Iran is big. At 636,000 square miles, it’s 20 times the size of Ireland. Its population is 90 million.
It has the world’s third largest proven oil reserves and the second largest natural gas reserves.
It has the potential to be an enormously wealthy and prosperous regional power, but first Britain, and then the United States, have prevented the country from reaching anything like its true potential.
What were the British doing there in the first place? Britain paid no attention to Persia, as it was then, until the middle of the 19th century. Then, as imperial Russia expanded its military conquests eastwards towards Siberia (and ultimately Alaska), adding more and more territories to its empire, Persia became a chess piece in what British diplomats called ‘The Great Game’.
The Great Game was rivalry between the British and Russian empires, with the British manoeuvring to prevent any southern Russian movement from its central Asian lands towards India, and the Russians trying to find access to a warm water port (since all its other ports froze over for months each year) and the Indian ocean.
Through Persia was obviously a convenient route for Russia so the British worked successfully with the Persians to keep Russia from exerting any influence.
Britain and Russia never fought over the issue and ultimately reached a deal in 1907 as tension with Germany led to the Triple Alliance of Britain, France and Russia.
By then, however, vast reserves of oil had been discovered which the British moved in to exploit through the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC), since they had the technical expertise and capital. As the Great War loomed, Britain took 53% of the company in 1914.
After the war there ensued a long, unsuccessful tussle to wrest control of the country’s oil from the British. As the Persian negotiator pointed out to the British, Persians believed “an industry had been developed on their own soil in which they had no real share”.
By the late 1920s the APOC had created the biggest industrial complex in the Middle East at the Abadan refinery on the Persian Gulf under British control and so it remained.
In 1935 a new modernising, westernising Shah, Reza Pahlavi, officially changed the country’s name to Iran, but his attempts to rid it of foreign economic control were doomed by World War II.
A combined Anglo-Soviet force invaded in August 1941 to secure the oil as Panzer divisions tore into the USSR. The British and Russian troops didn’t leave until 1946.
At last there was a chance to start with a clean slate and elect a democratic government, which Iranians did. Not so fast. The British were not about to give up their economic control.
In 1951 the Iranian government under Mohammed Mossadegh nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, by then BP, to the outrage of the British. The British (Churchill) then persuaded the American government at the height of the ‘Red Scare’ in 1952-3 that Mossadegh planned to open the door to Moscow.
Together MI6 and the CIA organised a coup – Operation Ajax – that overthrew Mossadegh’s government and replaced him with their own chosen Shah, something Iranians have neither forgiven nor forgotten.
As the British empire shrank and they withdrew from east of Suez, finally leaving the Persian Gulf in 1968, the Americans took over, siting the US fifth fleet in Bahrain.
The region seemed quiet and a satisfactorily anti-communist bloc from Egypt to Afghanistan until suddenly in 1979 their puppet in Iran was overthrown, not by a communist revolution but out of left-field by a religious revolution, installing Ayatollah Khomeini as leader of an Islamic Republic.
The 1979 revolution set the scene for the next 45 years: daggers drawn between Iran and the US/UK alliance.
The new government was, and remains, virulently anti-American and anti-British, believing correctly that Britain is America’s poodle and biggest aircraft carrier.
It is fiercely anti-Israeli, seeing Israel as America’s proxy foothold in the Middle East.
The US reciprocates Iran’s hostility, crushing the country economically, banning its oil exports and imposing financial sanctions.
Churchill is supposed to have said: “The Americans always do the right thing – after they’ve tried everything else.”
Unfortunately, “everything else” in Iran’s case seems to be a very long list.
Churchill is supposed to have said: ‘The Americans always do the right thing – after they’ve tried everything else’. Unfortunately ‘everything else’ seems to be a very long list