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JONATHAN SCHANZER:
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The original sin

What are the roots of Middle East terror? According to New York Times journalist Stephen Kinzer, one answer might lie in the US-assisted overthrow of Iranian prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953, meant to restore power to the Shah and thwart Communist designs on Iran.

Indeed, Kinzer resurrects this modern story of intrigue (yet again) to assert that "it’s not far-fetched to draw a line" from the attacks of September 11 back to the Islamic Revolution of Iran in 1979, and from there to Mossadegh’s overthrow. Kinzer argues that had Mossadegh stayed in power, Iran might have developed into a true democracy. However, because the US chose to support Mohammed Reza Shah, whom Kinzer portrays as a corrupt autocrat, democracy in Iran was squelched. More than two decades later, when anger over the Shah’s rule boiled over, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini overthrew the corrupt monarch and established the virulently anti-American and ascetically fundamentalist Islamic Republic. Khomeini, and his successor Ali Khamenei, have since funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to radical Islamic movements worldwide, and terror has proliferated.

Kinzer neglects to note that radical Islam, as a modern phenomenon and ideology, existed well before the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Indeed, it emerged well before the 1953 overthrow of Mossadegh. Rather, the cornerstone of radical Islamic movements was the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, which was founded in 1928. Many radical Sunni movements have spawned from the Brotherhood, including the radical Hamas (which is not a creation of the Islamic Republic, although it now receives funds from Iran). Even al-Qaida can be seen as an outgrowth of the Brotherhood. The writings of one of its ideologues, Sayid Qutb, are said to have been inspiration for Osama bin Laden, and al-Qaida’s number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, hailed from al-Jihad, an Egyptian terrorist group that grew out of the Brotherhood’s ideology.

There is another problem in Kinzer’s book. Throughout his account, he makes Americans look ridiculous over their fears of rising Communist sentiments in Iran, which he downplays. Yet, although Mossadegh was not a communist himself, he had become increasingly reliant upon that party, which was growing in power and popularity. This fact cannot be ignored.

Further, Kinzer places too much stock in the powers of the CIA. Indeed, his view that the CIA pulled all the strings to eject Mossadegh is the standard account presented by Western literature on the subject.

However, a vast Iranian body of literature now suggests that Mossadegh was eventually driven out of office because he alienated Iran’s clergy, as well as the Bazaaris (middle class merchants), whose support for any political figure in Iran is vital. Kinzer either ignored these facts, or, as the book’s six-page bibliography reveals, simply did not use even one Iranian source that might have illuminated this view. Despite all of this, Kinzer’s account is actually quite thrilling. He builds suspense artfully, explains the motivations of all the actors in this story of international intrigue, and provides a blow-by-blow account of "Operation Ajax."

At the height of the Cold War, Mohammed Mossadegh, a quirky, sickly politician who was prone to fainting in public, rose to prominence. Despite a nose like Jimmy Durante’s and a penchant for wearing pajamas in official meetings, Mossadegh became Iran’s unlikely "first genuinely popular leader." He was even named Time Magazine’s man of the year.

At the time, Britain’s oil concession in Iran accounted for a great deal of its growth and wealth. Yet he nationalized Iran’s oil industry despite intense international pressure to compromise with the British. The British, not surprisingly, wanted him gone. They planted a seed with the Truman administration that Iran was the Soviets’ next target to spread communism and that it needed to be safeguarded. It wasn’t until the Eisenhower administration, however, that two brothers — John Foster Dulles (secretary of state) and Allen Dulles (head of the CIA) — acted to help push Mossadegh out of public life. It was not hard for them to reach an agreement with the Shah over this, since Mossadegh had already directly challenged the Shah’s authority on several occasions.

Although a first attempt to overthrow Mossadegh failed on August 15, 1953, Iranians flooded into the streets four days later demanding that the prime minister step down. When Mossadegh was finally cornered and was forced to capitulate, order was restored, and the Shah returned from Rome, where he had fled upon hearing that the first attempt had failed.

Kinzer, author of the excellent book Crescent and Star: Turkey Between Two Worlds (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001), does a good job of getting the reader up to speed on Iranian politics in the first 60 pages. Indeed, he provides a convincing account of how Iran was historically primed for democracy, and how it has suffered under colonial designs, particularly the British.

But ultimately, what undermines this book is Kinzer’s assertion that the overthrow of Mossadegh is among the "roots of Middle East terror." Militant Islam did not grow out of the Mossadegh affair. Its anti-Americanism is far too complex to trace to one source; if only it did, we might then have a better idea of how to stop it.

— The writer is a Soref Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.