Newly-Released U.S. Documents Cover Iran 1951-1954
June 26, 2017
The documents include CIA briefings, nearly completely unredacted. They are arranged chronologically. The first document, February 23, 1951, is “Despatch From the Embassy in Iran to the Department of State”. Its subject is “THE POSITION OF THE SOVIETS IN IRAN”.
This material shows us what various people in the U.S. government were thinking. For example, we can read the positions of high officials at a meeting of the National Security Council on March 4, 1953.
Russia under the Tsars made considerable inroads against Persian territory. Iran occupied a position between the Russian and Ottoman Empires. Although Iran had very few communists (the embassy estimated 1 person in a 1,000), indeed Iranians are described by the U.S. embassy as “ruggedly selfish and individualistic”, the U.S. for other reasons feared a communist takeover. One of these is mistaken and imperial ideas about oil, including the ownership of oil and its nationalization within Iran, which meant that Iran was becoming a country more independent of foreign influence and control.
Border
regions between empires are usually contested areas. The British and
Americans displaced the Ottomans. If this sort of geopolitical rivalry
still is in place today to some extent, that is, if the U.S. still fears
that Russia has designs on Iran’s land, then the U.S. empire, if it
acted sensibly, really should be a friend of Iran or at least not
actively anti-Iran. The fact is that Russian-Iranian relations are
uneasy and marked by distrust, as one would expect after hundreds of
years of Russian incursions upon Persia and at least 5 wars between
them. Even if Russia has put behind it ideas of expansion into Iran,
which is likely, the general suspicion that the U.S. government has
toward Russia because of the Soviet past suggests that the U.S.
government would not be as antagonistic toward Iran as it is. The
solution to the puzzle of sustained U.S. hostility toward Iran is
certainly Israel and the special place that the U.S. government has made
for Israel in its policies. This special relation has been distorting
U.S. government behavior for a long time in the Middle East, including
its impact on war-making in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen.
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