Adumbration

The situation of US-Iran foreign relations has fallen from the top levels of the daily news (another installment of fiscal "crisis" has taken that position recently), so maybe there is opportunity to shed a little light of historical perspective on the subject.

The Financial Times offers a summary of the situation on this day, which mostly focuses on what terms can be arranged for treatment of nuclear materials. The FT summarizes what the New York Times refers to as the "bad cop" in the equation.

The House of Representatives has already passed a new round of swingeing sanctions on Iranian oil exports. A Senate aide said that if the administration could not demonstrate progress in the talks by the end of the month, the Senate would probably begin discussions about the new sanctions bill.

[for you non-English speakers of English, swingeing translates in Merriam-Webster as "very large and difficult to deal with, very critical or severe"]

So as the world waits to see whether we might ever achieve some form of normalized relations with Iran, let alone whether handling of chemical weapons will lead to forces of the United States will be ordered into another middle east war in Syria (a land with a huge set of other problems we should be very cautious about trying to resolve), The Seattle Post-Intelligencer proffers a summary of US government foreign relations with the governments of Iran.  

While the history of that region stretches to the beginnings of recorded civilization, the last century seems particularly tumultuous.  Here is how the PI (via AP) describes the CIA-led coup in the immediate post-WW2 period that kicked off a period of confrontation and intervention in Iran that has lasted ever since.  

The aftermath of World War II and the advent of the Cold War make Iran a U.S. policy focus for the first time. Washington sees the country as a bulwark against Soviet expansion and a source of stability in the oil-rich Persian Gulf. It cultivates a friendly relationship with Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The partnership is threatened with the 1951 appointment of Prime Minister Mohamed Mossadegh, who moves to nationalize Iran's oil industry. A CIA-backed coup ousts Mossadegh in 1953. The shah returns from his brief exile and resumes control.

A few sentences don't make a complete history, but it is still interesting how the early interest in "a bulwark against Soviet expansion and a source of stability in the oil-rich Persian Gulf" transforms to hostility when the Iranian Prime Minister "moves to nationalize Iran's oil industry".

While I have fundamental objections to the state confiscating private property, I'd have to guess that the ownership of those assets was clouded by preceding history of British, Russian, and French colonialism that pervaded the entire Middle East region in decades preceding those years.  A privatization scheme that gave equal shares to everyone who lived there might have been a more fair reconciliation of prior issues with ownership.  Otherwise, while nationalized control of the oil under Iran would have likely led to great corruption and inefficiencies, the value of those resources would have driven whoever controlled it to continue production and sale around the world.  Furthermore, the oil industry was then as now is a global affair, with production and processing that takes place in a great many locations, so even reduced access from a location like Iran would have been a blip in the broad perspective of the market, similar to ones we have seen many times in the years hence. 

Some people might object that US foreign policy was being driven by concern that Iran would fall under the sway and become a satellite of the USSR.  That presumption is far from certain, given that the murderous approach of communism was visible even then, and must have been far more visible to people in the region who met with refugees from the destruction of civil society that was taking place with Russian dominance of ethnic minorities across the USSR.  While that would be a sorry turn for the Iranian people, I imagine that their dislike of that yoke would have turned to revolution in far less time than it took them to rise up against the Shah. 

But the prospects of such a turn of events was hardly an existential threat to the United States.  The threat to the United States of the former Soviet Union turned out to be the huge number of atomic weapons which existence continues to put the population of the world at risk of mass destruction.  So I question the idea that we needed to control Middle East leaders to serve as a bulwark against Soviet expansion.  The Soviet system was unsustainable from the start, and at the end of WW2 they were faced with having lost a tenth of their population due to the war, while their insane social and economic policy was leading to mass starvation.  To stave off complete bankruptcy they looted the parts of Eastern Europe that they controlled consequent to US President Truman allowing that sphere of influence at the Yalta conference in 1945.  Even in those regions nominally controlled by the Soviets, the local people were fomenting unrest (reference Hungary and Czechoslovakia); in other areas, the Soviets were further impoverishing themselves by sending huge amount of resources to subsidize the communist leaders (e.g. in Cuba).

Back to the actual history, unrest and discontent in Iran with the US-backed Shah bubbled for years leading to the revolution in 1979.  This so infuriated US political leaders that they chose to support Iraqi President Saddam Hussein during the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq. 

The rest of that history is so mired in tragedy that I will conclude to say that it is ironic, tragic, and an unfortunately familiar story of the backfiring of US Middle East policy - fomenting and initiating conflict that (surprise!) leads to more conflict.