History Weekend: Ending Sixty Years of Bad Karma With Iran

Every once in a while, a pacifist blogger gets to yell “stop the presses”.

There was a Philosophy Weekend blog post all ready to go up this morning — till I heard that the United States of America, Britain, China, Russia, Germany, France and Iran have suddenly reached a preliminary peace agreement that will turn back Iran’s path towards nuclear escalation. This is very good news.

The CNN article above is headlined “3-decade gridlock broken: The nuclear deal with Iran in Geneva”. Actually, this peace treaty ends not three but six decades of bad karma between the USA and Iran. It was sixty years ago, in August 1953, that agents of the USA’s newly powerful Central Intelligence Agency led by Kermit Roosevelt successfully schemed to overthrow Iran’s democratically elected leader Mohammad Mossaddegh and replace him with a royalist tyrant, Shah Reza Pahlavi, who promised to allow American and European powers (primarily Great Britain) to continue to control Iran’s oil exports.

Mossaddegh was a moderate and noble popular leader who seemed to be steering his country towards greater freedom and self-reliance. Most significantly, he had been fairly elected by the Iranian people. The CIA-led overthrow was probably the most blatantly shameful and immoral act of foreign intervention in my country’s recent history, and of course it led to an intensely hostile relationship between the USA and Iran.

The history of the USA’s bad relationship with Iran is undisputed and widely known in Iran, but few Americans know about the roots of our conflict with Iran. Today’s news of a peace agreement may be met with confusion and disinformation by shallow journalists and commentators who don’t know much about history, and I suggest that anyone who wants to understand the big picture behind this peace agreement read an excellent book by Stephen Kinzer called All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror. The history of this 1953 overthrow reads like a conspiracy theorist’s bad fantasy, but it’s all undisputed fact, and the only reason the story isn’t widely known in my country is that the truth still makes us uncomfortable.


With this morning’s news of a historic peace agreement, it appears that a pattern of increasing mutual hatred and diplomatic isolation rooted in sixty years of bad karma has finally been broken. I’ve been blogging about the hopeful outlook for pacifism in my Philosophy Weekend posts for years. When an outbreak of good news like this suddenly hits, it feels like philosophy is merging with history, in the sense that we are seeing wisdom in action. With blatant optimism, I’m changing Philosophy Weekend to History Weekend for the day.

4 Responses

  1. I note that the Israelis are
    I note that the Israelis are not happy with this preliminary agreement…..

  2. Michael, I would say more
    Michael, I would say more specifically that Israel’s tough-talking leader Benjamin Netanyahu is not happy with the agreement. I hope and trust that many Israelis are able to see that this is a good thing for everybody in the Middle East, and everybody in the world.

  3. “the roots of middle east
    “the roots of middle east terror” ….

    wow, really? you mean we can trace actual root causes? based on actual historical events? generally in our so-called “public discourse,” if you have even hinted at such a concept, you have been exiled as some sort of political leper, especially circa 2001-04. finally some alternate perspectives.

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