forces, particularly Islamic fundamentalist forces, which would get in the way of U.S. domination in the whole region – an objective shared by the whole ruling class, even while there were (and are) differences over how to go about achieving this.

This battle was intertwined with a sharp debate over the significance of resurgent Islamic fundamentalism, which had been sparked by serious Islamist challenges to the ruling regimes in Egypt, Algeria, and Afghanistan. According to author Robert Dreyfuss, there were basically two camps within the U.S. establishment: those who “argued that the United States had nothing to fear from the Islamic right” versus “the clash-of-civilizations school [championed by right-wing academics like Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis], which believed that the Muslim world was unalterably and fundamentally hostile to the West.”

George Bush’s capture of the presidency in 2000 followed by the attacks of September 11, 2001 led to the consolidation of the neocon grand strategy and the launching of the “war on terror” to carry it out. The U.S. war machine would be unleashed to defeat Islamic fundamentalism and take down states impeding U.S. objectives. Global relations were to be radically transformed, and America’s sole superpower status locked in for decades to come. Iran would quickly become a prime target in this war for greater empire, as we will explore in the next and final installment of this series.

References

Ali M. Ansari, Confronting Iran: The Failure of American Foreign Policy and the Next Great Conflict in the Middle East, Chapter 4 – The United States and the Islamic Republic, pp. 132-146

Bob Avakian, “The New Situation and the Great Challenges,” Revolution #36, February 26, 2006

Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, p. 30

Robert Dreyfuss, Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, p. 316

Larry Everest, Oil, Power & Empire: Iraq and the U.S. Global Agenda, Chapter 8 – A Growing Clamor for Regime Change

Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future, Chapter 5: The Battle of Islamic Fundamentalisms, pp. 160-168

Part 8: Bush Regime Targets Iran After 9/11

For over 100 years, the domination of Iran has been deeply woven into the fabric of global imperialism, enforced through covert intrigues, economic bullying, military assaults, and invasions. This history provides the backdrop for U.S. hostility toward Iran today—including the real threat of war. Part 8 of this series examines why the Bush administration targeted Iran after 9/11, how the invasion of Iraq has backfired on them in many ways, and why this has increased their felt need to confront the Islamic Republic.

Iran, 9/11 and the “War on Terror”

George W. Bush’s capture of the U.S. presidency in 2000, followed by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, led to a radical shift in U.S. global strategy and the launching of Bush’s “war on terror.” Iran was a key target from the start.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the U.S. was suddenly the only global imperialist superpower. America’s rulers saw an opportunity to vastly extend their power, as well as the necessity to do so given the many contradictions—and potential contradictions—they faced worldwide. For a decade the “neo-cons” had been arguing for aggressively using U.S. military might to create an unchallenged and unchallengeable U.S. empire. They assumed key positions in Bush’s new administration.

After the 9/11 attacks, the Bush team felt compelled to forcefully lash back to preserve the U.S. empire’s global credibility. They also saw the opportunity—and the necessity—to push forward their broader agenda, which required crushing anti-U.S. Islamic fundamentalism and forcefully dealing with a host of impediments to their global power and ambitions —including states like Iran and Iraq.

During a secret November 2001 meeting, as reported by Bob Woodward in State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III, leading strategists close to the Bush administration argued that the 9/11 attacks did not represent “an isolated action that called for policing and crime fighting.” Their solution: a “two-generation battle with radical Islam” to defeat this movement—as well as take down regimes in Iraq, Iran, and Syria that were contributing in one way or another to the spread of anti-U.S. sentiments and fundamentalism or that posed obstacles to U.S. plans. They thought this would open the door to transforming the entire region—“draining the swamp,” as Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and his assistant Paul Wolfowitz put it shortly after Sept. 11—to eliminate the conditions giving rise to forces which, while reactionary, posed a growing obstacle to U.S. imperialist interests.

The first phase of this global war was launched on October 7, 2001 with the bombing of Afghanistan and the overthrow of the Islamist Taliban government. The Bush regime then decided that Iraq would be phase two. Saddam wasn’t an Islamist, nor was he allied with al Qaeda, but his continued rule was creating a variety of problems for the U.S. in the Middle East.

Even as they invaded Iraq, the Bush regime had Iran’s Islamic Republic squarely in their sights.

The Islamic Republic of Iran was not involved in the Sept. 11 attacks, and it aided the U.S. during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan by backing the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, allowing U.S. search-and-rescue missions to operate from Iranian territory, and passing on intelligence from Afghanistan. But the imperialists still had a big problem with the Islamic Republic—not because it is a reactionary theocracy that brutally represses its people. The problem, from the imperialists’ standpoint, was that Iran has been a key font of anti-U.S. Islamic fundamentalism. It was the first place where current-day Islamists seized state power—and they have used that power to promote Islamic fundamentalism and support Islamist movements in the region. Tehran’s rulers have also sought to redefine Iran’s place in the regional order, including by negotiating economic and political deals with U.S. rivals like Russia and China. All this has made Iran a big obstacle to U.S. plans in the region, and so the Bush regime placed Iran high on its target list.

On January 30, 2002, Bush charged that Iran “aggressively pursues these [nuclear] weapons and exports terror, while an unelected few repress the Iranian people’s hope for freedom,” and he included Iran (along with Iraq and North Korea) in the so-called “axis-of-evil,” which he said posed “a grave and growing danger.”

After Iraq, Debating Iran

After the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, some within the Bush administration argued that the U.S. should continue to pressure Iran’s Islamic Republic to end its support for Islamist movements in the region and give up its nuclear program, while also keeping the diplomatic channel to Tehran open, if only to use Iran’s influence to first stabilize post-invasion Iraq before moving on to other targets in the “war on terror.”

But the neocons, and those around Vice President Cheney in particular, argued that such rapprochement with Iran would derail the U.S.’s momentum and mission. “Our fight against Iraq was only one battle in a long war,” Meyrav Wurmser, a fellow at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute and wife of leading neocon David Wurmser, stated. “It would be ill-conceived to think that we can deal with Iraq alone[…]. We must move on, and faster.” (Jim Lobe, Asia Times, 5/28/03)

As further justification for their call for more aggressive action, Cheney and others pointed to new revelations about Iran’s nuclear program. In February 2003, Iran admitted that it was building two uranium enrichment plants, although it had not yet enriched uranium. By November 2003 Iran was in discussions with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) over verifying its compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), and stated it had suspended its enrichment program.

But the U.S. imperialists were determined to prevent Iran from having the bomb—not because they feared a preemptive Iranian strike on the U.S. or Israel, but because of the concern about “the constraining effect” a nuclear-armed Iran threatened “to impose upon U.S. strategy for the Greater Middle East,” as neocon Tom Donnelly put it. (Gareth Porter, Huffingtonpost.com, 9/8/07)

Iran’s rulers may want to acquire nuclear weapons, and they may have taken steps to do so. IAEA head Mohammed El Baradei, however, has stated that he’s found no evidence of any undeclared “source or special nuclear materials” or that such materials had ever been “used in furtherance of a military purpose.” (Farhang Jahanpour, oxfordresearchgroup.org.uk, June 2006)

In May 2003 the U.S. government secretly received a wide-ranging proposal from Iran’s leadership, perhaps motivated partly by fear that the U.S. was going to quickly turn its guns on Tehran. In exchange for an end to U.S. hostility, lifting of U.S. sanctions, and removal of Iran from the State Department’s list of countries supporting “terrorism,” the Iranian regime said it would meet the main U.S. demands and basically accommodate itself to a U.S.-dominated Middle East. Iran would also freeze its nuclear program and open it up to inspections that would guarantee it wasn’t making nuclear weapons. Iran also offered to support a democratic, non-religious government in Iraq, to cooperate fully in fighting al Qaeda and other groups, and to end its support for Hamas in Palestine. (Peter Galbraith, The NY Review of Books, 10/11/07)

The Bush regime summarily rejected Iran’s offer. The high-level dialogue between the U.S. and Iran over Iraq, Afghanistan, and other regional issues was abruptly shut down, and the neocons continued to push for regime change in Tehran.

The Fateful Decisions of May 2003

Before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, fervent advocates of the war had predicted that Hussein’s overthrow would trigger upheaval, even the fall of the regime in Iran. But, in fact, U.S. actions ended up strengthening Iranian influence in Iraq and across the region—intensifying some of the very contradictions the U.S. was trying to solve by invading Iraq in the first place.

The Bush regime attempted to quickly and radically reshape Iraqi politics, economics, and society in the interests of U.S. imperialism. In mid-May 2003, less than a month after Bush declared “victory” in Iraq from the deck of an aircraft carrier, occupation chief Paul Bremer issued decrees banning Iraq’s Baath Party, disbanding Iraq’s army and police force, closing unprofitable state-run industries, and beginning the privatization of Iraq’s economy. Bremer also scuttled the proposed interim government in favor of a “Coalition Provisional Authority” (CPA) which would gradually unfold the political process and form a new Iraqi government under Bremer’s tight control.

Bush officials also calculated that Iraq’s Shi’ites (some 60 percent of the population) would be hostile to Iran. Some even predicted that backing the Iraqi Shi’a religious factions would serve U.S. aims. Neocon war architect David Wurmser wrote that “liberating the Shi’ite centers in Najaf and Karbala, with their clerics who reject the wilayat al-faqih [clerical rule], could allow Iraqi Shi’ites to challenge and perhaps fatally derail the Iranian revolution.” (Larry Everest, Oil, Power, and Empire, Chapter 9)

These were profound miscalculations. The Bush regime underestimated how the shock of the invasion and the dismantling of the Iraqi state would lift the lid on the deep contradictions roiling Iraq, including hatred of the U.S. and its ally Israel, and the growing strength of Islamic fundamentalism among both Sunnis and Shi’as. And it underestimated how the CPA’s handling of the political process and elections would raise tensions with Shi’as and strengthen Iran’s hand.

While the full scope of Iranian actions in U.S.-occupied Iraq is unclear, it appears that Iran has sought to prevent the re-emergence of a hostile Iraq on its western border, as well as extend its regional influence and strengthen the Islamist project. (And expanding its influence in Iraq as a means of increasing Tehran’s bargaining leverage with the U.S.) From 2003 to 2005, U.S. and Iranian actions in Iraq ran more or less parallel—even as the U.S. imperialists and Iran’s Islamic rulers had sharply antagonistic strategic objectives. During the invasion, Iraq’s Shi’a leadership (who have close ties to the Iranian regime) encouraged their followers to avoid confrontations with U.S. forces. Both the U.S. and the Iranians ended up supporting the same reactionary Kurdish and Shi’ite parties, neither wanted Sunni forces to return to power, and both wanted the establishment of a stable new Iraqi government.

But U.S.-Iranian tensions continued to develop. In June 2003, less than a month after coming to Iraq, Bremer complained that Iran was “meddling” in Iraq (this came from the mouth of an official representing a power that had just invaded this country!). Bremer singled out the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution of Iraq (SCIRI, which was formed in Iran in the early 1980s) for threatening to boycott a Bremer-chosen interim Iraqi administration. (Financial Times, 6/10/03)

Tufts University Professor Vali Nasr, an expert on Iran, recently told investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, “Iran’s policy since 2003 has been to provide funding, arms, and aid to several Shi’ite factions—including some in [current Prime Minister] Maliki’s coalition.” In the fall of 2004, during the run-up to the January 2005 Iraqi elections for a Transitional National Assembly engineered by the U.S., the CIA reported that Iran was spending $11 million a week to help the United Shi’a Platform, which ended up winning a majority of seats in the election. So while Iran wasn’t directly challenging the U.S. in Iraq, it was definitely increasing its leverage.