Mohammad Mosaddegh Quotes
This coup has been the biggest trauma for the Iranian people in the last centuries. The blowback from it, has soured relationships between America and Iran for decades. Khamenei personally was traumatized by the coup and publicly refers to it quite frequently. Ironically, reasons and policy logic for the CIA orchestration of the coup are even today murky. The desires of the British may well have been the main reason. “Arrogance” is the term Khamenei uses to describe the British-American alliance and their propensity to try and shape the affairs of other nations.
of the Central Intelligence Agency fomented Iranian Revolution. At the request of the British MI6 intelligence service, the CIA implemented a “spontaneous” coup d’etat to overthrow the popularly elected Iranian President Mohammad Mosaddegh. One of the reasons this is a very important quotation is that it shows an interesting aspect if jihad—Islamic Holy War. One of the many tactics the CIA used was to bribe key Islamic Imams and other religious officials to declare a jihad against Mosaddegh—to tell the people that it was their Islamic duty to get rid of Mosaddegh who was a threat to Islam and the word of God. The quote illustrates that most of the Western powers who wanted to achieve a political objective would play this jihad religious card—one that was much easier to start than to control. When Eisenhower urged using the jihad tactic, he did not imagine that jihad would be used against the United States for the 9-11 attack and the Iraq and Iran wars. See {637008} and {637007}.
Mohammad Mosaddegh had been elected Prime Minister of Iraq. However, he was left leaning in the midst of the Cold War and some of our policy strategists thought that he could hurt the U. S. interests which were large there. Iran had huge oil reserves and American and British companies were active in operating the oil drilling and export. The new Prime Minister was threatening the British with oil nationalization to get a larger share of the oil revenue. The Shah, with CIA support, fired Mosaddegh, but that backfired and the Shah had to flee the country. This was when Smith sent this note to President Eisenhower. We were prepared to try and work with Mosaddegh. However, our chief ally did not agree and wanted to oust Mosaddegh. At the request of the British MI6 intelligence service, the CIA implemented a “spontaneous” coup d’etat to overthrow the popularly elected Iranian President Mohammad Mosaddegh. This enabled the Shah to return and take over. Ironically, although he was anti-Communist, he threatened the American and British Oil Companies and forced them to “renegotiate” their contracts with Iran and pay the Shah more money. The Shah was very unpopular with Iranians, and over the years the Iranians who opposed the Shah, blamed the United States for the fact that Mosaddegh had been overthrown and the Shah returned to power. See {637008} and {637007}.
In 1999 4 pro-reform newspapers were ordered closed by the Iranian government. Neshat, had been shut down for, among other things, “insulting Islam.” The publishers reopened the newspaper under a different name but felt constrained to make a statement of purpose and loyalty.
