A brief review of AMERICA AND IRAN A History 1720 to the Present by John Ghazvinian (2021)

I just finished this book. I didn't find it riveting although many reviewers did but I learnt a lot about how American crimes and follies have prevented good relations with Iran.

John Ghazvinian is an American of Iranian descent, his parents left Iran with him when he was one, he speaks Persian and researched this book in Iran’s archives after getting limited permission.

He shows that America has no reason to have any conflict with Iran except the influence of Israel, the bipartisan US Israel lobby, the hawks and the Arab states which don't want to share their influence in Washington.... and of course the duplicitous media.

The book makes clear that Iranians will resist U.S. efforts to impose “regime change” as they opposed interference by Turkey, Russia and England.

Oil was found in Iran as early as 1908 and was exploited by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which enabled the Royal Navy to convert from coal before 1914.

The concession was shockingly unfair to Iran, the oil money flowed to Britain while Iranian oil workers lived in slums in the oil port of Abadan.

British exploitation prompted resistance and in the early 1950s Mohammed Mosaddeq won a democratic election, tried to negotiate a better oil deal, failed and nationalised the company.

MI6 and the CIA organised a regime change operation which succeeded in toppling the popular Iranian leader with the Shah, a not very impressive autocrat and US puppet.

A very similar thing was attempted by the CIA, MI6 and this time Mossad in January of this year but failed. They intended to place the Shah's son on the throne.

The Ayatollah Khomeini made his name in a 1964 speech not by a religious pronouncement but a patriotic one, denouncing the Shah’s decree that exempted American military personnel and their families from Iranian laws.

Khomeini said: “They’ve given the people of Iran a status lower than that of American dogs.”

The Shah forced Khomeini into exile.

The era of miniskirts and hard liquor was a good one in many ways but the opposition continued to grow and some of the largest demonstrations in human history eventually forced the autocrat into exile in 1979.

Americans blame Carter for the fall of the Shah but there was nothing he could do - and anyway, what right did he have to choose who ruled Iran?

Israel supported the Shah, and was also quietly sympathetic to the Islamic government during the 1980s because it did not want Saddam Hussein to win the Iran-Iraq war.

In the 1990s however Israel feared that as the Cold War was over America might disengage from the Middle East.

Israel therefore made Iran a bogeyman and started issuing groundless warnings about Tehran’s nuclear program.

Ghazvinian says:

"For Israel, the goal had never been to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear bomb (something they knew Iranian leaders had little interest in). The goal had been to prevent a thawing of relations between Iran and the United States."

As often happens, Israelis then came to believe their own propaganda.

Eisenhower and Trump come out of the story very badly.

The only American president who looks good is Obama, but his attempt at a rapprochement with Iran was stymied by Israel, its DC lobby and the opportunistic Republicans.

Americans do not forgive or understand the chant the Iranians still repeat of 'Death to America' despite the Iranians having been given numerous reasons for it from the replacing of Mossadeq by the Shah onwards. 

Americans think the Iranians who support what they always call 'the regime' want to kill them personally.

Americans have not forgiven the affront they received in 1979 by the taking hostage of the diplomats (in fact CIA operatives steeped in dark arts) in the Tehran embassy by Marxist students (not the Islamic government). 

The Americans have the same attitude to this as British Liberals like Macaulay and Dickens to the Indian Mutiny. 

This fury is silly but it is an indication, I suppose, that Americans are not decadent unlike the British. 

John Ghazvinian tells this story of Bruce Laingen, the most senior US diplomat held hostage by Iran for 444 days, who later said this (I found the full quotation on the net).

“I had been sitting in my solitary cell as a hostage for about a year, when one day the cell door opens, and there is standing one of the hostage takers, one of my jailers. And all of my rage and my fury built up over one year sitting in that cell just burst out, and I started screaming at him, and I was telling him, 'You have no right to do this! This is cruel, this is inhumane! These people have done nothing! This is a violation of every law of God and man! You cannot take innocent people hostage! I went on like this for several minutes. When I was finally out of breath, the hostage taker paused for a moment, and then he leaned into my cell and said, in very good English, 'You have no right to complain, because you took our whole country hostage in 1953."

According to John Ghazvinian it was a point that Mr Laingen said he found it difficult to argue with. 

After his release he advocated reconciliation between the USA and Iran, as does the conclusion to this book.

The epilogue to the book and to the anecdote about Mr Laingen is being written now, partly in blood.