Murat SofuogluUS President Donald Trump’s threats against Iranian leadership have once again raised the prospects of the long-standing Western ambitions of hegemony over the oil-rich, Shia-majority nation located strategically between Central Asia and the Middle East.
Trump demanded “unconditional surrender” from Tehran, in what sounded like a pompous White colonialist leader giving an ultimatum to an economically weak and militarily inferior third-world nation.
But the Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei unequivocally rejected Trump’s demand, warning him that if he attacks Tehran or attempts to invade the country of 92 million people, the US and its ally Israel will face “irreparable damage”, signalling that old colonial tactics might no longer work.
Trump’s demand has also made many Iranians recall old Western interventions, which ranged from full-scale occupation to toppling legitimate governments by using military force and covert operations for the sake of securing Western political and commercial interests.
Here is a brief history of Western involvement in Iran over the decades:
British interests
Britain used its military and commercial power to colonise large parts of the world, from the Americas to India and the Middle East, from the 17th century to the early 20th century.
In the late 19th century, Iran’s textile producers and traditional handicrafts found themselves unable to compete with imported Western products, particularly from British-ruled regions, as the then-Shah opened up the country to the West.
But in 1872, when Naser al-Din Shah, the then-shah of the Qajar dynasty, decided to allow a British businessman to collect revenues from various national industries – ranging from roads to telegraphs, mills and factories in return for just 60 percent of the net revenue – both Iranian merchants and clerics got angry. The Iranian shah eventually backed down, overwhelmed by local resistance.
Two decades later, the clerics – traditionally led by top Shia religious authorities known as ayatollahs, merchants and newly-emerged modern intellectuals, made a pact to fight against another British monopoly: on the Iranian tobacco industry.
Their opposition led to a nationwide protest and boycott movement against British commercial interests, primarily its tobacco monopoly, which threatened job security of many Iranians working in the agricultural sector across rural areas.
In December 1891, Mirza Hasan Shirazi, the top ayatollah of the time, issued a fatwa against the use of tobacco across Iran, describing it a grave sin under the circumstances.
Some Iran experts see that this movement laid out the ground for the country’s famous Constitutional Revolution in 1905, which limited the powers of Qajar dynasty rule.
Experts point out that the merchant-cleric alliance – also known as the bazaar-ayatollah cooperation – which showed its increasing influence over Iranian society from the 1870s to 1970s, was instrumental in ousting the Pahlavi dynasty in the 1979 Revolution.
British, Pahlavis and occupation of Iran
In 1921, Reza Pahlavi, an Iranian military officer, overthrew the Qajar dynasty in a coup, marking the start of the reign of the Pahlavi dynasty.
While the Western involvement in the Pahlavi-led coup is still subject to debate, many see signs of British collaboration with the putschists.
In August 1941 British and Soviet forces invaded Iran, judging Reza Shah Pahlavi—who had courted German advisers—too sympathetic to Berlin. They compelled him to abdicate in favour of his 21-year-old son, Mohammad Reza Shah. The younger Pahlavi ruled until the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which erupted over domestic repression and resentment of foreign influence.
Reza Shah’s refusal to expel German nationals and grant the Allies full use of Iran’s rail network prompted the Anglo-Soviet occupation. London and Moscow sought to secure the “Persian Corridor,” a vital supply route linking Gulf ports to Soviet Central Asia.
In 1941, Soviet-British forces invaded Iran, initiating Reza Shah’s abdication from the throne and instituting his son Mohammed Reza Pahlavi as the Iranian monarch.
The Soviet-British occupation in Iran continued until 1946, the year WWII ended.
Overthrow of Mosaddegh government (1951-53)
After WWII, the world’s new superpower, US took over the imperialist global domination project from the UK, becoming the big brother of Iranians, who did not like it from the very beginning.
The new Shah Reza Pahlavi adopted many pro-Western policies despite the dislike of large sections of the population, from clerics to native merchants and anti-imperialist intellectuals.
Then came the seminal moment of 1953 when nationalist Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh wanted to change a bizarre arrangement, which allowed the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) to own most of Iranian oil profits, leaving Tehran barely anything of the revenues from the country’s native oil industry.
The British and their senior ally US saw this attempt as a grave challenge to the Western hegemony, and orchestrated a military coup against the Mossadegh government with the help of the CIA and MI6.
While millions of pro-Mossadegh Iranians protested the Western intervention across the streets of Tehran, this time around, Shia clerics did not join them like in the past, fearing that the nationalist prime minister was allied with the country’s communists. Clerical withdrawal from the protests helped the CIA-orchestrated coup succeed against Mossadegh.
Mossadegh was punished with house arrest until his death in 1967, even being denied a public funeral despite his wish to be buried next to the killed protesters of 1952-53 in a public graveyard.
But his anti-imperialist stance left an indelible mark in Iranian memory and became one of the main rallying points in the 1979 Revolution against the pro-American Shah.
Iranian Revolution of 1979 and after
While anti-West sentiments were high in Iran, neither the US nor its allies expected that anti-Shah forces, which ranged from leftist groups to clerics like the Ayatollah Khomeini, could overthrow the pro-American secular Iranian monarch.
“Iran is not in a revolutionary or even ‘pre-revolutionary’ situation,” the CIA declared five months before the Shah was ousted by a coalition of liberals, ayatollahs and communists.
But there was even more to the West’s underestimation in regard to Iran’s Shia religious establishment’s large influence over the merchant middle-class and larger society.
There was an infamous conversation between Walter F. Mondale, the US vice president in the Jimmy Carter administration, and CIA director Stansfield Turner when Iran was on the verge of the 1979 revolution.
During the interesting exchange, the vice president asked the CIA chief a critical question: “What’s an ayatollah?” Turner, caught off by with the vice president’s question, responded: “Damned if I know, but I’ll find out and get back to you.”
Experts do not see this as “an isolated incident in which the intelligence community failed to respond to queries from the highest levels of government.”
As a result, the US failed to understand the coming of the 1979 Revolution, which overthrew the pro-West Shah alongside its secular allies.
Since then, the West has used different punitive measures – from sanctions to political pressure and military threats against Iran’s successive elected governments.
During the ongoing conflict between Israel and Iran, the West has once again shown its interventionist nature rooted in its colonialist past, urging a regime change in Tehran, apparently with the aim of installing a pro-Western government on good terms with Zionism.
Israel has even threatened to kill Khamenei, Iran’s top ayatollah.
But analysts warn that the killing of the supreme leader might lead to even more hardline governance under Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), a post-revolutionary military force.
