The New York Times

Secrecy and Spectacle in the Overthrow of Mossadegh

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Chris Emery LargeA guest post from Christian Emery, Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Plymouth. Chris completed his PhD at the University of Birmingham and has held teaching positions at the University of Warwick and the University of Nottingham. Between 2010 and 2013 he was a Fellow in the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics. His research covers several areas but is primarily situated at the intersection of International Relations, Diplomatic History, and Foreign Policy Analysis. He is interested in all aspects of post-war US foreign policy, with specific expertise in US policy in Iran. His latest book is US Foreign Policy and the Iranian Revolution (Palgrave Macmillan, coming this October) and he is also the author of pieces in Cold War History, The Iran-Iraq War (Routledge, 2013) and commentary in The Guardian. His next journal article will appear in Diplomacy and Statecraft.

This week an organisation dedicated to expanding public access to US government information, and publishing its former secrets, released documents proving the CIA’s involvement in an illegal covert action. Sound familiar? In this case, however, the authors had no fear of landing themselves in solitary, a foreign embassy, or (worse still) a Russian airport. The organisation lifting the lid was the National Security Archive (I will not indulge in the ironic use of acronyms) which, despite the official sounding name, receives no government funding. The NSA (ok, just once) fights for greater transparency and accountability in US foreign policy within a legal framework. Its primary weapon in fighting for open government is the Freedom of Information Act, and its bluntness may be part of the reason why others have taken more drastic action. I will return to the prescient topic of government secrecy later on, but first a few words on the content of these documents.

The documents are significant for a number of reasons, but the headline news is this: ‘CIA Admits It Was Behind Iran’s Coup.’ The most significant line taken from these documents is from a CIA internal history from the mid-1970s: “the military coup that overthrew Mossadeq and his National Front cabinet was carried out under CIA direction as an act of US foreign policy, conceived and approved of at the highest levels of government.”

A legitimate response is:

Nicholas Cage You Don't Say

Quick historical recap. In August 1953 the CIA (working with MI6) orchestrated the overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected leader Mohammad Mossadegh and installed Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi in his place. The specific motivation for the coup (codenamed TPAJAX) was that Mossadegh was attempting to nationalise Iranian oil. The more pressing fear was that his government was unstable and Cold War thinking dictated that this made Iran vulnerable to Soviet influence. This anxiety was heightened by Iran’s huge oil resources, geographic proximity to the Soviet Union, and the existence of a large and well established Iranian communist party (the Tudeh). The plot to topple Mossadegh initially failed, spooking the Shah into premature exile, but a few days later US and UK agents managed through a variety of nefarious tactics to put a decisive number of pro-Shah supporters onto the streets. Mossadegh’s supporters were rounded up and the great man himself was sentenced to death (the sentence was never carried out – he died in Tehran in 1967). After the coup, Iran’s concession to Western oil companies was renegotiated and for the first time American petroleum companies were granted access to draw Iranian oil.

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‘Immediate Commodifiability’; Or, A Virtual Teach-In on Austerity in Education

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As a public service, some of the best of recent (and older) diagnosis and critique, largely an extension of work already done over at Infinite ThØught:

It is fascinating, and very revealing, to see how Browne’s unreal confidence in the rationality of subjective consumer choice is matched by his lack of belief in reasoned argument and judgment. The sentence that immediately follows the vacuous one about students’ ‘wants’ reads: ‘We have looked carefully at the scope to distribute funding by some objective metric of quality; but there is no robust way to do this and we doubt whether the choices of a central funding body should be put before those of students.’ It is, first of all, striking that the only alternative envisaged to the random play of subjective consumer choice is an ‘objective metric of quality’, i.e. some purely quantitative indicator. And second, it is no less striking that instead of allowing that an informed judgment might be based on reasons, arguments and evidence, there are simply the ‘choices’ made by two groups, treated as though they are just two equivalent expressions of subjective preference. We can have the money for a national system of higher education distributed either in accordance with the tastes of 18-year-olds or in accordance with the tastes of a group of older people in London: there’s no other way to do it.

Stefan Collini, Browne’s Gamble

György Lukács used to say that the objective unity of the capitalist order was never so apparent as in a phase of crisis. Then, the relative autonomy of expansionary times, which were so often asserted as the reality of social relations, would be abruptly suspended. The power of discretion would flow back to the centre, to the strategic politics of the state and to those prepared to launch a fundamental challenge to it.

What is objectionable is the ascendency of quantification, the emergence of quantifiability as a qualifying condition of relevance and admissibility. A species of transcendental reductionism. We need look no further than the familiar, degraded world of academic research. Scientific and scholarly projects, we all know, do well in these times to internalise the definitions, the priorities and the timescales of the REF as a main condition of finding institutional support. Reputation – the regard of one’s peers and serious audiences – is a frothy measure of achievement if it cannot be captured in scores and tables…League tables generally do not only reduce particular and distinct activity to a single numerical scale. As numerical procedures, they offer perverse compensation by generating distinctions where none can credibly be thought to exist in reality. 10 or 15 institutions differ within the space of 1%. But the visual code of the table – equal spacing in the plane of the vertical – renders such trivia grave and lapidary, carves them in stone…These processes of quantification and financialisation are effecting a progressive abstraction of university functions, in which exchange value is the homogeneous substance of working life. Now the labour of perfecting and defending these processes calls for an equally abstract organisational stratum of leader-managers, in a classic process of bureaucratisation.

Francis Mulhern, Humanities and University Corporatism

Wendy Brown, Why Privatisation Is About More Than Who Pays

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