What's With Iran?

      Wander around social media in recent days and you'll probably trip over someone reminding that "we created the mess in Iran."  It's almost true, too -- but it's not the whole story.

     I guess I could remind you, "War is not healthy for children and other living things,"* like the brilliant Lorraine Schneider, gone too soon, but if you haven't noticed that by now, you haven't been paying attention.

     So how did that part of the world end up where it is at this moment in history?  Some of the blame lies with Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., grandson of no less a figure than Theodore, who masterminded the events that brought the Shah to the fore in 1953.

     But here's the catch: the Shah of Iran, the guy they threw out in 1979, was already the Shah by that time, and had been since 1941, when his father was forced to abdicate.  After WW II, he tried to modernize by convening the country's 1906-created elected legislature for the first time -- and stacking the deck by appointing senators who were aligned with his power.  Subsequent elections undermined this convenient arrangement, leading to the opposition party winning a majority and triggering the oil nationalization crisis that spurred Western intervention.

     And that Shah's father?  Here's where it gets even weirder, because Reza Khan (later Reza Shah) was not, in fact, the scion of some ancient Middle Eastern ruling family.  He was almost Just Some Guy, who ended up in the messy ending of WW I and the ongoing Russian Revolution and civil war that followed it as a soldier, an officer, fighting the Soviet Union, sometimes with the British.  And in 1921, the British helped in the coup that collapsed the Soviet-dominated Persian government under Amad Shah Qajar, who was at that time, yes, you guessed it, the Shah of Iran (no relation); and his was the long-established ruling line, or as close as it gets in that part of the world.  For the new government, Reza Khan was Minister of War.  In 1923, he stepped up to Prime Minister and by 1925, he'd convinced the rest of the government to depose the Shah.

     That left a vacancy at the top, and, ahem, one man was ready to...is "serve" the right word for an autocrat?  His peers voted him in.

     That's how Reza Khan became Reza Shah Pahlavi, and how his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, became next in line for the throne he'd later be kicked out of.

     We can't blame the CIA for all of it.  We can't blame the Brits for more than their share, or the USSR, or the various Iranian governments or even, I suppose, lay it entirely at the feet of Reza Khan.  But it was a world-class mess long before the the first Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini grabbed the top spot in 1979 -- and one of his political motivations was that he blamed Reza Shah for the murder of his father, when he was two years old.

     I have simplified some things, and skipped steps; the details of what happened and who was trying to accomplish what at which time are tangled at best; there are few unbiased histories or first-hand accounts. This is history so thick you can stack it up like mud bricks.  This is history plastered with warning signs.
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* I have distinct memories of a counterfeit postage stamp with this image on it somehow passing muster in the U. S. mail and making the news afterward in the late 1960s or early 70s, but I can't find any mention of it online.