"The United Kingdom occupied southwestern Iran during both world wars to ensure the flow of Iranian oil to its war in Europe. The strategic access to vital oil reserves — oil reserves that didn’t belong to it — played a crucial role in the Allied victory during both world wars and the rise of the American order following World War II. By university, Baba Saeed joined the student movement that sought to end parasitic contracts that gave Iran only 10% of its oil income. A growing Iranian movement was determined to nationalize Iranian oil and bring the management of the industry and its profits into more Iranian hands.
Neither the British nor Americans appreciated natives wanting a bigger share of their own wealth. They swiftly moved to impose an economic blockade on the country, hoping that this would break Iranian will by toppling the Iranian government.
Baba Saeed, who has a framed picture of that prime minister, Mohamad Mossadeq, on his work desk, told me that the PM, who had been elected by an overwhelming majority of Iranians with the mandate to nationalize oil, only grew more popular. With economic and diplomatic pressure failing to stop him, MI6 and the CIA led a coup against Mossadeq, whom Western papers had called a clown, a demagogue, and Hitler. The coup regime put him under house arrest and executed members of his government. It reinstated the monarch, a jet-setting playboy who had fled Iran during the tumult to shop in Rome’s most opulent street, the Via Veneto.
Imperialists had violently removed a leader who manifested their resolve and crowned a puppet to rule over Iranians — to their utter humiliation. Estemar, or imperialism, I’d learn from my grandfather, destroyed a people’s self-determination by breaking their will. The Shah, forever paranoid of losing power, sought to establish himself as the policeman, the gendarme, of Western supremacy in the region and thus vie for their protection of his throne. He drew Iran closer to Israel as he brutally suppressed growing internal dissent through coordination with Israeli and American intelligence services.
But it was no longer just Baba Saeed’s generation rejecting the Shah. His daughter, my mother, was also turning to the revolution. For every generation, Palestine showed the full breadth of imperialist intent and showed the way to defy it."
