August 1953 Mohammed Mosaddegh, arrested after CIA/M16 coup
The Story The West Does Not Want You To Know
By Lim Tean*
I will be honest about why I wrote this article.
Across my social media platforms, I encounter daily a particular brand of ignorance that I find increasingly impossible to ignore. Iran is dismissed as a crazy country ruled by medieval mullahs, its people caricatured as fanatics who chant “Death to America” for no coherent reason. And from that caricature flows a conclusion that should horrify any person of conscience — that it is therefore perfectly justifiable for America, Israel, or any other country to bomb Iran, kill its people, and destroy its infrastructure.
This is not analysis. It is the recycling of propaganda as a substitute for thought. And it has real consequences — because populations that are kept ignorant of history can be mobilised to support atrocities committed in their name.
Iran is not a cartoon. It is one of the world’s oldest and most sophisticated civilisations. And its anger at America is not irrational. It is the entirely rational response of a people to whom history has been profoundly, systematically unjust.
Let me show you why.
The Original Theft
To understand Iran today, you must begin not in 1979, but in 1908.
In that year, on the sun-baked plains of Khuzestan, workers drilling for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company struck black gold at Masjid-i-Suleiman — the first great oil discovery in the Middle East. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which would later become the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and ultimately British Petroleum — the BP that today trades on the London Stock Exchange as a pillar of corporate respectability — had found the resource that would not merely enrich its shareholders, but change the course of world history.
The discovery was not merely commercially significant. It was strategically transformative. Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, had made the fateful decision to convert the Royal Navy’s warships from coal to oil before the First World War — giving Britain’s fleet superior speed and range, but making it utterly dependent on a secure oil supply. Iranian oil did not merely enrich British shareholders. It powered the British Empire’s ability to wage and win the greatest war in human history. The Iranian people received almost nothing in return.
For decades, Britain extracted Iran’s oil under terms of stunning inequality. Iranian workers toiled in dangerous conditions for poverty wages. Iranian communities near the oilfields lived without electricity, running water, or basic sanitation — while British staff enjoyed swimming pools, clubs, and comfortable salaries. The Iranian government received a pittance in royalties, and was denied even the right to audit the company’s accounts. Iran’s greatest natural treasure was being systematically looted, and the Iranian people knew it.
A man arose who decided to say: enough.
Mosaddegh and the Crime of Democracy
Mohammed Mosaddegh was everything the West claims to want in a Middle Eastern leader. He was democratically elected. He was secular. He was a constitutional lawyer steeped in European liberal tradition, who had studied in Paris and Neuchâtel. He wore suits, not robes. He believed in parliamentary democracy, the separation of powers, and the rule of law.
In 1951, as Prime Minister, he did something unforgivable. He nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, returning Iran’s oil to its rightful owners — the Iranian people. The Iranian parliament voted for it unanimously. The Iranian street erupted in celebration. For the first time in their modern history, Iranians dared to believe that the wealth beneath their feet might actually benefit them.
Britain was apoplectic. The Americans were alarmed. And so, in August 1953, the CIA and MI6 launched Operation Ajax — one of the most consequential covert operations in modern history. They bribed Iranian generals, hired thugs to create street chaos, spread disinformation, and toppled the democratically elected government of a sovereign nation.
Mosaddegh was arrested, tried, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. He died in 1967, never having been broken, never having recanted — a man of extraordinary dignity whose only crime was wanting his country’s wealth to belong to his country’s people.
In his place, the West reinstalled Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi — and handed him SAVAK, one of the most feared secret police forces in the world, to keep his people in line.
This is the original sin. This is where the story truly begins.
The Shah’s Gilded Cage
The Shah that America restored and sustained was not a moderniser, whatever his propaganda claimed. He was a man of spectacular vanity and profound disconnect from his own people.
Consider this extraordinary fact: Mohammed Reza Shah held his coronation not once, but effectively twice. He had been on the throne since 1941, but waited until 1967 — twenty-six years — to hold his formal coronation, because he felt the circumstances had never been grand enough for a ceremony befitting his self-image. When he finally crowned himself, in a ceremony of breathtaking opulence, ordinary Iranians watched from a distance that was not merely physical.
But the coronation was merely a rehearsal for the true performance of imperial delusion — the celebrations at Persepolis in October 1971.
To mark the 2,500th anniversary of the Persian Empire, the Shah staged a spectacle that remains one of the most extraordinary acts of self-aggrandisement in modern political history. Heads of state and royalty from across the world were flown in. A tent city of fifty lavish pavilions was constructed in the desert near the ruins of Persepolis, the ancient Achaemenid capital.
The tents themselves — along with virtually everything else — were imported from France. Maxim’s of Paris catered the meals. Guests dined on quail eggs stuffed with caviar, crayfish mousse, and roast lamb, washed down with vintage Bordeaux. Iranian culture was largely absent from a celebration ostensibly honouring Iranian civilisation. The Iranian people were spectators at a party thrown in their name, to which they were not invited.
The estimated cost was anywhere between $100 million and $300 million — at a time when millions of Iranians lived in poverty, lacking clean water, adequate healthcare, or basic education.
The Iranian people drew their conclusions.
Khomeini’s Rational Revolution
When Ayatollah Khomeini offered the Iranian people his theory of velayat-e-faqih — the guardianship of the Islamic jurist — and proposed an Islamic Republic as the vessel for a new Iranian order, he was not offering them theology alone. He was offering them dignity. He was offering them the promise that Iran’s sovereignty, Iran’s resources, and Iran’s future would belong to Iranians — not to the Shah’s court, not to Western oil companies, not to American strategic planners in Washington.
The Iranian revolution of 1979 was a mass movement of extraordinary breadth. Secular nationalists, leftists, intellectuals, bazaar merchants, students, and the religious poor all marched together. They had different visions of what would come after — but they were united in what they were marching against. A corrupt, repressive monarchy sustained by American power and serving American interests, which had delivered neither freedom nor prosperity to its own people.
When the American Embassy was seized and diplomats taken hostage, the West erupted in outrage. But behind that act was a simple, searing Iranian fear — that America would do in 1979 what it had done in 1953. That Washington would organise another coup, reinstall the Shah, and extinguish the revolution. The hostage crisis was many things — chaotic, counterproductive, damaging to Iran’s own interests — but it was not irrational. It was the desperate act of a people who had already been betrayed once by American power and were determined not to be betrayed again.
When America Armed the Man Who Gassed Iranian Children
If the 1953 coup was the original sin, the Iran-Iraq war was the confirmation — the moment that removed any remaining doubt in Iranian minds about what American power truly meant for their people.
In September 1980, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Iran. It was an act of naked aggression against a revolutionary government that was still finding its footing, launched with the tacit encouragement of Washington, which viewed the chaos of revolutionary Iran as an opportunity to be exploited. The war that followed lasted eight years. It consumed perhaps one million lives. It was one of the bloodiest conflicts of the twentieth century’s second half — and it has been almost entirely erased from Western historical memory.
What has been even more comprehensively erased is America’s role in sustaining it.
As the war ground on and Iranian forces began pushing back Iraqi advances, Washington made a decision of breathtaking cynicism. It could not allow Iran to win.
And so America began providing Saddam Hussein with satellite intelligence on Iranian troop positions, military equipment, and — most damningly of all — with the precursor chemicals for the weapons that Saddam would use to commit one of the most documented war crimes of the modern era.
Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against Iranian forces on a massive scale — mustard gas, tabun, sarin. Thousands of Iranian soldiers died in agonising chemical attacks. And Washington knew. American officials knew that Iraq was using chemical weapons. The intelligence community reported it. And the Reagan administration made a deliberate policy decision to continue supporting Saddam regardless — because an Iranian victory was deemed strategically unacceptable.
The most haunting chapter came not on a battlefield but in a Kurdish village. In March 1988, Iraqi forces attacked Halabja with chemical weapons, killing thousands of Kurdish civilians — men, women, and children — in a single day. It was the largest chemical weapons attack against a civilian population in history. And even then, Washington’s response was muted, carefully calibrated to avoid jeopardising its strategic relationship with Baghdad.
Iranian mothers who lost sons to American-supplied chemical weapons are still alive today. Iranian veterans who survived those attacks carry the physical scars — destroyed lungs, ravaged skin, broken bodies — into old age. Iran has never forgotten. Iran will never forget.
And yet Western commentators express bewilderment at the “Death to America” chant.
Consider for a moment what that chant actually represents, stripped of its theatrical staging. It represents the voice of a mother whose son was gassed with chemicals whose precursors passed through American hands. It represents the voice of a nation that had its democracy stolen in 1953, its resources plundered for decades before that, its revolution encircled and sanctioned, and its sons killed in a war that America prolonged deliberately to prevent Iranian victory.
If any Western nation had suffered a fraction of what Iran has suffered at the hands of a foreign power, that chant would be taught in schools as an anthem of righteous resistance. It would be celebrated in films and memorialised in monuments. Instead, because it is directed at American power, it is presented as evidence of Iranian irrationality. The arrogance required to sustain that position is staggering.
47 Years of Punishment
Since 1979, the United States has imposed on Iran some of the most comprehensive and punishing sanctions ever inflicted on any nation in modern history. Sanctions on oil. Sanctions on banking. Sanctions on technology. Sanctions on medicine. Sanctions that have impoverished ordinary Iranians, denied patients access to life-saving drugs, and strangled an economy of 93 million people.
And surrounding Iran on all sides — in the Gulf, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in the Arabian Peninsula — America has built a vast archipelago of military bases, projecting power and telegraphing threat. Iran has been encircled, economically strangled, and subjected to covert warfare including the assassination of its nuclear scientists on its own streets.
Throughout all of this, Iran has survived. It has adapted. It has built regional influence through patient statecraft, cultivating allies across Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. It has advanced its nuclear programme not out of theological ambition but out of the entirely rational calculation that the only nations America does not attack are those that possess nuclear deterrence.
Justice Delayed
When analysts speak of America’s strategic defeat in its confrontation with Iran, they reach for the language of geopolitics and military balance. But there is another language that must be spoken — the language of history.
For 47 years, a people of ancient civilisation, extraordinary intellectual depth, and justified grievance have been punished for the crime of reclaiming their own sovereignty. They were punished for Mosaddegh’s ghost. They were punished for daring to say no to a superpower that had grown accustomed to treating the Middle East as its private strategic estate.
The “Death to America” chant that so offends Western sensibilities did not emerge from the Quran. It emerged from Operation Ajax. It emerged from SAVAK’s torture chambers. It emerged from Persepolis while children went hungry. It emerged from sanctions that killed patients who could not obtain medicine. It emerged from chemical weapons whose precursors passed through American hands. It emerged from a history that the West has studiously refused to confront — because confronting it would require acknowledging that the rage it provokes is not irrational.
It is the entirely rational response of a people to whom history has been profoundly, systematically unjust.
Understanding this does not require endorsing every act of the Islamic Republic. It requires only honesty — the willingness to read history as it actually happened, rather than as Western convenience has chosen to remember it.
Iran is not a cartoon. It is a civilisation. And civilisations have long memories.
Much of the historical foundation of this piece draws on two remarkable books that I commend to every serious reader: Michael Axworthy’s Revolutionary Iran — Axworthy served as Head of the Iran Section at the British Foreign Office before becoming one of the foremost academic authorities on modern Iran — and Scott Anderson’s Shah of Shahs. They changed how I understand this civilisation. They may change how you understand it too.
The picture below is of Mohammed Mosaddegh, August 1953- at the moment of his arrest in a coup plotted by MI6 and the CIA
*Lim Tean is the founder and Secretary General of the People’s Alliance for Reform (Singapore)
