Time's 1952 Man of the Year Mossadegh Article

This article is quite insightful and revealing of elite American attitudes to a man who tried to pursue what he believed to be in Iran's best interests. Interesting to keep in mind this is long before Ayatollah Khomeini and the specter of Islam was constructed in American minds.

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January 7, 1952

Once upon a time, in a mountainous land between Baghdad and the Sea of Caviar, there lived a nobleman. This nobleman, after a lifetime of carping at the way the kingdom was run, became Chief Minister of the realm. In a few months he had the whole world hanging on his words and deeds, his jokes, his tears, his tantrums. Behind his grotesque antics lay great issues of peace or war, progress or decline, which would affect many lands far beyond his mountains.

His methods of government were peculiar. For example, when he decided to shift his governors, he dropped into a bowl slips of paper with the names of provinces; each governor stepped forward and drew a new province. Like all ministers, the old nobleman was plagued with friends, men-of-influence, patriots and toadies who came to him with one proposal or another. His duty bade him say no to these schemes, but he was such a kindly fellow (in some respects) that he could not bear to speak the word. He would call in his two-year-old granddaughter and repeat the proposal to her, in front of the visitor. Since she was a well- brought-up little girl, to all these propositions she would unhesitatingly say no. “How can I go against her?” the old gentleman would ask. After a while, the granddaughter, bored with the routine, began to answer yes occasionally. This saddened the old man, for it ruined his favorite joke, and might even have made the administration of the country more inefficient than it was already.

In foreign affairs, the minister pursued a very active policy—so active that in the chancelleries of nations thousand of miles away, lamps burned late into the night as other governments tried to find a way of satisfying his demands without ruining themselves. Not that he ever threatened war. His weapon was the threat of his own political suicide, as a willful little boy might say, “If you don’t give me what I want I’ll hold my breath until I’m blue in the face. Then you’ll be sorry.”

In this way, the old nobleman became the most world-renowned man his ancient race had produced for centuries.

In this way, too, he increased the danger of a general war among nations, impoverished his country and brought it and some neighboring lands to the very brink of disaster.

Should We "Double Down" on Iran? | Stephen M. Walt

Should We "Double Down" on Iran? | Stephen M. Walt

Stephen Walt recently wrote a brilliant article on Iran for Foreign Policy (see above), outlining the failures of US policy towards Iran and "insulated beltway thinking" regarding those policies. His piece is wonderfully written and I agree with probably all of what he says regarding the shortcomings and illogical nature of people like Kenneth Pollack and Ray Takyeh.

Walt discusses the absolute absurdity of the "dual track approach" -- which had also been accurately criticized in essentially the same terms by Mehdi Mohammadi for Kayhan in an article I translated into English, here.

Long story short, aside from the fact that the advice Pollack and Takyeh give is just idiotic, hypocritical, and illogical, these men have an absolutely horrifying track record and have innocent blood on their hands. We should not be listening to people who have been proven wrong in the past and have admitted they were wrong... would you re-hire a doctor who almost killed you in surgery and admitted he didn't know what he was doing afterwards?