West Asia At War: Repression, Resistance and Great Power Games

by Talmiz Ahmad

But colonial rule went a step further: it brought back hundreds of thousands of Jewish people living in the diaspora to West Asia after two millennia, and settled them on lands occupied by the Palestinian people. They thus forcibly helped create a Jewish state, Israel, as an expression of what the Palestinian historian Nur Masalha has called ‘Zionist settler-colonialism’ that ignores the existence and rights of the indigenous people.2 The leaders of the Zionist enterprise shared the sense of racist supremacy that the Europeans had towards native peoples: referring to the Palestinians living in the lands claimed for the Jewish homeland, the prominent Zionist leader, Chaim Weizmann, said, ‘The British told us that there are some hundred thousand niggers and for those there is no value.’

Since then, it has had a single-point item on its agenda – to engineer a massive US-led assault on Iran or, failing that, to cripple the country through harsh sanctions, which would encourage regime change through domestic dissent. This effort is accompanied by deliberate provocations – killings of Iran’s nuclear scientists, sabotaging of its nuclear facilities, and, recently, skirmishes with Iranian naval vessels in the Western Indian Ocean. These are accompanied by constant bombardments of Iranian assets in Syria and Iraq, which are said to number several hundred just in 2020. Since 2001, successive US presidents have been partners of Israel in these aggressions upon Iran, seeking to destroy its economy and discredit its leaders through harsh sanctions, which have impoverished millions of Iranians without either effecting regime change or even a curtailment of its nuclear programme.

The war was very much on the Israeli agenda, but what US interests were involved was never clear;

‘The single greatest threat to the independence of the Middle East was not the armies of Europe but its banks.’

Egypt’s debts became the doorway through which Western financiers and then its politicians assumed control. Western authority over Egypt was established in 1878 when two European commissioners were appointed to the cabinet – the British commissioner became the finance minister, while the French official became the public works minister. When Khedive Ismail attempted to dismiss these two a year later, the Western powers arranged his own removal by the Ottoman sultan and the appointment of his more accommodative son, Tawfiq. This reflected the shift in the balance of power in favour of the West both in Istanbul and Cairo.

They found their solution in the doctrines of Islam. The central aspect of their advocacy was for good government, which meant that it would be in accord with Sharia, which, being influenced by considerations of masalaha (public interest), would lead to a just political order. They envisaged rulership as a ‘just despotism’; shura (consultation) would be at the heart of the system, though it would be limited to the nobility in al-Kawakibi’s plan of ‘democratic administration’. They envisaged a ‘Rule of Law’, which, though based on Sharia, would be reformed through ijtihad (independent reasoning). They viewed liberty and justice as intrinsic to Islam.11 Thus, this first generation of Arab reformers accepted the need for change; they supported peaceful opposition to despotism; they advocated consultation; and, above all, maintained the central importance of public welfare in the reformed political order. The difference between them and the liberals was only one of degree in that the latter used the same Islamic principles to call for more far-reaching changes in society.

In this way, the nineteenth century saw the first Arab forays into the areas of constitutional government. These pioneers, as Hourani has observed, justified their efforts ‘as being not the introduction of something new but a return to the true spirit of Islam … [they believed] that the modern parliamentary system was a restatement of the system of consultation which had existed in early Islam and was the sole guarantee of freedom’.

Britain’s occupation and control over Egypt from 1882 inspired a new generation of intellectuals and activists. The new authorities denied there was a unified Egyptian ‘peoples’, that the people in Egypt would take several generations to be fit for ‘real … autonomy’, and, towards this end, they would need ‘to work cordially and patiently, in cooperation with European sympathisers’.

In addressing local rulers in 1903, Lord Curzon, the viceroy in India, applauded British achievements in the region thus: We found strife and we created order. … We saved you from extinction at the hands of your neighbours. … we shall not wipe out the most unselfish page in history. The peace of these waters must be maintained; your independence will continue to be upheld; and the influence of the British Government must remain supreme.

Britain’s ‘informal empire’ in the Gulf was recognized as ‘unique’ in a Foreign Office memorandum of 1908 in which the writer noted: [In the Persian Gulf, Britain] has for generations borne burdens there which no other nation has ever undertaken anywhere, except in the capacity of sovereign; she has had duty thrust upon her without dominion; she has kept the peace amongst people who are not her subjects; has patrolled, during upwards of two centuries, waters over which she has enjoyed no formal lordship.39

In fact, for Arab Muslims, their Islamic faith and their link to a particular region was far more important than their being ‘Arab’.

In power in Syria, the French applied divide-and-rule principles to sustain their governance of the resentful population. Syria was divided into four administrations – Damascus and Aleppo, and two communal entities, the Alawite in western Syria and the Druze in the south. The intention was to keep the people divided: minority communal entities were expected to support colonial rule, while staying away from the waves of broader nationalist fervour. All attempts at nationalist mobilization were ruthlessly crushed with police firings, mass arrests and prolonged imprisonment. However, France was quite inept in handling local sensitivities: clumsy manipulations of Druze affairs ignited a major uprising in July 1925, which then spread to other parts of Syria, including Hama and villages outside Damascus. These uprisings were crushed with brutal violence – artillery and aerial bombardments destroyed entire villages, while hundreds were summarily executed. The rebellion then spread to Damascus in October, which was also put down through aerial bombings over several weeks. The uprising ended only in October 1926, when the French had deployed about 95,000 soldiers. Sporadic low-key uprisings continued over the next years, but the back of national resistance was broken and, over the next decade, awaited a new generation of leaders.

In August 1920, France shaped ‘Greater Lebanon’ as per its ‘natural boundaries’: to Mount Lebanon were added the port cities of Beirut, Tripoli, Sidon and Tyre; the Druze areas; and the Bekaa valley, which had a large Shia population. The French succeeded in obtaining a state which then had a 52 per cent Christian population and provided a Constitution that was based on ‘confessionalism’, i.e., political offices were divided among different groups on religious/sectarian basis. This system ensured that faith-based differences would define state affairs.

1918, Foreign Secretary Balfour affirmed that Mesopotamia should be under British control; he said, ‘I do not care under what system we keep the oil, but I am quite clear it is all-important for us that this oil should be available.’26 As war ended, British troops in Mesopotamia occupied Mosul after the armistice with Turkey. After heated discussions between the British and French delegations at the Paris Peace Conference, it was finally decided at the San Remo Conference in April 1920 that Mosul would be part of the British Mandate, while France would get 25 per cent of the oil produced in Iraq. Thus, the story of Iraq under the British Mandate runs in two parallel courses: one, political developments within the country; and, two, the complex aspects of Iraq’s oil-related story. Before the enforcement of the Mandate, many Iraqis had believed that they would secure independence. Within British counsels, opinion was divided between those who advocated direct colonial control – as in British India – while others thought a more effective (and less expensive) arrangement would be to have a monarchy in Baghdad, which would avoid direct British confrontation with nationalist forces.

The treaty of 1922 was replaced by a new agreement of June 1930, which maintained British military presence in the country, but otherwise loosened its authority; the latter’s principal interest then was to control Iraqi oil, which it did by acquiring, in 1928, a 47.5 per cent share in the Iraq Petroleum Company. In October 1932, Iraq entered the League of Nations as an independent, sovereign state, but Britain continued to maintain informal civilian and military influence, thus eroding the standing of the ruler until he was violently overthrown in the revolution of 1958. Ideas of Nationalism Before we leave this short survey

Al Husri’s notion of Arab nationalism was entirely secular – he rejected the idea that religion could be the basis of Arab nationalism, even though the vast majority of the Arabs were Muslim. Arab and Islamic history were not co-terminus, he pointed out; Arabs had existed long before Islam, and if Arabs ceased to Muslim, they would still be Arabs.

Britain prioritized the implementation of the Balfour Declaration and presided over a massive movement of Jewish people to Palestine: Jews had started coming to Palestine to escape czarist persecution from 1882, joining a population that was 85 per cent Muslim, 9 per cent Christian and 3 per cent Jewish. During, the Jewish population went from 24,000 to 85,000.

This led to a pattern of regular and increasingly bloody communal riots in Palestine. Though British governments would periodically protest that they had no intention of changing the demography of the state, the Zionist leaders in London were able to overcome these hesitations, and maintain the tempo of migration and land purchase that ensured that violence became endemic to the territory. Once the Nazis had seized power in Germany, there was a massive increase in Jewish migration, with 62,000 people entering Palestine in 1935. Between 1922 and 1935, the Jewish population went from 9 per cent to 27 per cent of the total population.

In 1937, the Peel Commission conceded that there was ‘an irrepressible conflict … between two national communities’, with no common ground between them.39 The commission proposed a partition plan that would give 20 per cent of the best areas of Palestine to the Jews, while the Arab territories would be linked to Transjordan, the territory east of the Jordan river that had been separated from Palestine in 1923 and made a state under King Abdullah, another son of Sharif Hussain.

The British used 25,000 soldiers to combat this uprising and inflicted severe reprisals: under emergency regulations, 2,000 homes were destroyed and several thousand Palestinians were incarcerated in concentration camps. As Rogan notes: The use of overwhelming force and collective punishments by the British degenerated into abuses and atrocities that would forever stain the mandate in the memory of the Palestinians. … Some 5000 Palestinians were killed and 10,000 were wounded – in all, 10 percent of the adult male population was killed, wounded, imprisoned or exiled.

As oil revenues increased and the strategic importance of oil rose, the British felt the need for a stronger ruler who would both centralize and modernize administration and ward off the Soviet Union, whose forces were threatening a southward advance on Persia, similar to what Russia had done in the nineteenth century. The British found their protégé in Colonel Reza Khan, commander of the Cossack brigade, who mounted a coup against the last ruler of the Qajar dynasty in 1921. A prime minister was imposed upon the monarch, and Reza Khan first became war minister and then prime minister. In October 1925, the majlis (national assembly) deposed the monarch and, two months later, proclaimed Reza Khan as Shah-en-Shah (king of kings) of the country. He was henceforth known as Reza Shah Pahalvi.

The Anglo-French powers shaped five new states in the region and provided them with borders, rulers, and institutions of modern governance – assemblies, councils of ministers, bureaucracies, and elements of local government and municipal services. And, whatever the dubious circumstances of their birth, these states have endured, with borders intact. This endurance is remarkable since the borders were drawn by discredited colonial masters with little local knowledge and even less sensitivity to the area’s conditions, so that communities with shared identities and interests were divided, and peoples with little compatibility and often deep hostility were placed together in one state.

The case of Lebanon is even more curious. Here, the French deliberately carved out a Christian majority state; the Christians had a bare majority of 52 per cent at the outset, but were privileged by the Constitution. In this order, the Maronite was a unique community; it was an ancient one that had always emphasized its ‘distinctiveness, perseverance and resistance to assimilation’.56 In Lebanon, this community has been compelled to live with Sunnis, Shias, Druze and Orthodox Christians.

Initially, the Muslims saw themselves as part of the broader ‘Syrian’ and Arab community, while the Christians viewed Lebanon as a Christian state. But, by the 1930s, as Hourani notes, ‘the idea of a state based on accord between the various Christian and Muslim communities began to gain strength’.

Fromkin points out that ‘the modern belief in secular civil government is an alien creed in a region most of whose inhabitants, for more than a thousand years, have avowed faith in a Holy Law that governs all of life’. He then notes ‘Islam’s hold on the region’ and points out that ‘European officials at the time had little understanding of Islam’.60 What Fromkin misses out is that it was not the ‘Holy Law’ that made the West Asian soil infertile for Western institutions; it was the fact that these institutions imposed by Western powers were not really modern, secular, democratic entities, but were fake imitations of Western order – hollow structures without the informing spirit of freedom, equality and justice. In fact, the literature of the period from Arab sources is replete with proclamations, petitions, pamphlets and journalistic outpourings calling on Western powers to grant to the Arabs the very ideas and institutions they had at home. The nationalism of the Arabs at this time, as Hourani notes, was secularist and constitutionalist; to be modern ‘was to have a political and social life similar to those of the countries of western Europe’.61 The Western response to these aspirations was intolerant and violent – firepower, incarceration, torture, executions and exile. This, rather than Holy Law, should be held responsible for the legacy of insecurity and instability that has been bequeathed to the region. Fromkin is however right when he says, ‘The settlement of 1922, ...

Perhps the mosf important insight.

Palestine witnessed increased Jewish immigration after the war. Given US backing for the Zionist cause, particularly encouraged by the horrors of the Holocaust, Britain had no choice but to accept this movement of Jews, and 300,000 of them came to Palestine – 10 per cent of the total Jewish community in Europe.

American pressure for israel was there evven before wwiii

In the course of the conflict, the victorious Israeli forces occupied more territory and made two-thirds of the Palestinians (750,000 persons) leave their homes and become refugees in neighbouring countries. In the agreements that followed the Second World War, Israel obtained 75 per cent of former Palestine; a small strip of land on the Mediterranean, Gaza, was given to Egypt, while the West Bank went to Jordan. The city of Jerusalem, venerated by Jews, Christians and Muslims, was partitioned, with the West going to Israel and the East to Jordan.

The Wafd government, that had come to power in the 1950 elections, firmly opposed the British armed forces’ continued stay in the country, abrogated the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty in October 1951 and demanded immediate British withdrawal from the Suez Canal zone. The British refused to recognize this abrogation. With tacit government support, there were several attacks on British facilities in the canal zone and guerrilla attacks on UK personnel. In a major escalation, in January 1952, about 1,500 British troops besieged Egyptian police at the canal zone and demanded the surrender of their weapons. In the fighting, forty-six policemen were killed. In response, on 25-26 January, referred to as ‘Black Saturday’, there were strikes, riots and arson attacks in Cairo on British, Jewish and other foreign properties; fifty Egyptians and seventeen foreigners were killed, and the Wafd government was dismissed.

While initially they installed a civilian government, the revolution was supervised by a Revolutionary Command Council (RCC), headed by Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser. The RCC banned all political parties as sources of discord, and set up a state-sponsored party, the Liberation Rally. In June 1953, Egypt was declared a republic, with Naguib as its first president. Among the first acts of the new order were the abolition of Turkish titles enjoyed by the aristocracy and landed gentry, and expropriation of their land for redistribution among small farmers.

Recognizing that agricultural production needed to be boosted with increased water supply, the government decided to construct the Aswan Dam, which would increase acreage under cultivation from 6 million acres to about 9.5 million acres. Funding for this project brought the Egyptian revolution face-to-face with the realities of post-war global politics. In seeking funds for the dam and weapons to upgrade its armed forces, Egypt first turned to the US. The US insisted that Egypt join a regional defence pact – the Middle East Defence Organization (MEDO) – before military supplies could be considered. Nasser rejected this proposal, seeing it as another avenue for continued British presence in Egypt. Israel, on its part, viewed the British in the canal zone as a buffer between itself and Egypt, and was apprehensive about its end. McHugo points out that Israel’s prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, had long-term concerns as well: he thought that Nasser would modernize his country, unite the Arabs and finally destroy Israel. He, therefore, committed himself to destroying Nasser before he became too powerful.

In July 1954, Israeli intelligence attempted to create enmity between Egypt on one side and the US and Britain on the other by sabotaging the latter’s facilities in Cairo, but its agents were exposed and apprehended. Then, in February 1954, to exhibit their military superiority, Israeli personnel attacked the Egyptians in Gaza and killed thirty-seven soldiers.

Instead, he found his niche in the Non-aligned Movement, joining India’s Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz Tito at the helm of this grouping of developing countries which were inspired by anti-colonialism and the rejection of the ideological and political divisions of the Cold War. Nasser, like India, also obtained his military equipment, denied to him by Western powers, from the Eastern bloc. This action, coupled with Egypt’s diplomatic ties with China in May 1956, further alienated the US; in July 1956, President Dwight Eisenhower announced that the US was withdrawing all financial assistance for the Aswan Dam project. Viewing this as a direct threat to his regime, Nasser announced the nationalization of the Suez Canal on 26 July.

With other groups joining them in later years, their organization, based in Damascus, was renamed Arab Ba’ath Socialist Party (ABSP) in 1952. Aflaq, the ideologue, described Arab nationalism as a ‘… tolerant spirituality that will open its heart and will shade with its wings all those who shared with the Arabs their history, who lived for generations in the atmosphere of their language and culture until they became Arab in thought and sentiment.’9 Aflaq’s Arab nationalism was founded on shared language, though, at times, he referred to other factors, such as ethnicity (though as part of remote history), Islam as part of the Arabs’ cultural heritage (not faith), and common history; in the contemporary period, this meant ‘a unity of suffering and hopes’, and a sense of shared destiny.10 This ‘nation’ had been divided by colonialism, which had also severely damaged the Arab spirit of solidarity.

In February 1966, the Military Committee, backed by younger members of the Ba’ath party, ousted the top Ba’ath leaders, Aflaq and al Bitar, and established a Marxist, neo-Ba’athist leadership under Salah Jadid. Their ideology was a mix of Arab nationalism and Marxism, calling for mass struggle and the liberation of Palestine. This included support for cross-border raids by Palestinian guerrillas into Israeli territory. Nasser was wary of Syrian radicalism, but, given his ongoing competition with the traditional Arab monarchies, he felt compelled to back the Syrians. He entered into a defence agreement with Syria, which provided that an attack on one country would be considered an attack on the other. This made them partners in the 1967 war with Israel. In November 1970, the Corrective Movement, led by defence minister Hafez al Assad, ousted Salah Jadid and his supporters, and brought al- Assad to power in Damascus.

Algeria had some unique features: in 1848, it had been declared French territory; its three provinces – Oran, Algiers and Constantine – were declared departments of France and provided elected deputies to the Chamber in Paris. But these were French nationals, since Algeria attracted settlers from France who numbered over 800,000 by the 1920s. The other feature of French rule was that, though Algeria was French territory, Algerians were not seen as equal to French citizens – to be considered for citizenship, Algerians needed to give up their Muslim faith and accept French civil law. In Algeria itself, laws discriminated between French nationals and the native population, providing for penalties for actions that were not deemed criminal for Europeans, for instance, criticizing government officials or the French republic. Hence, in the first decades of the twentieth century, the agitation in Algeria was not for national independence but for equal rights.

A settler community in Philippeville was attacked in August 1955, in which over a hundred persons were killed. In their retaliation, the French admitted to 1,200 civilian deaths; the FLN claimed 12,000 died. French forces in Algeria, which were 60,000 in 1954, became 500,000 by 1956.

From 1956, the French began the policy of mass displacement of rural communities and their forced settlement in internment camps, so that by 1962, about 3 million people had been forcibly displaced in this effort at eroding FLN support in rural areas.

Israel, meanwhile, was keen on war: McHugo says its military and much of its government were ‘itching for war’; they wanted the ‘destruction of the Egyptian army’.33 Rogan explains that, while the Arabs were anxious to correct the humiliation of 1948, Israel too ‘needed one good war to secure defensible boundaries and inflict a decisive defeat on the Arabs’.34 Israel knew it was militarily superior to its Arab neighbours. While Nasser may have thought that US intervention would lead to a settlement, Israel was ‘not prepared to give Egypt a political victory which did not correspond to the balance of power between them’.35 After his troops entered the Sinai, Nasser sent several messages to Tel Aviv and Washington seeking a political settlement, while indicating he was ready for war. This misjudgement cost him dearly.

There are reports of an attempted coup by Saudi military officers in May 1955; they had been trained in Egypt and were seeking to overthrow the royal family with the help of Egyptian advisers.38 In April 1958, the ‘National Liberation Front of Saudi Arabia’, made up of Saudi nationalists, demanded wide-ranging reforms in the country, including a Constitution, free elections, and freedom of speech and association. These reformists were joined by a group of princes, all sons of King Abdulaziz, who were influenced by Nasser. They included Princes Talal, Nawwaf, Abdul Mohsin and Badr, and were later joined by a few others. They were known as ‘Free Princes’, who called for a constitutional monarchy and even submitted a draft Constitution to King Saud in early September 1960. In 1962, they made their way to Cairo and met Nasser. Prince Talal, their most authoritative member, proclaimed socialism as the main principle of Islam. Through the 1960s and early 1970s, there were several attempts by left-wing groups to effect a governmental change – an attempted coup that was foiled in December 1962; a leftist effort in February 1963; another in December 1965; and sustained labour unrest during. In January 1967, hundreds of ‘trained saboteurs’ were arrested and accused of planned bombings of military, royal, and US targets. In June 1969, a major assassination conspiracy, mainly by military officers, was foiled.

As oil revenues increased after 1973 (see below), the socio-economic impulse for reform, as the French scholar of religion and politics in Saudi Arabia, Stephane Lacroix notes, became less relevant and, over time, gave way to domestic debates relating to culture and identity, setting up divisions such as ‘liberal’ versus ‘Islamist’.

Vasiliev says that the Saudi approach to Iran ‘was an intricate combination of rivalry, fear and cooperation’.41 Through the 1960s, the two monarchies were united by their shared alliance with the West in the Cold War and, closer home, their hostility to Nasser’s Egypt. They were brought together in the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), where they cooperated to ensure a moderate approach to production and prices (see below). What worried Saudi Arabia was Iran’s military capabilities and the shah’s territorial claims in the Gulf. He claimed Bahrain as Iranian territory, a claim he finally relinquished only in August 1971 when the country became independent. In early 1971, the shah announced that Iran would assume responsibility for the defence of the Gulf after British withdrawal, which added to the uneasiness of the emerging Arab states. Later, he forcibly took control of the islands of Abu Musa and the Greater and Lesser Tunbs at the mouth of the Gulf, which were claimed by the emirates of Sharjah and Ra’as al Khaimah, respectively, on the eve of the UAE emerging as a sovereign, federal entity in December 1971. However, Saudi Arabia quietly countenanced Iran supporting Sultan Qabous in his fight against the separatist movement, People’s Liberation Front of Oman, a Marxist entity, in the southern province of Dhofar.

The Muslim Brotherhood had been founded in Egypt in 1928 by an educationist, Hassan al Banna, to preserve Muslim faith and belief in the face of challenges from Western secularist and materialist blandishments. The Brotherhood had supported the revolution of 1952 in Egypt, but fell out with the new rulers as the latter failed to shape their revolution on an Islamic basis and instead pursued a secular order. Following a crackdown by Nasser after a failed assassination attempt, the group migrated to Saudi Arabia, where they were joined by their co-members from Syria in 1963, when the Ba’athists turned against them. From the late 1950s, as the Saudi–Egyptian divide widened, King Faisal turned to the Brotherhood for help, as they were themselves victims of Nasser and capable of taking him on ideologically by using the instrument of Islam.

In response to the powerful radio messages broadcast by Egypt’s Sawt al Arab (Voice of the Arabs), the Saudis aired Sawt al Islam (Voice of Islam); as the Egyptian press referred to Saudi rulers as ‘agents of imperialism’, the Saudis called Nasser ‘Egyptian Stalin’. Beyond mainstream media, the Brotherhood took the competition to the doctrinal level as well, with the Islamic University in Madinah, set up under their guidance, seeking to match the influence of Al Azhar University in Egypt, which Nasser had brought under his control.

In May 1962, Saudi Arabia convened a conference in Mecca to discuss how secularism and socialism could be confronted. This led to the establishment of the Muslim World League (MWL) as the platform to propagate Wahhabiyya through contacts with like-minded organizations set up or supported by Saudi Arabia in South and Southeast Asia and Africa. Later, in 1972, the MWL was backed by the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), which took the message of Wahhabiyya to the next generation of Muslims.

The attempted arson at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in August 1969 provided Saudi Arabia with the appropriate occasion to assert its new role on the Islamic stage. It convened an Islamic summit at Rabat in September 1969, and then held the first conference of foreign ministers of Islamic countries in Mecca in March 1970. It was chaired by King Faisal and was attended by twenty-three countries. The next conference, held in Jeddah, two years later was attended by thirty-one countries. Saudi Arabia thus took central position in both Arab and Islamic worlds.

In June 1976, Syria sent its troops into Lebanon to protect the Christian fighters. President al Assad’s logic was that a Muslim triumph in the fighting would encourage Israel to intervene, avowedly to protect the Christians; once in Lebanon, the Israelis would turn on Syria, its real target. Thus, its entry on the side of the Christians saved Syria itself.

It also provided the ruling regimes with the ability to co-opt their populations into the authoritarian order and silence the demand for political reform; education, health, employment and enhanced quality of life substituted for popular participation in the political order.

Britain took a firm position in the face of the challenge from Mosaddeq, since it feared that there would be similar demands to nationalize British assets in other countries in the region, including the Suez Canal. An effective approach the British adopted was to win over US support by playing on the latter’s anti-communist paranoia. The well-known authority on Iranian history and politics Ali Ansari has pointed out that this outreach to the US and shaping a Western Alliance against Mosaddeq encouraged a ‘certain circularity’ in positions, in that Western concerns relating to communist influence on Mosaddeq made the latter even more obdurate and autocratic, and pushed him further towards the left, particularly the Iranian communists in the Tudeh party.56 As the US moved closer to the British, Mosaddeq moved closer to the communists, hoping to pressure the Americans to extend to Iran the financial assistance it needed – given that there had been no oil revenues for two years and the country was facing economic collapse. But this had the opposite effect of convincing the US about the imminent communist takeover of the country and the need to remove him from office.

As the 1950s ended, Arab producers began to experience the limitations of the 50:50 sharing of profits agreement. This was because international companies would occasionally cut the posted price of oil in response to market conditions without consulting the producer governments. British Petroleum decided on a 10 per cent cut in 1959, while Standard Oil announced in August 1960 a 7 per cent cut. The then Saudi oil minister, Abdullah al Turayqi, encouraged the principal producer countries to put together a grouping of producer states to protect their interests from the arbitrary actions of the oil companies. On 14 September 1960, five countries – Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela – met in Baghdad and announced the setting up of OPEC. It was formally inaugurated in January 1961 in Geneva, and moved its headquarters to Vienna in 1965. Other WANA states that joined it later were: Qatar (1961), Libya (1962), Abu Dhabi (1967; membership transferred to the UAE in 1974), and Algeria (1969).

The passing of the Oil Nationalization Bill by the majlis on 28 April 1951 suffused the country with nationalistic fervour, but the nationalization programme was firmly resisted by the British government, the majority shareholder in the AIOC. Britain declared the nationalization illegal and initiated a global boycott of Iranian oil, while Mosaddeq projected it as a ‘historic struggle’ and a ‘holy struggle’ to liberate the East from Western tutelage.3 The British worked on the Americans against Mosaddeq’s powerful messages by playing on their concern relating to communist influence, fusing this with safeguarding Western commercial interests. British efforts in Washington were successful – a joint plan was developed by their intelligence agencies to overthrow Mosaddeq. In fact, all details of the plan were finalized nearly a year before it was operationalized on 19 August 1953.4 It was implemented with the help of Iranian army officers, sections of the clergy, and the (reluctant) support of the shah. Clerics were upset with the government giving women the right to vote and lifting the ban on alcohol. Ayatollah Abol Qassem Kashani, earlier a supporter of Mosaddeq, left the National Front, and set up a separate Islamic grouping in the majlis.5 This overthrow of a democratically elected government by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) continues to poison the Iranian view of the US’s role in Iranian affairs. Though the event is little-remembered by later US leaders, ‘it remai...