Iran

Flag of The Islamic Republic of Iran

Iran, officially The Islamic Republic of Iran (جمهوری اسلامی ايران) is a theocratic country in southwest Asia. Its capital is Tehran and its official language is Farsi.

History

Iran was formerly known as Persia, and was the historical center of a number of empires.

1941-48

During World War II Iran was openly partial to the Axis cause. A joint Anglo-Soviet military action began on 25 August 1941 when 40,000 Soviet troops entered Iran from the north and headed for Tehran. On the same day about 19,000 British Commonwealth troops, mostly in Indian brigades, entered from various directions. There was slight resistance on the part of Iranian troops but no force Iran could not have withstood the power of the occupying armies of British Empire and the Soviet Union, and German assistance by air was now as far away as Crete. On 30 August 1941 identical notes were submitted by the invading powers to the Iranian Government which accepted their terms on 9 September. On 16 September the Shah abdicated in favor of his son, Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, and left the country. The next day Tehran was jointly occupied by the British and Soviet troops without show of military force.

The terms imposed by Tri-Partite Treaty of alliance signed on 29 January 1942 disavowed any designs against the territorial integrity of Iran or independence. Iran agreed to refrain from any act contrary to British or Soviet interests.

Soviet political "agitprops," graduates from the Lenin Institute in Moscow, were dispatched to exploit whatever resentment and hostility toward the "imperialist warmongers" of the West they might encounter or stir up. The Tudeh party, founded early in 1942, at once began to lay the ground work for the Communist uprisings which followed World War II. The Tudeh party, guided by the Soviet officials who at the same time were supervising the movement of American lend-lease aid to the Soviet Union through Iran, began openly agitating against the Anglo-Saxon exploiters. By 1944 Iran's mushrooming, Soviet-financed Tudeh press openly called the British and Americans "fascists," "reactionaries," and "imperialist."

1949-79

In 1949 the Angelo-Persian Oil Company negotiated an agreement with the Iranian government under which it would pay the government 25 to 30 per cent of its net profits, The British government controlled 52 per cent of the stock of the company. Under pressure from the the Shia clergy and members of the Communist Tudeh party, the Iranian government led by Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh did not ratify the agreement and on May 2, 1951, nationalized ownership of the oil industry. In October Britain shut down Abadan, the world's largest refinery, on the Persian Gulf, and boycotted Iranian oil for the next two years. 30 per cent of Iran's national income previously came from oil exports. Iranian production fell from 424,000 barrels a day in 1947 to 59,000 in 1954, while Saudi Arabia rose from 246,000 barrels to 953,000, and Kuwait from 45,000 barrels to 953,000.

Rioters raise a poster of Mossadegh at the palace gates of the Shah in August, 1953.

In January 1953 the Iranian parliament extended Mossadegh's dictatorial powers. The following month, Mossadegh denounced the Shah for intrigues with "foreign interests". On February 28 the Shah announced he would abdicate "for reasons of health". Serious riots followed when the Shah's supporters clashed with Mossadegh's supporters in the streets. The Shah canceled his plan of abdication. Meanwhile, the United States ambassador presented proposals to end the impasse with the United Kingdom, one proposal was for a consortium of oil companies to replace Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and buy from Iran's nationalized industry. Mossadegh rejected the suggestion and continued to complain about the boycott.

On July 19 Mossadegh disolved the Majlis and called for a plebiscite on August 2. The Tudeh party, which was staging violent demonstrations in the streets, by the end of July openly supported Mossadegh while the Soviet Union offered desperately needed economic assistance. Mossadegh received 99.4 per cent of the vote and on August 8 Soviet Premier Georgy Malenkov told the Supreme Soviet that the Soviet Union had been conducting negotiations with Iran since June and concluded a series of agreements on border, aid, and trade issues. The Shah, who still held the position of Head of State, asked for the resignation of the government and appointed a successor.

When Mossadegh received word, he began mass arrests. Two days of chaos ensued. Rioters smashed statues of the Shah and his father and screamed, "Death to the Shah!" With assurances from the CIA, the Iranian Army turned against the officers Mossadegh installed, and drove rioters off the streets. On August 19, Mossadegh turned himself over to the Shah's forces and was jailed along with Tudeh leaders. In December he was sentenced to three years in solitary confinement. The Iranian economy and living standards of the people gradually recoverd as oil exports regained a market share which had been decimated during the previous two years. The Shah, who could not be seen as too close to the West because of Iran's domestic situation, nevertheless expressed his understating of the importance of Iran's position in the region, and the world, as a bulwark against Soviet expansionism.

The Shah recognized and secured formal diplomatic relations with Israel and did he participate in the Arab oil embargoes during the Six Day War of 1967 and Yom Kippur War of 1973. The US and British Mediterranean Fleets were provided with oil by the Shah. During the Yom Kippur War the Shah deterred Sadam Hussein from playing any role by moving Iranian troops to the border, and with covert aid to the Kurds of Iraq which kept the Iraqi Army diverted.

1979-1981

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini emerged as an active critic of the Shah's increasingly autocratic government. Khomeini was imprisoned and later exiled, but popular anti-government sentiment continued to spread.

During the Carter presidency, the State Department’s Bureau of Human Rights was headed by Patricia Derian, a liberal political activist who had worked in Mississippi during the American civil rights movement of the 1960s. Once appointed to State, Ms. Derian publicly deplored aspects of the Shah’s rule, particularly SAVAK, and issued low ratings for Iran’s and other pro-American government’s treatment of dissidents. Aligned with Derian in a general way was President Carter’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young, who on one occasion had referred to the Ayatollah Khomeini as a "saint." The American Ambassador to Iran, William Sullivan, a veteran diplomat of many years experience and an acute observer of the stresses in Iranian society, sought to steer a middle course through the official U.S. debates on Iran. Nevertheless, when instructed, Sullivan also would remind the Shah of the State Department’s concern (and presumably President Carter’s) about the regime’s treatment of its enemies.

With the exception of Ms. Derian and members of her staff, it is unlikely that other American officials were ready to dump the Shah immediately and cast U.S. policy in the Gulf to the revolutionaries. What is clear, however, is that when the voices of critics were added to the activities of the demonstrators in Tehran and Washington, all of it lavished with media coverage, new and destabilizing aspects to United States policy were set in motion.

By the fall of 1978, events in Iran were moving fast. The Iranian armed forces—whose officer corps had been carefully cultivated by the Shah and had sworn a personal oath of allegiance to him—witnessed the growing disorder and violence in Tehran. Knowing of the Carter administration’s discomfort at attempts to repress it, the generals nevertheless urged the Shah to crack down. The result, enacted on the 7th of September, was "martial law" without exactly being martial law. Opponents of the Shah quickly found they could challenge their sovereign’s authority and court the foreign media.

Khomeini returned from exile in France to Teheran on 31 January 1979. On 11 February the Shah fled, and mobs armed with machine guns attacked the U.S. embassy. Iran’s armed forces did not respond. On 3 November 1979, the American embassy was stormed again, and 66 U.S. personnel were taken prisoner. Thirteen were released in a few days, but the remainder stayed captive in Iran until 30 minutes after Jimmy Carter had turned the White House over to Ronald Reagan at noon on 21 January 1981.

1984-2001

In 1984 the Reagan administration as part of its policy of Containment, and in seeking to secure an ally for Israel, sought to repair the breach that occurred with a longtime ally in 1980. Oliver North of the National Security Council staff was dispatched to Tehran with a proposal to reconcile the United States and Israels differences with the Shia Islamic regime. The proposal entailed sales of Tow missiles to help Iran break the deadlock in the trench war with Iraq. The United States and its allies feared a militarized Iraq could pose a threat to the region, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, if Iraq emerged from the war as victor.

Iran needed the weapons after US arms sales were cutoff in the wake of the break in diplomatic relations. Iraq had invaded the majority Arab Khuzestan province in southwestern Iran in September 1980. The ensuing Iran-Iraq War lasted until 1988, when some naval operations by the United States against Iran impressed the impossibility of their position upon the Iranian leadership. Iran finally signed an armistice which ceded to Iraq the Shatt al-Arab waterway, the latter country's main war aim. Less than three years later, Iraq ceded it back to guarantee Iranian neutrality in the Gulf War against the United States.

After the war, Iran continued to support Hezbollah, the most powerful Shiite militia in Lebanon, which had waged war against the United States during the latter's intervention to end the 1982 Israeli invasion. With Iran's assistance, Hezbollah launched terrorist attacks even against such clearly inoffensive countries as Argentina, which seems to have been attacked because there were Jews there. The head of Iranian intelligence during the early 1990's, Ali Fallahian, was indicted along with various Hezbollah operatives and an international arrest warrant was issued for him in March 2007, which the Iranians immediately appealed. This and the Iranian role in the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing prevented any normalization of relations, even after Mohammed Khatami became President of Iran in 1997 and made this one of the principal goals of his administration.

Khatami was seen by some in the West as a possible Iranian version of Mikhail Gorbachev. The United Kingdom reestablished relations with Iran in 1999. His coalition was dominated by persons who clearly wished to make Iran a normal country. However, the limitations of the President in the Iranian system allowed Iranian conservatives to marginalize his supporters and close media outlets friendly to his policies. Although he won reelection in 2001 and cooperated with the United States to some extent against their mutual enemy the Taliban, his supporters were not able to take the next logical step that Boris Yeltsin and other anti-communist Russians did under Gorbachev, that is, unite to completely replace the existing political system. Because they had been able to outmaneuver him politically, Iranian conservatives also did not oblige with a corresponding coup d'etat against Khatami. Normal relations with the United States probably will require just this sort of replacement of the existing Iranian constitution, but the popularity of Khatami and congruent popular distaste for his successor indicates that may be possible without war.

2001-present

Iran is currently ruled by the Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the second theocrat of the country, who has been in office since the death of Khomenei in 1989. He is considered to have a less extreme anti-Western bias than his predecessor. It is governed on a day-to-day basis by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is suspected by several Western nations to be developing nuclear weapons to use against Israel and America. Domestically, however, he is facing questioning and possible impeachment by the Iranian Parliament, who see him as too extreme. The relationship between these two could be compared to that between the king and the prime minister in a constitutional monarchy, although students of Iranian politics hotly debate where the precise balance of power lies.

The Iranian constitution calls for a Presidential election once every four years (in practice, the year following Presidential elections in the United States). Candidates are selected by the Guardian Council, an unelected clerical body. Presidents are limited to two terms as in the United States. While since 1981 no Iranian President has been defeated for reelection, elections lacking an incumbent have been quite lively, as was the 2005 election, which Ahmadinejad only won at the runoff stage.

Tensions between Iran and the United States have increased since Iran was identified by President Bush in January 2002 as part of the Axis of Evil, and particularly since the 2005 election of Ahmadinejad. An attempt by the European Union to negotiate a surrender of or reduction in Iranian nuclear efforts failed, leading to the United Nations Security Council voting to impose limited sanctions. The United States has since lobbied for sanctions more along the lines of those imposed on 1990 upon Iraq, which remained in place until the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003. Talks in March 2007 between U. S., Iranian, and Syrian diplomats at a regional conference organized by Iraq proved unproductive, although the willingness of the parties to talk was itself regarded by some as a sign that war had become somewhat less likely.

In spite of the relative overstretch of the U. S. military, the utility of an attack on Iran, or at least its nuclear facilities, was a live debate among American opinion leaders throughout 2006. Objections to such an attack were mostly based upon the belief that this would represent the first step on a slippery slope to occupation of Iran, which would probably require conscription in the United States, a step conservatives and most military leaders oppose. The debate, however, appeared to have been won decisively by the hawks following the regime's suicidal decision in late March 2007 not to promptly release 15 British sailors and marines it had captured on March 23, 2007.

In 2007, NATO officials caught Iran "red-handed" shipping heavy arms, C4 explosives and advanced roadside bombs to the Taliban for use against NATO forces. The NATO officials stated that the incident was a "dramatic escalation of Iran's proxy war against the United States and United Kingdom".

A United States intelligence report in 2007 noted growing public unrest in Iran over the bleak economic situation.

Further reading

• Iran: Western Spy Networks Discovered, May 26, 2007.
• Iranian-American charged with spying, May 29, 2007.

See Also

Articles about Iran from previous "Breaking News"

External links

• Official website of the President of Iran
• The blog of the President of Iran
• Encyclopædia Iranica
• WikIran Encyclopedia