There has been a release of archived official US diplomatic communications a few years ago that paint a rather mixed picture where the embassy was convinced the uprising had failed and the next days there were surprising marches in support of the shah that succeeded in the end.
The point GP made was that Mossadegh was not democratically elected. There hadn't been representative democratic support for Mossadegh. Mossadegh was installed by the Shah and Majles, stopped an election that wasn't going his way, and then tried to dissolve parliament to concentrate power with himself.
"Iranian people voted in their beloved leader, who was then toppled by the mastermind West" is a cartoonish level of geopolitical understanding by those who have read the first couple paragraphs of wikipedia
To be fair, the entire chain of this thread is lacking any sources. Wikipedia at least contains sources, despite its relative inaccuracies and questionable authenticity of those sources. "in conflict with wikipedia" seems somewhat reasonable at this junction until someone rises above that bar.
This is sort of a bad and inaccurate summary of a much more complicated situation. Mossadegh was trying to dissolve parliament and was in conflict with the Shah before the British got involved. The Shah was already planning to try by constitutional means (which he had legal power to do) to remove Mossadegh. Would he have done it without British and US backing, is a debate for historians.
I don’t think any serious post WWII historians would agree with you. There was a concentrated effort by the UK and US to displace Mossadegh, who was democratically elected by the way. At the very least it disproves your unspoken assertion that the Iranians are primarily to blame for their problems when it’s been proven that the most powerful intelligence agencies on the planet were actively destabilizing their society so that oil revenue would continue flowing into western pockets.
Mossadegh was elected but was also illegally trying to dissolve parliament.
>at the very least it disproves your unspoken assertion that the Iranians are primarily to blame for their problems
I'm very clearly stating that the Shah in particular was highly likely to have removed Mossadegh either way due to a multi-decade power struggle between the Pahlavi dynasty and the parliament /prime minister. The Majlis as a rival power center was largely a result of the Anglo-Soviet invasion which deposed Reza Shah, prior to that the Majlis had functioned in more of an advisory capacity, and Mohammed Reza Pahlavi was always lookign for ways to push back against the Majlis.
It is also important to note that the constitution in place in the early 1950s gave the power to appoint and remove the prime minister to the shah, Mossadegh was recommended to the shah by the Majlis who appointed him prime minister. That is factually how the government worked. It is also important to note that in 1952 Mossadegh stopped the counting of an election that it looked like he was going to lose. In 1953 Mossadegh organized a referendum to dissolve the parliament and vest sole power in the prime minister. This gave the shah the excuse he needed to remove Mossadegh and triggered Anglo-American support for the Shah and Iranian army to remove Mossadegh.
The CIA certainly helped the Shah get generals on side and plan the coup, this is not in dispute. However the idea that Mossadegh was democratically elected is not really true, and the idea that the coup was entirely carried out for external reasons is entirely false.
Ray Takeyh a professor of Near East studies who wrote The Last Shah: America, Iran, and the Fall of the Pahlavi Dynasty (Yale University Press, 2021) holds the position that the coup was internally driven. We also know from declassified document that the CIA thought the coup had failed and that their part was rather insignificant, but Iranian on the ground under their own direction carried out the coup.[1]
I think it’s just a super complicated story. My post above doesn’t even touch the rural urban divide or the role of the Mullahs or Tudeh and the communists. The whole thing was a second from exploding for years.
Well the vote was a sham with no secret ballots and separate voting tents for yes and no votes. Armed members of Tudeh were at almost every poling station, there were wide spread reports of members of Mossadegh's party voting multiple times, and the vote count came out to 99.99% "yes'. On top of being illegal it was obviously fraudulent. It is at times called a coup by Mossadegh.
He was everything but democratically elected. He was installed. The Iranian people did not elect Mosaddegh. He was put there by a Shah and the elites of the Majlis, neither of which ever represented the people of Iran. At no point in the past century has Iran had representative government.
For the absurd 'democratically elected' premise to be true, there would have to be actual representative government. There wasn't, there isn't.
He was as democratically elected as the system at the time allowed and spent basically his entire political career on increasing the power of the majlis and getting rid of colonial interests.
The UK spent a lot of resources conspiring against this project, which ultimately failed, to a large extent because he did not have a solution to the blockade that followed nationalisation of the oil production. Perhaps he also did not expect as many members of the majlis to join the foreign conspiracy as did when the blockade got inconvenient.
It's also not like democratisation followed under the shah, rather the opposite, like the establishment of rather nasty security services and a nuclear program that the later revolutionaries inherited.
Right up until he was about to lose an election, then he suspended counting votes and tried to dissolve the Majlis in alliance with the communist party.
Not sure what you mean. In the -52 election he stopped the vote counting when enough of the majlis was filled that it could legally do work, and then tried to form a government which the shah blocked. This is what led to the proposal that the majlis give him six months of emergency powers.
Whatever happened due to the British, it’s still fact they Iran was doing pretty well before the current revolution. I don’t think anyone would argue the population at large are better off today than they were under the previous regime.
That's a matter of values. Some would argue that appeasement of and being subdued by colonial powers is a much to high price to pay for whatever material wealth you're referring to.
> Most Europeans seem to be fine being under the EU where they don’t get to vote those bureaucrats in.
The political power in the EU comes from the national governments (directly and via the European commission) and the EU parliament. The members of parliament are elected. The national governments are also formed out of elected parliaments. There's also a body of administration and bureaucracy that comes out of these power structures, just like there is, by necessity, in any government ever, democratic or not.
Insinuating that this somehow equates to authoritarian forms of government appears deeply ignorant or dishonest to me.
I didn’t say authoritarian rather there is a supra national body that dictates policy down to sovereign countries whether the countries agree or not. It has similarities to colonial powers. You have local laws and customs but the colonial power can overrule and supersede those.
This is a similarly bizarre claim, for the same reasons as before. You have not really thought about how representative democracy works, or you misunderstand or wilfully misrepresent it.
In the end, your argument can be used against the other levels of government. National governments of not directly elected officials and bureaucrats and remote parliaments dictating to whole regions, who lord it over cities and communities, who oppress individual people, who should not have to cede a bit of their sovereignty to anybody else to decide or act on their behalf.
Nothing is perfect, nor is the EU, but with your line of thinking, you effectively deligitimize every practical way of organizing government as "colonial".
Maybe that's what you want, maybe you misunderstand and don't care if you do. There are many reasons good and bad to dislike the EU. Yours just appears to be nonsensical.
US influence in Europe would be a much better comparison than indirection between positions and elections in the EU. As you surely know we've had a lot of interference in what parties are allowed and who can get elected and financing of organised crime coming from that direction.
Nationalizing resources simply gives the capitalist west a legitimate casus beli to “liberate” all the assets that were stolen.
Venezuela is about to be turned into another Vietnam. Iran is next. I remember invading them in a mission in BF3. The USA itches to implement what its media anticipated.
It’s commonly accepted that Mossadegh was thrown out by a coup and that Khomenei seized power through a revolution.
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