ABSTRACT
Introduction Iranians seeking to explain the history of their relationship with the United States often look to the events of 1953, when US and British secret services combined to help overthrow Mohammad Mosaddeq, Iran’s elected Prime Minister. Some published accounts in the West make the argument that the resentment and ill will generated by the coup contributed not only to the growth of antiAmericanism that fuelled the 1978/9 revolution in Iran, but also to the motivations of Osama bin Laden in carrying out the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks against the US.1 Whether or not it is possible to trace such a direct causal line between those events, which after all were separated by almost five decades, the coup no doubt had important repercussions for domestic affairs in Iran, regional developments in the Middle East, as well as the respective roles of the US and Britain as the two main Western powers engaged in the Persian Gulf. A striking aspect of the Iran crisis of the early 1950s is the number of parallels to the situation today. Considerable caution is required when drawing comparisons between historical periods. The US has not managed to instigate a change of regime since Iran was transformed from a monarchy to an Islamic republic in 1979, although members of the Carter and Reagan administrations gave serious consideration to the idea. After 2001, a steady flow of reports and rumours, fed by relentless and unabashedly hostile American rhetoric, hinted at similar intentions on the part of influential elements inside the George W. Bush administration.2 But notwithstanding these superficial differences, laying out some of the questions that were (and are) at issue in Iran in 1953 (and today) regarding underlying policy assumptions, understanding of ‘the enemy’, and assessments of imminent threat yields a surprising number of points of continuity between ‘then’ and ‘now’. The major questions about Iran currently being considered by Western policy-makers and scholars alike include: what is happening inside Iran? How good is our intelligence about the country? What are we to make of Iran’s leaders and their outlandish public statements? How deep is Iranian animosity towards the West and particularly the US? Are they ‘rational’ people? To what extent is Iran simply asserting its independent right to control and develop its own resources?
