334 DESTINY DISRUPTED
Allies, the wonderful Allies, had removed him during the war for flirting
with the Nazis. The stage was set for Iranians to restore their 1906 consti-
tution, resurrect their parliament, and hold real elections: at last they could
build the secular democracy they had dreamed about for so long.
With high hopes, then, Iranians went to the polls and voted a secular
modernist named Mohammad Mosaddeq into power as their prime min-
ister. Mosaddeq had pledged to recover total control of the country's most
precious resource, its oil, and accordingly upon taking office he canceled
the lease with British Petroleum and announced that he was nationalizing
the Iranian oil industry.
Nice try.
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency immediately moved to stop "this
madman Mosaddeq" {as U.S. secretary of state John Foster Dulles called
him). In late August of 1953, a faction of the Iranian military carried out
a bloody CIA-funded coup that left thousands dead in the streets and put
Iran's most popular political figure under house arrest from which he never
emerged. In his place, the CIA restored the son of Reza Shah Pahlavi {also
called Reza Shah Pahlavi) as the country's king. The young shah signed a
treaty with the United States giving an international consortium of oil cor-
porations the job of "managing" Iran's oil.
It would be hard to overstate the feeling of betrayal this coup embed-
ded in Iran or the shudder of anger it sent through the Muslim world. Just
three years later, Eisenhower's intervention secured the Suez Canal for
Egypt, but the United States reaped no public relations benefit out of it
among Muslims: Nasser got all the credit. Why? Because the damage done
by the CIA coup in Iran was too deep. Across the Islamic heartland and in-
deed throughout the once-colonized world, the conviction took hold that
the imperialist project was still alive, but with the United States at the
helm now, in place of Great Britain. From the perspective of the Islamic
narrative, the history unfolding in Iran still revolved around the struggle
berween secular and religious impulses. How best to revive Islam, how to
recover Muslim strength, how to cast off the weight of the West-these
were the issues that drove events. But Iran was also part of the world nar-
rative now, and that narrative revolved around the superpower competi-
tion for control of the planet. From that perspective, what shaped events
were Cold War strategic considerations and the politics of oil. The same