What hope for Iran?

Mark Seddon looks back on a disastrous history of Western intervention and assesses the brutal repression of the current regime

A few years ago, I remarked upon a silver ashtray in a friend’s sitting room. Looking more closely, I saw that its base was formed by an old coin, and on closer inspection, I saw that the coin was pre-World War II Persian and depicted Reza Shah Pahlavi, who ruled the vast country from 1925 to 1941, when he was abruptly removed in a joint British-Soviet operation. This occupant of what was known as the “Peacock Throne” had been a convinced Nazi, admiring Germany as both a close economic and ideological partner. This was somewhat ironic as, following World War I, British and Russian troops had not only occupied large portions of Persia, which was then neutral, but had installed Reza Shah Pahlavi in the first place, only for him to go rogue. The Nazi business was bad enough, but it was the fact that the Shah had geared up most of his country’s trade with Germany, which really stuck in the craw for Britain.

Following the 1941 intervention, a safer pair of hands, his son Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi, was installed. This marked an interesting departure for the Stalin era Communists, for in the not-so-distant past, the Tsar and his family had all been brutally executed and yet here was a king being replaced by another one. For “Perfidious Albion” (Britain), meddling in the internal affairs of Persia (renamed Iran) was quite de rigeur. And it didn’t really matter whether it was Russia, the Soviet Union, or later the United States as junior partner in the coup against the popular, elected, Iranian Prime Minister, Mohammed Mossadegh; Iran was unofficially part of the Empire.

“Operation Ajax” was, by most accounts, led by MI6 and supported by the CIA in 1953, because Mossadegh, with huge popular support, had nationalised the Anglo-American Oil company in 1951. The coup meant that Britain and the US could ensure that Iran’s democracy was crushed in a clean sweep and that it returned the absolute power of the monarch, yet another hand-picked Shah. (Persian Shahs have been a motley crew of despots, neo-Nazis and Western play-things.) Iranians have never forgotten Britain’s intervention. The British establishment learned next to nothing, of course, because three years later, Anthony Eden launched his disastrous invasion of Suez.

The brief hopes in the build-up to the Iranian Revolution in 1979 of a democratic future that would be ushered in by Prime Minister Shapour Bakhtiar evaporated as quickly as the loose opposition alliance of Communists, Socialist and Islamists that had been its mainstay. In any event, there was no arguing with the fact that millions of Iranians turned out on the streets to welcome back from France, Ayatollah Khomeini, even if the 98% claimed vote for an Islamic Republic still seems difficult to accept.

The Shah’s Pahlavi dynasty had been overthrown, one of the sparks being the burning down of the Rex Cinema in Tehran, allegedly by SAVAK agents, which led to over 400 people being killed. I thought of this as the Mullahs turned their fire on their own people in recent months, slaughtering what are believed to be tens of thousands of civilians in a desperate and revolting attempt to cling to power.

So what are Iranians in general to make of the vice-like conditions that have the Trump administration threatening to up the bombing campaign that had targeted Iran’s nuclear programme, the bloody horrors being visited by the much despised Mullahs, and the prospect of a saviour being paraded once again in the shape of a member of the Pahlavi family, the late Shah’s son, Reza Pahlavi? Even the names are the same.

There is no denying that his name was on the lips of many of the demonstrators who were so savagely gunned down in the streets. Insofar as Trump actually cares who runs Iran as long as it is “one of us” (as in the case of the vassal state of Venezuela), does Reza Pahlavi figure in US thinking? In the absence of any leading opposition figures inside Iran, it is hardly surprising that a desperate people believe that anything, even yet another Pahlavi, has to be better. Would a constitutional monarch preside, as did the restored King of Spain, over democratic elections? Or would he follow in the footsteps of his late father, grandfather or even great-great-grandfather? One of the more disturbing aspects to Reza Pahlavi and many of his supporters in the West is their support for Israeli Zionists, which is reciprocated..

Western interference in Persia and then Iran has been ill thought-out, capricious and deeply damaging. The current situation inside the country though, is both desperate and appalling in equal measure. Ultimately, and without American bombs and marines, the fight to free Iran is one for the Iranians – and all of us. We must support them materially and morally, and in the same way, people across the world are supporting the Palestinians. The rule of the Mullahs is untenable, and a living insult to the most basic of human rights. When they surveyed the crowded morgues stacked with the corpses of innocent people that they had had killed, I wonder how many of them had visions of the sudden and swift collapse of Assad’s Syria?