Shah Mohammad Reza's Decision To Nationalize The Iranian Oil Industry

The complexity of America’s relationship with Iran increased steadily beginning in 1908, when Iran struck oil. The Shah, the king or emperor of Iran, after taking the place of his young predecessor Reza Shah Pahlavi with the help of the CIA, led Iran into a period of extreme wealth and prosperity, the likes of which the Iranian people had never experienced. However, with the growth of wealth in Iran came the growth of Iranian resentment towards the West, specifically the United States. The Iranian’s resented the uneven distribution of wealth that they felt existed and the United State’s influence in “westernizing” their society. In 1963, this growing hatred led to a conflict with the Islamic clergy. The conflict was quickly settled by the Shah, but he was unaware that this dispute was the beginning

In 1908, oil was discovered in massive quantities in Iran. Ever since, Iran has attracted a great deal of attention from other countries. In 1953, the United States felt that Iran was moving ever closer to Russia. To keep Iran out of Russian hands, the CIA overthrew Iran’s prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, and placed the Shah, Reza Shah Pahlavi, in place as dictator. However, the Shah was greatly disliked by innumerable Iranians because they felt he went against Islam and he let his secret police, the SAVAK, brutally control the people. In 1963, they openly rebelled. The revolutionaries were subdued forcefully and the leader of the rebellion, Ruhollah Khomeini, was exiled and sent to Iraq. This was the start of Iran’s Islamic Revolution. The people began to rebel more and more often until, on January 16, 1979, the Shah raced away to Egypt. On January 30, 1979, thousands of Iranians cheered for Ruhollah Khomeini as he came back to Iran after fourteen years as an exile. Then there was a major question: should the United States, the Shah’s former ally, allow him to enter the country? According to Vice President Walter Mondale, Jimmy Carter “went around the room, and most of us said, ‘Let him

On President Jimmy Carter’s third year as president, the shah of Iran was in deep trouble. Iran had brutal and unpopular policies that many people did not agree with. Revolution broke out in the January of 1979, because many Iranians didn't agree with the shah's ruling. The shah had no support due to his “secret police” that would

World leaders in Great Brittan didn’t want Mossadegh to have any sort of power because he had long desired to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Mossadegh and British diplomats argued over the rights of Iranian oil for years. Mossadegh argued that the oil was a natural resource, the most abundant in Iran, therefore it was rightfully property of the people of Iran. He also saw the deal as an opportunity to create wealth and prosperity in his country. The British argued that Iran had contractually agreed to allow them to run the company decades prior and the contract had yet to cease. Additionally, Britain had been getting the oil dirt cheap and was selling it at 30 times the price they paid. According to Mossadegh, the British were exploiting Iran for their oil and land. The British claimed they were only trying to help Iran, yet they refused to help Iranians learn to run the factory and ensured that no British citizen would help them.

The American government is known to promote democratic values throughout the world. Though the ideals America was fighting for during the Cold War, the government still managed to participate in the overthrow of democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammed Mossadegh. Mossadegh threatened to nationalize Iran’s oil in 1951 and later gained the support of the Iranian government. The British companies had many investments in Iranian oil. It is with the approval of nationalization that the economies of both British and Iran were ultimately harmed. The British government requested the help of the US so that they could perform a coup to overthrow Mossadegh. With suspicions of Mossadegh supporting communism, and being supported by the Tudeh Party, the United States government was willing to sacrifice their democratic ideologies and credibility in the region for the insurance of an anti-communist leader. This would prove to cause problems that still resonate in today’s political and military negotiations in this region.

Back in 1950, when Mossadegh was Prime Minister of Iran, he nationalized Iran 's oil industry, reducing the European influence throughout the nation over the oil commodity. This sparked great fear throughout the United States; they feared the communists would turn the Iran democracy against them. After three years in exile, in 1953 Shah Mohammed

The civilizations, as identified by Huntington are Sinic [Chinese or Confusious], Japanese, Hindu, Islamic, Orthodox [Russian], Western [Europe, North American, Australia, New Zealand], Latin American and possibly African. And it is among these groups that share a “common interest and common values” and have a “common culture or civilization” that will lead to more interdependence on members of the same civilization and less dependent on the West. Huntington’s theory is that the West has had [at one time or another] a negative impact on every other civilization, and this has led to a decline of power and influence around the world, especially the Islam civilization. Therefore he predicts, “the fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.”

In response, the rest of the world started a boycott of Iranian oil, and the British began planning a military operation to wrest control from Mossadegh. They worked with President Dwight Eisenhower and the American CIA to organize a coup of sorts, by funding and inciting pro-shah supporters to take to the streets and demand the removal of Mossadegh, who was an erratic and unpredictable ruler. The operation was successful and threw Mossadegh out of power, but not without many unintended consequences (Farber, 56). Within Iran, Islamic fundamentalists following Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini were greatly angered by the American influence and disruption, and the seeds of revolution were planted.

I learned that the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammed Mosaddegh and the Iranian parliament nationalized the oil industry including the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, a British corporation. The British were furious with Mosaddegh’s actions and instigated a worldwide boycott of Iranian oil. However, Britain’s efforts made little difference and they turned to the USA for help in a plan to overthrow the Iranian government and replace it with the Shah. The USA initially refused to be involved but the British officials managed to convince Eisenhower that Iran posed a communist threat. The CIA convinced Reza Shah to participate in the coup and bribed newspaper editors and civilians to make it appear as though the Shah had popular support.

“…had a poor grasp of economic realities; he vastly overestimated the importance of Iranian oil production to the world at a time when the market was actually glutted. As a result, he did not realize how easily Britain could block its sale…He also did not take into account that nationalization would deprive Iran of its legitimate claim to investments made by the AIOC…” (The History of Iran—Elton L. Daniel, page 155).

If they would just leave us alone, this wouldn 't have happened. It all started in 1908. Oil reserves were found in the Persian Gulf. We had oil, but not enough money to extract and refine the oil. The big bucks British did though. They were given a lot of profit from this and had freedom to extract all the Iranian oil that they pleased. This maddened the people of Iran. They watched their Shah and these British business men become filthy rich while the rest of the country was dirt poor. Our hopes were raised when our Iranian Prime Minister Mosaddegh took over the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. We all loved Mosaddegh’s ideas. He was going to build schools, give poor farmers more land, give unemployment insurance to workers, and, the greatest

Moises Naim doesn’t agree with Huntington’s theory of the clash of civilizations. As the graph shows that the number of deaths in Iraq, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Syria and Pakistan are higher than the rest of the globe and account for the most and they are committed by their own people not between, but within; Militant jihadists have killed more fellow Muslims than any other population of civilizations; centuries old conflicts between Shiites and Sunnis in Islam; more deaths due to terrorist attacks in America since 9/11 from white supremacists and other non-muslim extremists.

After the vote to nationalize Iran’s oil industry. Britain initiated a worldwide boycott of Iranian oil to pressure Iran economically. In the beginning, Britain mobilized its military to seize control of the

Samuel Huntington sees an emerging world organized on the basis of "civilizations". Societies that share cultural affinities cooperate with each other and the efforts to force a society into another civilization will fail; countries gather around the leading States of their civilization. This description of the process of new structures of international relations that Huntington sees developing, leads him to consider that the greatest risks of violence and confrontation lie in the Westerns’ claims to universality, which are leading them to increasingly get into conflict with other civilizations, particularly Islam and China; local conflicts, especially between Muslims and non-Muslims, generate new alliances and lead to an escalation of violence, which will usually lead the dominant states to make an attempt to stop them.

In The Clash of civilizations Huntington argued that the future conflict would be different in the Post-Cold war era. In which different ideologies would not be the main reason for world problem but instead it would be because of the differences between cultures. The division of power would be placed in the civilizations that have the similar cultural norms. Huntington states that the “most dangerous enmities occur across fault lines between major civilizations” (20). This argued that foreign affairs cannot be peaceful or accommodating rather that these affairs go onto the basis of the influence of power based on different civilizations societal norms. The major societies that Huntington included were the western, Sinic, Islamic and Orthodox civilizations. The “ fault lines” between these societies