The Limits of Misperception: ReexaminingIranian-U.S. Relations

Abstract

The Iranian oil crisis of 1951–1953, which culminated in the overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammed Musaddiq in a coup jointly organized by the CIA and British intelligence, is one of the talismanic moments of twentieth-century history. Along with such other events as the outbreak of World War I, Suez, the Cuban missile crisis, and the Kennedy assassination, it is a subject to which historians, and politicians, continue to return, as much to reexamine the impact of this moment on later events as to reveal new evidence or propound starkly new interpretations. This study by James Goode, professor of history at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, is by no means the first account of these events. The Musaddiq crisis library already contains general accounts of U.S.-Iranian relations from American perspectives, such as those by Richard Cottam, Iran and the United States, Barry Rubin, Paved with Good Intentions, Mark Gasiorowski, U.S. Foreign Policy and the Shah, and James Bill, The Eagle and the Lion, studies of modern Iran, such as those by Richard Cottam, Nationalism in Iran, and Ervand Abrahamian, Iran Between Two Revolutions, and biographies of Musaddiq by Farhad Diba and Homa Katouzian.1 It also features in histories of oil and of covert action, and in a mass of literature in Persian. Goode, however, makes his own contribution and argument: in addition to being an academic historian, he has the benefit of having lived in Iran as a Peace Corps worker and of using Persian sources; he wants to register both the calamity that, in his view, U.S. policy led to at the time, by removing an elected government and reinstalling the shah, and argue, as many Iranians do, that it was these events that set the scene for the later fall of the shah and the ensuing conflict between the United States and Iran.