How do you avoid the Iranian revolution of 1979.

There's a few points I want to make because I'm not sure all posters are aware of them.

1) The initial Iranian Revolution was not Islamic in nature. Khomeini hijacked the revolution to establish an Islamic state. Only a minority of Iranians wanted this in 1979. Khomeini was embraced as a symbol of resistance to the Shah, but he was in exile in Iran, and very few people were actually bothering to know what Khomeini was advocating. Khomeini was able to seize power by cunning and a series of fortuituous events - much like how Hitler or Castro seized power.

So if you want to avoid the Islamic Revolution, you should be clear whether your goal is to keep the Shah in power, or if you merely want to prevent Khomeini from gaining power. There is a scenario where the revolution happens, the Shah topples, but Khomeini does not gain control.

2) The 1950s CIA coup can be summarized as "Kermit Roosevelt spreads some money around to rent some mobs who act thuggish and say some bad things about Mossadegh so Mossadegh resigns." It's farcical. There was little resistance to the coup. Mossadegh didn't try to stay in power and crush the coup. Mossadegh had popularity, but the people against him were very widespread, and at the time the coup didn't seem to generate much resentment.

It was only much later int he 1970s as the new middle class was attempting to get political power that the Mossadegh era was seen as some kind of golden age where democracy was smashed by the evil CIA. It was primarily a myth.

Mossadegh was certainly a secularist who had said good things about democracy, and probably meant them. But his actions did not support his words. At the end of his term, he was ruling by decree and accumulating more and more power to himself. He was a charismatic demagogue, and was doing nothing to establish constitutional authority or the rule of law. We see this in many figures in history like Porforio Diaz in Mexico, leaders sympathetic to democracy, who accrue absolute power, neuter the legislature, and always seem to think that people are not ready for democracy.

Personally, I don't see Mossadegh as a real democratic figure, although I do see him as well-intentioned. He certainly wasn't a good leader and positioned Iran in a very dangerous position. Mossadegh made a good myth though, but that Iranians in the 1970s believed the myth was true doesn't make it so.

The latter is an interesting point, however let me ask this. Well, first, sources for what CIA did please.

But besides that, say Mossadegh becomes a dictator, would he have been as bad as the Shah? That's it.

For the first, wouldn't that result, ironically enough, possibly in a Communist, or Socialist revolution? I don't think there were exactly traditional liberals running around during it, so something to keep in mind.
 
If you do it a few years earlier than OTL, then you might get this to work, preferably if you do not have the SAVAK do some of the stupid things that followed. A major program to advance the interests of the lower parts of the population would help this, as Iran's late 1970s economic issues were making things problematic for the country. If the son can get something of a "benevolent ruler" image, you might be able to keep the revolutionaries down, particularly Khomeini.

The way I see it, if the US had forced a coup on Iran instead of meekly asking for the Shah's approval, the CIA could have demolished the revolutionaries in co-ordination with the SAVAK and the Imperial Guard. That being said, once the revolutiuonaries were crushed, there would have to be a question of who is in control next.

The current Shah staying in power would not be a good idea. He was already dying of cancer and there was a plot to overthrow him. I'd see a stronger US response insisting that he abdicate in favor of his more pro-democratic son. The new Shah could play up the "benevolent ruler" image by making reforms to his father's policies and promising a transition back to a constitutional monarchy (like it was before the White Revolution).
 
Jumping in to bump Blackfox5's points

@ kevvy2010- to use a trope- the Shah had a Zero Percent Approval rating for a variety of reasons. Blackfox5 enumerated how secularists, Islamists and bazaaris who just wanted the economy to work well outside the Shah's cronies all wanted the Shah to bugger off. Coups wouldn't have done much to stabilize the situation.

Operation Ajax was a rum business- it just delayed the Iranians seizing their own destiny by twenty-three years and engendering a hatred of the West esp the USA for engineering it.
I'm with Blackfox5 re Mossadegh being a well-intentioned failure who backed Iran into a no-win situation. It didn't solve any of the social, economic, or political issues making Iranians seeking self-determination into bitter enemies of Western oil companies.

IMO Iran needed a better White Revolution from 1960 on, and more insistence on it being a constitutional monarchy where the Majlis wasn't just a rubber-stamp committee as the Russian Duma was pre-October Revolution. The Cyrus gambit to borrow from past Persian glories was interesting theater, but ironically, the folks he went to such effort to educate saw right through it and kept telling him to do something real and useful.

YMMV whether the Iranians needed to be doing Five-year plans or not, ordoliberal style to get more people educated (which they did) and investing oil profits for entrepreneurs to go beyond oil as an economic engine (which I figure they didn't).
 
@ kevvy2010- to use a trope- the Shah had a Zero Percent Approval rating for a variety of reasons. Blackfox5 enumerated how secularists, Islamists and bazaaris who just wanted the economy to work well outside the Shah's cronies all wanted the Shah to bugger off. Coups wouldn't have done much to stabilize the situation.

Operation Ajax was a rum business- it just delayed the Iranians seizing their own destiny by twenty-three years and engendering a hatred of the West esp the USA for engineering it.
I'm with Blackfox5 re Mossadegh being a well-intentioned failure who backed Iran into a no-win situation. It didn't solve any of the social, economic, or political issues making Iranians seeking self-determination into bitter enemies of Western oil companies.

IMO Iran needed a better White Revolution from 1960 on, and more insistence on it being a constitutional monarchy where the Majlis wasn't just a rubber-stamp committee as the Russian Duma was pre-October Revolution. The Cyrus gambit to borrow from past Persian glories was interesting theater, but ironically, the folks he went to such effort to educate saw right through it and kept telling him to do something real and useful.

YMMV whether the Iranians needed to be doing Five-year plans or not, ordoliberal style to get more people educated (which they did) and investing oil profits for entrepreneurs to go beyond oil as an economic engine (which I figure they didn't).

So if there were a stronger US response that wanted to maintain control in Iran at all costs, how would they have approached it? Could they have backed someone else?
 
So if there were a stronger US response that wanted to maintain control in Iran at all costs, how would they have approached it? Could they have backed someone else?

Honestly, the ordeal was over with so quickly and the Carter Administration was completely unprepared for it that there might not be much else to do. Perhaps they could have insisted that Shapour Bakhtiar was the legitimate government over Mehdi Barzagan. Unless they're going to send in U.S. Marines to assert that fact, then the Islamist government stays as the de facto government.

Violence is the only way to stop the revolution in 1979, and a lot of it will be unleashed.
 
Honestly, the ordeal was over with so quickly and the Carter Administration was completely unprepared for it that there might not be much else to do. Perhaps they could have insisted that Shapour Bakhtiar was the legitimate government over Mehdi Barzagan. Unless they're going to send in U.S. Marines to assert that fact, then the Islamist government stays as the de facto government.

Violence is the only way to stop the revolution in 1979, and a lot of it will be unleashed.

So if any Shah is to remain in power at the time of the revolution, the US would have to essentially do what the did when they put him in power the first time?
 
There was another thread where we went back and forth about the Iranian revolutionaries revealed how fractured and varied a mob of folks wanted to overthrow the Shah.
There were several well-intentioned folks who could have been the vanguard for a democratic Iran but exactly what flavor remained to be seen.
Marxists were probably 20% and liberal democrats maybe 20-25% of the population but balkanized into several factions that hated each other as much as they hated the Shah.
Iran-first Islamists of several stripes made up the rest, but wound up getting hijacked by Khomeni's bunch being the main instigators and organizers and getting tons of help from bazaari merchants funding them.

A big POD would be another Islamist figure besides Khomeni tapping into the violated sense of community that made the Islamists such a popular force.

One- getting the religious community on side with public displays of piety and zakat to the poor instead of all the forced secularization during the White Revolution.
That reminded them of Ataturk and that for them was a bad thing b/c it erased a lot of the unique aspects of Turkish society to be fake Westerners.
Sure I mentioned the attempts to make the Shah seem a descendant of the greats of Persian antiquity were laughably clumsy but the Shah's handlers knew they had a PR problem of zero legitimacy with the Iranian people.

Two- SAVAK was really good at crushing the democratic opposition in the 60's thru 1975, then realized they'd created an army of dwarfs.
Butterflying that suppression and making more efforts to co-opt and consult with them might help the secular, democratic opposition not be opposition but supporting a White Revolution and finding ways to cooperate would have made things a lot less explosive in the 1970's

Three- I agree with you, there needed to be a consistent American policy on Iran that wasn't dictated entirely on expediency, but keep in mind the US had five changes of president from 1960-1979 that gave incredibly variable amounts of attention to Iran.
JFK wanted to support them with investments, Peace Corps volunteers, and so forth. LBJ OTOH let Vietnam devour all of his attention on internatonal affairs. Nixon was pretty shrewd, but he got yoinked out of office by Watergate and Ford couldn't find it on a map, then Carter wanted to be idealistic and powerful, which doesn't work terribly well.
It didn't help that the CIA was blinded by having inside access to everything but ZERO interest in Iranian society. They figured they'd practically be Americans by 1985, so why bother? D'oh! :eek::eek::eek:
 

RousseauX

Donor
So if any Shah is to remain in power at the time of the revolution, the US would have to essentially do what the did when they put him in power the first time?
No, they would have to do a lot more than what they did the first time.

The Shah was hated across the political spectrum by the very people his Kemalist modernization produced: the secular nationalists saw him as a sell-out, the Marxists wanted to be the USSR, the Islamists and conservatives resented what they perceived as destruction of traditional Islamic values through modernization.
 
The latter is an interesting point, however let me ask this. Well, first, sources for what CIA did please.

Many history books will go into details about the coup. Two that I have read are All the Shah's Men by Stephen Kinzer (which is about the coup) and The Persians by Sandra Mackey. Neither are sympathetic to the coup, and Kinzer is explicitly against it. However if you can ignore the normal platitudes and just concentrate on the facts, the story that emerges may be very different from what most people think of when they hear that the CIA staged a coup.

I first heard about the coup in my high school history text book, and all I learned from it was there was a coup against a democratic leader, and no other details. My imagination quickly filled in the missing gaps. I assumed that Mossadegh was a legitimate democratic leader attempting to build a democratic state; that he was violently overthrown and killed; that it was against the wishes of the Iranian people who seethed in anger ever since then; that it was only about the oil; and that Mossadegh was killed.

Instead, the picture is of Mossadegh doing very little to build democracy (indeed dismantling the legislature), that there was widespread opposition to Mossadegh (having said it, it is also clear that he likely maintained support of the majority of the populace), that Mossadegh's own actions prevented an end to the crisis, that Iran was becoming dangerously disstabilized, that there was very little complaints about it after it was done because the country became stabilized again (again, nostalgia for Mossadegh would grow and eventually become a key myth by the mid seventies - but if we imagine a world where the Shah was a better leader, it's possible this myth would never have developed), and that Mossadegh lived afterwards (albeit under house arrest). Obviously, this is very different than my initial belief.

One can be against direct involvement in the domestic politics of a foreign country in principle and complain against the coup. But this does not mean that there was some magic moment where Iran was a legitimate democracy under the rule of law, and the CIA just ruined it.

Now maybe Iran would have developed that way anyway even under Mossadegh, but his actual actions - and the historical actions of similar democratically elected leaders - give us little reason to think that was the most likely outcome. All we know is that it would have been different than if the Shah was in charge.

But besides that, say Mossadegh becomes a dictator, would he have been as bad as the Shah? That's it.

By all accounts, Mossadegh was a gentle soul and was opposed to violence. It's one reason he did not challenge the coup more forcefully. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, Mossadegh might be someone like Julius Nyrere of Tanzania - a more or less peaceful benevolent dictator whose policies harmed his country, but ultimately gave up power. Of course, Nyrere's actions in relinquiching power are extremely rare. How many other dictators did so? Pinochet is the only one that comes to mind. Then again, after prolonged exposure to being in control, we don't know if it would have warped his sensibilities. My best guess is that he would not have created an oppressive appartus like SAVAK, and since he was old and would die in 1967, there would have been a change in government far earlier than in the Shah.

For the first, wouldn't that result, ironically enough, possibly in a Communist, or Socialist revolution? I don't think there were exactly traditional liberals running around during it, so something to keep in mind.

Don't know how the revolution would have turned out without Khomeini. Certainly a communist revolution was a fear of the US. However, the initial leaders of revolutionary Iran (Bakhtiar, Bazargan) were in general liberals who were merely upset over US support of the Shah, but not anti-American in general. If they had won out over Khomeini, some form of secular democratic government would have been established.

Without Khomeini and without the embassy hostage crisis, the US and Iran would likely have resumed some sort of good relations.
 
Snip


By all accounts, Mossadegh was a gentle soul and was opposed to violence. It's one reason he did not challenge the coup more forcefully. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, Mossadegh might be someone like Julius Nyrere of Tanzania - a more or less peaceful benevolent dictator whose policies harmed his country, but ultimately gave up power. Of course, Nyrere's actions in relinquiching power are extremely rare. How many other dictators did so? Pinochet is the only one that comes to mind. Then again, after prolonged exposure to being in control, we don't know if it would have warped his sensibilities. My best guess is that he would not have created an oppressive appartus like SAVAK, and since he was old and would die in 1967, there would have been a change in government far earlier than in the Shah.



Don't know how the revolution would have turned out without Khomeini. Certainly a communist revolution was a fear of the US. However, the initial leaders of revolutionary Iran (Bakhtiar, Bazargan) were in general liberals who were merely upset over US support of the Shah, but not anti-American in general. If they had won out over Khomeini, some form of secular democratic government would have been established.

Without Khomeini and without the embassy hostage crisis, the US and Iran would likely have resumed some sort of good relations.

First, okay, I'll see about doing some research, and thanks for the suggestions.

For the second, Pinochet is a really... odd example. He's hardly a gentle dictator, so why he decided to give up power to me, is because he didn't think he could hold onto it. I only bring this up because Pinochet is too brutal, among other things, to give it up for a gentleness reason.

Anyway, for Mossadegh, since he'd probably die soon anyway, relatively speaking, I seriously doubt his rule would've been as bad as the Shah's. Even if he got corrupted, he wouldn't live long enough to do much either way, unless he went rather out of his way.

For the last, would they really have been able to keep the populace behind them? After all, I don't think they were exactly thrilled with traditional capitalism, and additionally, wouldn't it have to deal with the taint of US association? That's the main thing here after all, the Shah is too associated with the United States. Maybe he wasn't as directly installed as many perceive, but what matters here is the perception.

Hence? I don't think Iran and the US are going to have warm relations regardless, although arguably it wouldn't get as bad as it did in OTL.
 
Anyway, for Mossadegh, since he'd probably die soon anyway, relatively speaking, I seriously doubt his rule would've been as bad as the Shah's. Even if he got corrupted, he wouldn't live long enough to do much either way, unless he went rather out of his way.

For the last, would they really have been able to keep the populace behind them? After all, I don't think they were exactly thrilled with traditional capitalism, and additionally, wouldn't it have to deal with the taint of US association? That's the main thing here after all, the Shah is too associated with the United States. Maybe he wasn't as directly installed as many perceive, but what matters here is the perception.

Hence? I don't think Iran and the US are going to have warm relations regardless, although arguably it wouldn't get as bad as it did in OTL.

The problem with Mossadegh is that he wasn't skilled enough to keep the reins of power. He had to resort to emergency powers in a dubious manner, and the communists and ulema were ready to betray him by leaving his coalition. The Communists will never be happy with him, and the USSR will always try to depose him somehow to create a client-state. The Ulema would have hated him as much as the Shah for the same liberal and modernist policies. SAVAK may not exist for the while, but what about the economic crisis from the oil embargo? Some mob is going to form to depose him, and political violence will surely escalate until somebody can get the British to back off. With all of these obstacles, it's hard to say how another 10 years or so of him as PM would be.

Capitalism can work in the Iran, so long as the government is attentive to the people. The Shah pissed off too many people with his extravagance (then again that could be said for many Middle Eastern monarchs, and is more of the image problem he had), and the White Revolution's economic program had hollow promises that essentially said that they were only a decade or so away from being comparable to the First World. I already addressed some of the specific policy blunders earlier.

Relations with Iran and the United States were bound to deteriorate at some point, mainly with how incredibly naive and idealistic that Iranians were towards America. Prior to Abadan, Iranians pretty much thought that America was their White Knight, who was all about fairness and would always back them from whenever the Soviets/Russians or British were trying to return to their Imperialist pursuits. It was only afterwards that the illusion was shattered, and a lot of people were really angry that the United States had strategic policies of its own, and that it was pretty ignorant of their country otherwise. Of course, none of this would probably boil over to Anti-Americanism being an ideological pillar of the government like the IR OTL.
 
For the second, Pinochet is a really... odd example. He's hardly a gentle dictator, so why he decided to give up power to me, is because he didn't think he could hold onto it.

I never said Pinochet was a gentle dictator. I said he willingly relinquished power - which is a fact. Don't confuse a statement I made about the personality of Mossadegh with anyone else.

Certainly Pinochet thought he was going to hold onto power (not that he couldn't hold onto it) when he held the plebiscite, but when results came in and voted him out, he actually left.

That's rare. Most dictators attempt to hold onto power until death and resist giving it up. Some are less prone to bloodshed than others, and give up early in the face of people power rather than go down fighting like Qaddafi or Assad, but they all resist it initially. Pinochet presented the people a chance to get rid of him when he wasn't facing popular opposition, and left when he lost. That is something very, very few people actually do.
 
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