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
