Posted by Wymark on 7/13/2009, 12:57 am, in reply to "How many people have even heard of Abeer Qassim al-Janabi?"
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Up until then, it's oil reserves had been owned by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which became British Petroleum. But the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh, decided to take Iran's oil industry into state ownership, so that the profits could be used to fund development in Iran, rather than them lining AIOC shareholders pockets or ending up in the British treasury.
In response to this, the U.S./U.K. organised a coup in the country, overthrew the democratically elected leader, and installed Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi as dictator and supreme leader. Declassified documents show that Foreign Office planners thought that Iranians were 'merely wogs' and that it was 'important to prevent the Persians from destroying their main source of income . . . by trying to run it themselves' (Mark Curtis, Web Of Deceit, p.305).
Basically justifying destroying Iranian democracy to secure U.S./U.K. oil interests by appealing to a kind of racist paternalism. As so they so often did around the globe.
And it's acts like these that have played an important role in preventing progressive, popular movements from flourishing in the developing world. They were always seen as a threat to U.S./U.K. economic interests, and so were crushed.
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