by W.D. Ehrhart
So after waging open warfare against Venezuela for months, obliterating a village in Nigeria, and bombing Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and Somalia, our intrepid president, in his quest for the Nobel Peace Prize, is making noises about invading Greenland—Greenland, for cryin’ in a bucket!—Cuba, and maybe Mexico.
Perhaps most ironic of all, he’s threatening to attack Iran in defense of Iranian civilians being murdered by the repressive ayatollahs for taking to the streets in protest of tyranny. Given what’s been happening in this country—think Senator Mark Kelly, Renee Nicole Good, Tim Walz and Jacob Frey, just for starters—there’s something laughable about the MAGAPrez coming to the defense of political dissidents and dissenters.
But in fact, it’s no laughing matter. Moreover, I wonder how many Americans have any idea how Iran came to be what it is today. Let’s take a look:
Back in 1925, an Iranian army general staged a coup d’etat, overthrew the government, and took power. A docile Iranian parliament subsequently proclaimed him “shah,” which means “king,” though he rather preferred to be referred to as “shahanshah” or “king of kings,” even if he had only about as much royal blood in him as I do.
However, he was kicked out by the British and Russians during World War II because they thought he was a bit too fond of Adolph Hitler. They replaced him with his more malleable son, whom we know as Shah Reza Pahlavi, and who ruled Iran until the Islamic Revolution overthrew him in 1979.
But here’s where it starts to get interesting. In the early 1950s, in what was almost certainly the only free and fair democratic election ever held in Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh was elected prime minister. Among other cockamamie ideas Mossadegh had was the one where he thought that Iranian oil should benefit the people of Iran, not the owners and stockholders of the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now BP) along with U.S. companies Esso (now Exxon), Texaco, SoCal (now Chevron), Gulf, and Mobil. So he nationalized Iranian oil.
This would never do, of course, so the Brits and Americans engineered the overthrow of Mossadegh, and the Shah was left to rule in the style of a “Sun King” monarch answerable to no one so long as he didn’t upset the U.S. (British influence in the Middle East rapidly atrophying through the 1950s).
But over the next three decades, Shah Reza’s rule became ever more repressive, his behavior ever more extravagant and megalomaniacal, his SAVAK secret police coming to rival Adolph Hitler’s Gestapo in its savagery and brutality. And here’s where it gets even more interesting:
It turns out that my father-in-law, an anthropology professor who spent most of his career at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, was a Middle Eastern specialist. He was, in fact, teaching and doing research in Iran just before the collapse of the shah’s regime. Iranian colleagues of his begged him to get the United States to withdraw its support from the shah. When he left Iran, they even gave him letters urging a change in U.S. policy that they begged him to deliver to the U.S. State Department. As if the U.S. government was going to listen to some university academic (at least one not named Henry Kissinger).
These Iranian academics and professors argued that if the U.S. didn’t support more moderate advocates of democracy in Iran, the hardcore radical Islamists would end up taking control of the country. And of course, that is exactly what happened. The U.S. continued to support the shah to the bitter end, the more moderate dissidents and advocates of democracy were arrested, tortured, and murdered, and the Ayatollahs took over.
All of this was a long time ago, but we Americans and—far more importantly and tragically—the Iranian people are still living with the consequences of the illegal overthrow by the United States government of the democratically elected premier of Iran back in 1953. And all because Mossadegh had the audacity to think that the natural resources of Iran ought to belong to and benefit the people of Iran.
And if the Iranian government has been hostile to the U.S. ever since 1979, is that any surprise? I mean seriously, given U.S. attitudes and policies with regard to Iran, and what the U.S. has done and not done for the people of Iran since 1979, let alone since 1953, what would any reasonable person expect?
And if our “peace president” resorts to violent military action to come to the aid of the Iranian people, I wonder how that will work out. Will it teach those ayatollahs a lesson? And what will be the long-term consequences?
As for deposing other countries’ heads of state, our track record on that is actually pretty bad. Iran is just one example. One might also look at how that worked out in Guatemala in 1954, in Vietnam in 1963, in Cambodia in 1970, in Afghanistan in 2001, in Iraq in 2003.
How forcible regime change by the U.S. military will work out in Venezuela in 2026 remains to be seen. Anybody wanna take a guess?
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W.D. Ehrhart is a retired Master Teacher of History & English, and author of a Vietnam War memoir trilogy published by McFarland.