Bureau d 'information Alba Granada North AfricaIRAN: Why Mossadegh’s Liberal Anti-Imperialist Project Collapsed
Mossadegh Nationalized Iran’s Oil Industry, but Failed to Build Institutions of Workers’ Power, Leaving the Country’s Young Democracy Vulnerable to the Western-Backed Coup of 1953: We Must Not Repeat the Same Errors of the Past. Reflecting on this historical episode is crucial because it offers vital lessons about the importance of strengthening democratic institutions and popular participation to prevent repeating such tragedies. Mossadegh’s nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company was an act of economic nationalism that resonated deeply with Iranians who longed for control over their natural resources. It challenged not only British imperial interests but also set an example for post-colonial nations asserting their rights.
For the U.S. government, violently imposing its will on the Iranian people is a generational tradition. The most consequential of these interventions took place in 1953, when American and British intelligence overthrew Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, two years after his government nationalized Iran’s oil reserves, which had previously been monopolized by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC).
Mossadegh, who embodied anti-imperialist sentiment in a country that had long been at the mercy of foreign powers, enjoyed broad support ranging from Marxist organizers to Shiite clerics. But when the pressures of the British-led embargo and Mossadegh’s plans to restructure the oil industry threatened the interests of Iran’s financial establishment, the unity of the anti-imperialist front quickly unraveled. Mossadegh’s refusal to empower a mass working-class movement ultimately sealed the fate of his government.
The Fracturing of a Broad Coalition
Nationalist fervor initially concealed the fragility of the liberal-oriented coalition led by Mossadegh. He came to power as the leader of the National Front, a broad alliance of nationalist, pro-democratic, liberal, and socialist tendencies that mobilized for fair elections, freedom of the press, and the nationalization of Iran’s oil economy against the British monopoly. In the patriotic and euphoric years following its founding in 1949, the movement was financed and supported by the bazaaris, Iran’s traditional merchant class, who expected nationalization to transfer the oil monopoly from British hands into their own.
Instead, the bazaaris found themselves facing blockade-induced hyperinflation, paralyzed trade, and the growing reality that Mossadegh intended to place the country’s oil under the control of the newly created National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC), a state-led capitalist development vehicle whose revenues would fund major infrastructure projects, public welfare programs, and a secular education system.
Most of the ulema, Iran’s clerical establishment, similarly abandoned Mossadegh’s coalition once their material interests came under threat. Initially, they viewed him as an ally, sharing a mutual hatred of the foreign and non-Muslim interests that stifled Iranian sovereignty. But once British and American influence had been contained, the dominant factions of the clergy came to regard Mossadegh as their greatest threat. To them, his vision of a secularized society represented an assault on Iran’s religious identity, while his plans to build a modern welfare state undermined what they considered their traditional role in providing charity to the poor and containing proletarian unrest.
The British blockade, which strangled revenues derived from land rents and customary religious taxes—a problem they largely blamed on the prime minister—hurt the ulema as much as it did the bazaaris. While some clerics remained loyal to the anti-imperialist cause, the most powerful strata of the ulema were prepared to abandon Mossadegh by 1952.
As the British embargo eroded their profits, many Iranian elites demanded an accommodation with either Britain or the United States, even if it meant allowing Western officials to administer the oil fields—an arrangement Mossadegh refused to accept. Rather than capitulate to Britain or negotiate through an external mediator such as Truman, the government issued bonds and restricted imports, but resisted more radical measures such as rationing and heavy taxation of the wealthy. This attempt at moderation satisfied few.
Western Spies and the Shah
By late 1951, Winston Churchill’s incoming Tory government accelerated secret plans to forcibly remove the Iranian prime minister. While President Harry Truman officially refused to participate in an outright coup, he authorized the CIA to undermine Mossadegh by other means. The CIA and MI6, working only nominally toward different objectives, built a network among key interest groups and oversaw a meticulously planned campaign to discredit Mossadegh through rumors and trusted operatives embedded within Radio Tehran and other media outlets. By the time Eisenhower lent his support to what they euphemistically called a “counter-coup” in early 1953, the opposition infrastructure and funding channels were already in place.
Two of the coup’s principal architects were Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and CIA Director Allen Dulles, among the most fervent advocates in U.S. history of subverting any country they considered too close to Soviet socialism. They were motivated both by their deep ties to the AIOC, the predecessor of British Petroleum, and by their Cold War ideology. It did not matter that Mossadegh was a constitutional liberal who opposed concessions to the Soviet Union as vehemently as he opposed the AIOC monopoly. This intervention was driven by more than revenge for lost capital or reflexive paranoia about Soviet influence; it was a violent corrective measure against a government and a movement that threatened the core logic of Western imperialism and capital accumulation.
Western intelligence cultivated potential allies by portraying Mossadegh as a left-wing radical and a Russian puppet, but few of these accusations could withstand genuine scrutiny. Mossadegh was in fact a liberal reformer seeking to develop a capitalist economy free from foreign imperial extraction, and a fierce critic of the proposed Soviet oil concession of 1944. His frequent clashes with the Moscow-aligned Tudeh Party created a rift within the Iranian left, leading to a breakaway faction that formed the left wing of his National Front in 1948. Nevertheless, Western propaganda provided convenient narratives that Mossadegh’s opponents embraced in pursuit of their own immediate economic demands.
Perceiving Mossadegh’s vulnerability and increasingly alarmed by his policies, Iranian reactionaries gravitated toward the Shah, a powerful symbol for millions among the urban poor and rural periphery, and one of Mossadegh’s most dangerous antagonists. Although some of the monarchy’s powers had been curtailed following the Anglo-Soviet occupation during World War II, the Shah still controlled the armed forces, presided over a court that served as a safe haven for anti-government conspirators, and exercised the constitutional right to appoint half of the Senate’s members, filling it with landlords, monarchists, and wealthy merchants who systematically vetoed Mossadegh’s reforms.
The Shah and the ulema made an unlikely pair. Since the 1920s, the father-and-son monarchy had sought to weaken clerical influence by absorbing traditional religious domains such as education and law into the secular state. In the long run, however, these efforts merely pushed the ulema to adapt and embed themselves more deeply within elite political circles. Senior clerics, often drawn from high-status families, used their connections to secure state scholarships and government positions for their children, creating a professionalized generation capable of opposing the government from within the state apparatus itself.
Despite this history, Mossadegh’s apparent desire to promote secular nationalism—and the more fantastical rumors that he would adopt Soviet-style anti-clericalism—convinced his opponents among the ulema that his leadership represented an existential threat. Overcoming their historical animosity and encouraged by American and British agents, the court and the mosque willingly joined forces against a prime minister they regarded as a common enemy.
Western intelligence deliberately nurtured the reactionary alliance of the Shah, the bazaaris, and the ulema by sending provocateurs disguised as pro-Mossadegh supporters to threaten religious and business leaders with “savage punishments” if they dared criticize the government. One cleric, Seyyed Mohammad Behbahani, with pockets full of American money, distributed letters bearing the Tudeh Party emblem threatening to hang mullahs from lampposts across the country. Another cleric, Abol-Ghasem Kashani, a former ally of Mossadegh in the campaign to nationalize the oil industry, made subtle yet defiant statements that elevated the conflict from a political dispute to a theological struggle.
Western intelligence paid particular attention to Kashani, whose influence among the urban poor was enhanced by their dependence on mosque charity for daily survival. Already estranged from the government over secularism and internal power-sharing, Kashani was encouraged further by the CIA through a mixture of private appeals and public subversion, including a leaflet depicting a caricature of Mossadegh sexually abusing the ayatollah.
In the months preceding Mossadegh’s downfall, Kashani no longer bothered to conceal his defection. Before departing for Mecca in August 1952, he warned Mossadegh through his ally, the deputy speaker of the Majlis, that parliament might take matters into its own hands if Iran’s economic situation continued to deteriorate. It was a blatant display of status, as Kashani was powerful enough that Mossadegh dared not arrest him, unlike many of his other political rivals.
Caught in the Middle
Faced with total obstruction from imperialism and the right, Mossadegh could have relied more heavily on left-wing allies such as Khalil Maleki, one of the leading Marxist organizers who had split from the Tudeh Party in 1948. But the prime minister, an aristocratic constitutionalist of noble lineage, was terrified of proletarian insurrection and fundamentally unwilling to build institutions of working-class power.
Rather than cultivating an independent, organized mass movement capable of defending his government against its enemies, Mossadegh focused on gaining control of the monarchist armed forces and combating foreign and domestic subversion from above, using a fractured and unreliable state as his primary instrument.
This left the Soviet-aligned Tudeh Party as the only viable street-level force on Mossadegh’s left flank. Fearing that his replacement would pose an even greater threat to Iranian workers, the Tudeh began organizing large demonstrations in support of the government. Mossadegh refused to fully embrace them, yet neither did he forcefully refute the accusations of communist sympathies spread by his opponents, ultimately satisfying no one.
From pulpits throughout Tehran, many clerics preached to working-class congregations that Mossadegh’s tolerance of secular factions was paving the way for atheistic Marxism. Others, such as Ayatollahs Mahmud Taleghani and Seyyed Reza Zanjani, argued that socialist policies represented Islamic justice in its purest and most egalitarian form. Mossadegh, however, convinced that religion belonged in the private sphere regardless of its orientation, preferred to wage his battles in the Majlis and at The Hague rather than support progressive clerics.
An emotional and gifted orator in his own right, Mossadegh was not opposed to mass mobilization per se, but he maintained an aristocratic disdain for the rougher work of street theology and violent resistance. His opponents had no such reservations. Through local intermediaries such as the wealthy, Anglophile Rashidian brothers, the CIA and MI6 funneled millions of dollars into buying the loyalty of military officers and gang leaders. Over the previous century, the ulema and the bazaaris had repeatedly joined forces whenever political crises threatened their power; now, armed with foreign backing, they prepared to create a crisis of their own.
Completing the Coup
In February 1953, Mossadegh visited the Imperial Palace to bid farewell to the Shah and Empress Soraya before their extended European vacation. During the visit, a massive crowd mobilized by Ayatollah Behbahani’s network and monarchist gang leaders gathered outside to implore the Shah not to leave the country, fearing that Mossadegh and the Tudeh Party would seize complete control of the state. Kashani, Behbahani, and other clerics personally fueled the hysteria, with Kashani lamenting that “if the Shah leaves, everything we have will leave with him.” The spectacle achieved its intended effect: portraying Mossadegh as cunning and power-hungry while fostering public panic that any delay in removing him would result in an irreversible communist dictatorship.
The February crisis convinced coup organizers that sufficient opposition could be mobilized against Mossadegh. To ensure success, Western intelligence and their Iranian allies continued undermining him while allowing the economic strangulation to take its toll throughout the spring and summer. Mossadegh then made a critical mistake in early August by holding a rigged referendum in which 99.9 percent of participants voted to dissolve the Majlis and grant him the authority to legislate by executive decree—a move condemned as dictatorial and unconstitutional even by some allies within the National Front.
Believing that public opinion, or at least a critical mass of coercive power, had shifted in their favor, the CIA and MI6 launched Operation Ajax on August 15. To provide legal cover for military action against the prime minister, CIA operatives persuaded the ambitious yet fearful Shah to sign a royal decree dismissing Mossadegh and appointing General Fazlollah Zahedi as his replacement.
The uprising initially failed. Poor execution and warnings from Tudeh infiltrators allowed Mossadegh’s loyalists to uncover the plot, arrest several conspirators, and force the Shah to flee abroad. Tens of thousands of Tudeh-led demonstrators celebrated the coup’s failure by toppling royal monuments, demanding that the government declare a democratic republic or establish a regency council, and confronting the demoralized remnants of pro-Shah mobs. Mossadegh, meanwhile, publicly dismissed the attempted coup as the work of a few rogue military elements.
On August 18, however, insisting that removing the Shah would be unconstitutional, alarmed by escalating proletarian unrest, and already facing threats from the U.S. ambassador to withdraw official recognition of his government, Mossadegh ordered the police to clear the streets of anti-monarchist crowds. Eliminating his only organized working-class defense was precisely what Kermit Roosevelt—the CIA’s man in Tehran—needed for a second attempt.
On the morning of August 19, with the militant left nowhere to be seen, paid provocateurs disguised as pro-Mossadegh supporters flooded the capital, burning and looting mosques and shops. Hours later, a larger wave of monarchist thugs led by gang bosses such as Shaban “The Brainless” Jafari and backed by soldiers and tanks from the Tehran garrison violently attacked government loyalists and Tudeh members under the pretext of crushing a supposed “communist revolution” that Mossadegh had already dispersed the day before.
Mossadegh was captured and placed under house arrest for the remainder of his life. Most of his closest associates were imprisoned under harsher conditions, while others, such as Foreign Minister Hossein Fatemi, were tortured and executed. Zahedi assumed the premiership, the Shah regained power, and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company was smoothly reorganized into a Western consortium.
Mossadegh died in 1967, still under house arrest. Ayatollah Zanjani, the progressive cleric whom Mossadegh had kept at arm’s length, personally washed his body and performed the ritual prayers before the former prime minister was buried beneath the floorboards of his dining room.
Throughout his twenty-six years in power, the Shah relentlessly crushed all internal dissent through SAVAK, a notoriously brutal secret police force trained by the CIA and Mossad. The United States and the United Kingdom had carried out a cynical intervention that secured their oil interests, installed a friendly regime, and destroyed Iran’s pro-democracy opposition. In doing so, they offered a costly historical lesson: liberal anti-imperialism, terrified of its own working class, cannot withstand the power of foreign capital and domestic reaction. Mossadegh’s failure ensured that the next anti-imperialist revolution and regime would take on a radically different character.
Source: Nicholas LIU – JacobinLat
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