Iran History Revisited: Part 15

(See parts 1-14 below)

In January 2007, the editor-in-chief of the Kuwaiti-based Arab Times, Ahmed Al-Jarallah, reported that “A reliable source said President Bush… held a meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Robert Gates…and other assistants in the White House where they discussed the plan to attack Iran in minute detail.” Yet in 2009 President Bush’s Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, is still the U.S. Secretary of Defense.

And as Eric Margolis observed in the February 16, 2009 issue of the Khaleeq Times:

“The CIA… funds at least one extremist Pakistani Sunni group that launches raids into Iran, attacking government posts, soldiers and civilians. Further covert American aid goes to armed separatist groups among Iran’s Arab and Azeri minorities…The US Congress has repeatedly voted hundreds of millions for such covert operations.

“The US has also waged a…financial and economic war against…Iran…

“Israeli elections produced a sharp move to the right, increasing chances Israel may make good on threats to attack Iran…”

Yet most U.S. high school social studies departments, ironically, still don’t require their students to study much 20th-century Iranian history.

U.S.-based transnational oil corporations profited enormously from the CIA’s illegal 1953 covert activity in Iran. As University of Alberta Professor of Economics Ed Shaffer noted in his 1983 book The United States and the Control of World Oil:

“The overthrow of Mossadegh, which was engineered by the CIA, paved the way for the displacement of Britain by the United States as the major power in Iran. The displacement took place first in oil…

“After the coup the US sent Herbert Hoover, Jr., a director of Union Oil, to negotiate a new oil pact…Oil exploration and production in southern Iran and the operation of the Abadan refinery, then the world’s largest, were to be carried out by a consortium of companies known as Iranian Oil Participants Ltd….”

Mobil, Exxon, Chevron, Texaco and Gulf Oil were each given the right to receive a 5% share of the Iranian Oil Participants Ltd.’s profits from its Iranian oil industry operations and twelve smaller U.S. oil corporations were each given the right to receive a 1% share of the consortium’s profits. Just forty percent of the Iranian Oil Participants Ltd.’s profits went to the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, now renamed British Petroleum/BP, which had previously not had to split the profits from its Iranian operations with the U.S.-based transnational oil corporations. According to The United States and the Control of World Oil:

“The establishment of the consortium was the most important factor in making the U.S. the dominant oil power in the Middle East. The entry into Iran unquestionably gave it effective control of most of the known reserves of the non-Communist world. Its basic objective, the control of world oil, had been realized.”

(end of part 15)