WI: Mosaddegh Remains in Power

Inspired by the game 'the cat and the coup'.

In 1951, Dr. Mohammad Mosaddegh became the first democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran. Due to his fierrce nationalism and opposition to foreign control within his country, he incurred the wrath of the United States and United Kingdoms. Following his nationalization of the Iranian oil industry, the CIA organized and carried out a coup at the request of MI6.

Consequently, the Shah was installed as ruler of Iran and governed as an absolute ruler until the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

What if, for whatever reason, there had been no 1953 coup and Mohammad Mosaddegh remained in office? How would this influence the development of the Middle East and the world? Most topics regarding Mosaddegh seem to die prematurely.
 
Writing that your thread is a dud eighty minutes before it is posted might be a bit hasty. I unfortunately don't know much about the subject, but I'm sure others do.
 
Inspired by the game 'the cat and the coup'.

In 1951, Dr. Mohammad Mosaddegh became the first democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran. Due to his fierrce nationalism and opposition to foreign control within his country, he incurred the wrath of the United States and United Kingdoms. Following his nationalization of the Iranian oil industry, the CIA organized and carried out a coup at the request of MI6.

Consequently, the Shah was installed as ruler of Iran and governed as an absolute ruler until the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

What if, for whatever reason, there had been no 1953 coup and Mohammad Mosaddegh remained in office? How would this influence the development of the Middle East and the world? Most topics regarding Mosaddegh seem to die prematurely.

Likely Iran would become an American-leaning but fiercely independent, secular developmentalist state, with the Tudeh party and Islamists causing trouble every so often, and swinging between being suppressed and integrated into the political system. Iran pre-Revolution was quite generally pro-American, the people saw America as an example of what they wanted to be (albeit with less capitalism)

Arguably, it was the USA's greatest geopolitical mistake of the Cold War to overthrow Mossadegh's government.
 
This is very hard to answer because Mossadegh was a very strange man, and it is easy to attribute many things to him that may not be true.

Mossadegh was democratically elected, but he failed to build democratic institutions. Instead, he had parliament surrender its power to him and he ruled by decree. Ruling by decree makes a mockery of democracy.

So does Mossadegh keep that power and continue to rule by decree? Or does he eventually give that power back to parliament? To be honest, no one knows.

Mossadegh was also keenly unpopular with the clerical establishment because of his secularism. They are going to be just as unhappy with him as they were with the Shah.

Furthermore, the man was incapable of making compromises. The crisis over the Anglo-Iranaian Company could have been resolved. Iran had won, and the British agreed to Iranian demands. But by that time, Mossadegh had nationalized the industry and wouldn't give it back. He continued the crisis far past the point it could have been. The US was originally very pro-Iranian in the dispute, but ever time a US diplomat met with Mossadegh they came back with a very negative report on the man.

I think a wiser man than Mossadegh would have realized that he had gained as much as he could and been willing to accept some kind of compromise that would have returned Anglo-Iranian back to the British in exchange for some kind of face saving measures he could take back to the Iranian people. Instead, he was the kind of impossible and irrational idealist that cannot accept anything less than 100% victory.

Such a person is bound to make many future mistakes for the same reason that politics must be tempered with pragmatism.

If there is no coup, then the oil industry embargo is still in place. Iranian economy will continue to suffer. So what happens first? Does Mossadegh finally break down and agree to a compromise? Does the oil industry come to terms and starts buying Iranian oil again? Does the Iranian economy collapse? Does Tudeh (Communists) try to seize power? Something else?

Probably the only definite good thing about Mossadegh is that he seems to have been a genuinely peaceful man who would not have used force. However, a similar disposition did not stop Julius Nyerere from destroying Tanzania through foolhardy policies.

There is not a direct line from the coup to the revolution. There are lots of PODs that do not lead to the revolution. Nor does Mossadegh's survival not mean that some kind of great turmoil won't happen. Iranian history from 1953-1979 has lots of twists and turns and lost opportunities.
 
Inspired by the game 'the cat and the coup'.

In 1951, Dr. Mohammad Mosaddegh became the first democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran. Due to his fierrce nationalism and opposition to foreign control within his country, he incurred the wrath of the United States and United Kingdoms. Following his nationalization of the Iranian oil industry, the CIA organized and carried out a coup at the request of MI6.

Consequently, the Shah was installed as ruler of Iran and governed as an absolute ruler until the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

What if, for whatever reason, there had been no 1953 coup and Mohammad Mosaddegh remained in office? How would this influence the development of the Middle East and the world? Most topics regarding Mosaddegh seem to die prematurely.

As I said to Emperor Norton regarding his "CP/Entente Cold War" question--you really have to specify just how this highly divergent result comes about.

There were deep reasons for the American intervention, for the Soviet Union's lack of effective countervailing offers and threats, for Mosaddegh to be in a weak position to either see the threat coming or divert it if he did see it. Just how some factor is changed has tremendous bearing on what happens next.

Is the USA, for some reason, reluctant to get involved? How could that happen, in the context of the early 1950s? A President with lofty notions of conducting policy in full and broad daylight, who concedes the justice of the Iranian position--that's the sort of President I wish we generally had and I try hard every four years to get one but I can't say I've had much luck at it! In 1952, with the Korean War going on, how can such a President be elected and if elected, permitted to go on with such "naive" policies in the face of the power Establishment?

Is the Soviet Union stronger and bolder? How? Anyway if it is deeper and broader butterflies are flapping their wings all over the world, and meanwhile Mosaddegh and Iran might be not one little bit better off!

Perhaps the plotted coup goes forward but stumbles and fails, becoming a "putsch" instead? That seems the likeliest way to me to get the divergent result--but what exactly prevents the Americans, the British, or some clique of oil companies hiring filibusters from trying again and again until they get it right?

What happens after that depends on the scenario that allows the result to be divergent. Intervention in Iran was not a casual or marginal decision, as demonstrated by the parallel coup executed at the same time against the democratically elected government of Guatemala. It was a policy, policy consistent with generations of US policy in Latin America and the way Britain ran its Empire; presumably had the US demurred the British would have gone ahead with a similar plot of their own unless the USA actively dissuaded them from it.

One way the coup might have come to grief I can imagine is that the American leftist-independent press might have exposed it, leading to a political shake-up and impeding such moves across the board. I can imagine it, the way I can imagine a noble US President who deals with all world interests with firm but generous and fair-minded high principle. In fact I can go farther and suspect, based on my own experience with the leftist alternate media being right on top of stories that should be major global scandals, as they happen, only to be ignored or distorted out of all recognition by the mainstream press and power structure, that OTL there were muckraking journalists printing stories in magazines like The Progressive that were spot-on in analyzing the nature of "plausibly deniable" interventions and even documenting week to week the maneuvers against both Guatemala and Iran--but mere cries in the wilderness as far as mainstream society went. Nor do our power brokers ever seem to get a sudden fit of conscience when, decades after the fact, the chickens come home to roost and belatedly realize those beatniks were trying to tell them something important. Nope, down the memory hole, with a lubricant of disdain for their annoying premature insight!

Again in the context of the ongoing Korean War, it's hard to imagine anything arousing public opinion to indignation at these schemes, and one supposes merely exposing their development would be good for some long jail sentences for espionage and giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

No, if the coup is going to be tried but fail it probably has to be defeated in Iran itself, by Iranians. And this is where I'd hand the speculation ball over to someone who actually knows in great detail what Iran was like in the early 1950s and can identify some combination of factors that could foil the one coup and deter or block other tries at it down the line.
 
Is the USA, for some reason, reluctant to get involved? How could that happen, in the context of the early 1950s? A President with lofty notions of conducting policy in full and broad daylight, who concedes the justice of the Iranian position--that's the sort of President I wish we generally had and I try hard every four years to get one but I can't say I've had much luck at it! In 1952, with the Korean War going on, how can such a President be elected and if elected, permitted to go on with such "naive" policies in the face of the power Establishment?

It's probably a PoD that's a lot bigger than being looked for, but if Mao hadn't won in China*, the full on Red Scare of the early 1950's would be either averted or significantly diluted. This ultimately butterflies out Operation Ajax.

*granted, I'm doing so with a 1934 PoD in mind, but I think however it happens...
 
It's probably a PoD that's a lot bigger than being looked for, but if Mao hadn't won in China*, the full on Red Scare of the early 1950's would be either averted or significantly diluted. This ultimately butterflies out Operation Ajax.

*granted, I'm doing so with a 1934 PoD in mind, but I think however it happens...

I don't follow this. During the Cold War, checking Communism in a global chess game was the excuse for this sort of behavior, on the relatively rare occasions anyone was called to account for it at all. It often made little or no sense but it took priority as a rationalization.

However the business of "...protected, all their rights respected, until someone we like can be elected!*" goes back way before 1945 and indeed before the Bolshevik Revolution; the US begun intervening in Latin America overtly in the early 20th century and via private filibusters, early in the 19th. Meanwhile these sorts of moves are part of how empires like Britain's achieved indirect rule.

If the Red Scare wave brought on by the "loss" of China didn't exist in the 1950s it would have to have been invented. Meanwhile the real issue in Ajax, and whatever cool codename they gave ousting Arbenz in Guatemala, and so on, was that these neocolonized third world nations were daring to assert control over their own resources, and inconveniencing rich and powerful Westerners who had invested money (and hitherto extracted a lot more than they had invested, but it's a matter of principle, not scorekeeping, you know!)

I'd be interested to know just how QuoProQuid, our OP here, envisions Ajax either not happening at all or failing.
-------
* from Tom Lerher's "Send the Marines!"
 
Top