In his memoirs, the CIA agent and anti-Israel activist Kermit Roosevelt, Jr. wrote that his office played a significant role in engineering a 1953 coup d’état in Iran that restored power to the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. While his account has long been held up as a model of the dangers of American meddling abroad, or even a justification for the “Death to America!” chants so beloved by Iran’s current regime, a new history by Ray Takeyh shows that Roosevelt greatly inflated his own role in events. Joshua Muravchik writes in his review:
The 1953 coup that restored the shah’s authority also ousted the popular prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, and to this day it “casts a long shadow over Iran,” writes Takeyh. “The oft-repeated slogan that the United States crushed Iran’s nascent democracy and ushered in a rigid dictatorship conceals more than it reveals.” For one thing, as Takeyh shows, Mossadegh . . . made his own contributions to undermining democracy, notably by inducing the parliament to award him the power to rule by decree. At strategic moments, he encouraged riots to strengthen his bargaining position, and, says Takeyh, he even seems to have countenanced the assassination of one of his predecessors, Ali Razmara.
Takeyh argues that while “the CIA was complicit” in the 1953 events, “its role has been exaggerated.” It was Iranians, he says “who took the essential steps in overthrowing” Mossadegh.
In 1979, a revolution overthrew the shah, and brought to power the current theocracy:
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the cleric who led the revolution, was, says Takeyh, “the only figure in this imbroglio who was free of doubt and uncompromising in his approach.” When other leaders of the uprising secured agreement from the shah’s officers for a settlement entailing a full transition to democracy, the ayatollah would not hear of any such compromise. Instead, he demanded complete surrender by the existing government even after the shah had taken himself off into exile.
[W]ith the shah’s ouster in 1979, Iran became the world’s first “Islamic Republic,” energizing radical Islam, both Shiite and Sunni, much as Lenin’s declaration of the first socialist republic in 1917 infused enormous new strength into all sorts of revolutionary movements.
Read more on Commentary: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/joshua-muravchik/america-iran-pahlavi-dynasty/