The original sin: How Churchill’s oil and Khomeini’s vision fuelled decades of Middle East turmoil

The war in Iran did not begin with a missile strike or a declaration. It began in the sweltering August of 1953, in the offices of a CIA operative named Kermit Roosevelt Jr., grandson of a president, architect of a coup d’état. It began when American and British intelligence agencies decided that democracy was too dangerous — that a people’s right to their own oil, their own sovereignty, their own future, was an inconvenience to be extinguished. Mohammad Mosaddegh was everything the postwar West claimed to want: a secular, democratically elected leader, confirmed by parliament and Shah alike, who believed — naively, fatally — that the law might protect a nation’s right to its own resources. When he nationalized the […]