Marking 70 years of blowback from a U.S.-led coup in Iran

Distracted by this summer’s record-setting heat, the looming Republican primary debate, and the indictments of a former president, we Americans are unlikely to mark this 70th anniversary. Too many of us, in fact, won’t even remember the original event.

So here’s a reminder: On Aug. 19, 1953, a coup arranged by the United States Central Intelligence Agency and the British government removed the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh. That gave vastly more power to the monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. In 2013, the United States government acknowledged the CIA’s role.

The roots of the coup were oil and communism. The British enjoyed an immensely favorable concession for extracting Iran’s oil, approved by the Iranian monarchy. So London strongly opposed Mosaddegh’s move to nationalize the oil industry and give Iran a fairer share of the proceeds. To the communism-obsessed CIA, Mosaddegh’s embrace of democracy looked like the start of a communist Iran. So Mosaddegh had to go. In the following quarter-century, the shah ruled autocratically, with his SAVAK secret police suppressing dissent, and he was reliably pro-American.

That coup is not the only time our government has helped oust a foreign leader. The United States has too often rejected the democratically expressed will of the people of other nations, to install leaders more autocratic and better aligned with America’s perceived interests. But the 1953 coup reverberates most strongly to this day.

Start with Ronald Reagan. President Jimmy Carter’s loss to Reagan in 1980 can be blamed on a variety of factors, such as a souring economy and a primary challenge by Sen. Ted Kennedy. But the 1979 Iranian revolution against the shah and the taking of American hostages was also crucial. Following Reagan’s lead, today’s Republicans are still working to undermine government regulation and weaken the social safety net that grew under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Even rising college tuition is partly attributable to Reagan’s disdain for student anti-war demonstrators, which led him to cut aid to public higher education, as California governor and as president. The next time you struggle to pay tuition, think of Mosaddegh.

Then there’s terrorism. The fundamentalist clerics who led the Iranian revolution quickly branded America “The Great Satan.” Historians point out that post-revolution Iran funded dangerous organizations in the Middle East and inspired the Taliban in Afghanistan, who provided a base to Osama bin Laden, the architect of the 9/11 attacks. Fear of a nuclear-armed, anti-democracy Iran remains a concern of American and Israeli foreign policy.

Imagine how different that region could have been if Mosaddegh had remained in office and built a democratic Iran. Imagine, too, how different America would be without the rise of the national security state, the creation of the bloated Department of Homeland Security, and the tightening of airline security. Next time you’re standing in a long TSA check-in line at an airport, removing your shoes, leaving behind containers of liquids too large to meet specifications, remember Osama bin Laden, and ponder whether a Mosaddegh-led Iran would have inspired the Taliban that sheltered him.

The unintended consequences of the coup that toppled Mosaddegh can be described by one word. In "Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire," Chalmers Johnson wrote: “The term ‘blowback’ first appeared in a classified government document in the CIA’s post-action report on the secret overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953.”

The many-faceted blowback from the 1953 coup is still with us today, and that makes Aug. 19 an anniversary worth remembering, but hardly a reason for celebration.