PETER HITCHENS: Our hostility to Iran has only helped keep the ghastly Mullahs in power
Why do we make such a bogeyman out of Iran? What is the British interest in keeping up hostility between us and that country?
What good has it done us and is it justified? The subject is always urgent, but after the killing of Saleh al-Arouri, a Hamas envoy to Iranian-backed Hizbollah in Beirut, it is more pressing than ever.
The killing, presumed to be the work of Israel, might have been designed to draw Iran into the smouldering war between Israel and Hamas.
Israel’s hostility towards Iran is undoubted and easily explained, though the long-term relation between the two countries has been complex.
Since 1979, the Iranian regime has been deeply anti-Israel, and Israel has returned the hatred.
Peter Hitchens alongside a portrait of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. He discovered personal friendliness from Iranians and general pro-Western feeling among many
But what about Britain? Some years ago I managed to get into Iran, and to spend some time travelling there, without official approval (having tried and failed to obtain a press visa). I expected a grim regime of surveillance and frowning mullahs, and strong anti-British feeling.
In fact, I found a great deal of personal friendliness from the Iranians I met, and general pro-Western feeling among many others.
And while there were horrible aspects to the regime, it was clear to me that in the big cities at least, these were resented by many educated people. Iran, despite the heavy hand of the Revolutionary Guard that enforces the will of the Ayatollahs, has plenty of dissenters.
Private conversation is amazingly free and well-informed, or was in the homes I visited.
I came to the view that it is quite capable of developing into a modern society, more free and plural than anywhere else in the Middle East. The most interesting comparison is between Iran and Turkey.
Turkey is, formally, a democracy, a member of Nato which dreams of EU membership, but whose people are increasingly keen on Islamising their society. Iran is a despotism, high on the West’s enemies list, whose people increasingly yearn for a more liberated and secular society.
This is a country whose elections can and do go against the wishes of the Supreme Ruler, despite elaborate efforts to rig them.
Perhaps I was seduced or fooled. Much of Iran (though not its dreary, brown and grey, traffic-infested capital, Tehran) is very beautiful.
The hardline Ayatollah Khomeini seized power in the Iranian revolution of 1979
Isfahan must be one of the loveliest cities on the planet. The attitude of many women to the official attempts to make them dress in shrouds are witty and spirited.
When I was there, the compulsory headscarves were pushed further and further back on women’s heads, often held in place by nothing more than a burst of hairspray. The officially sanctioned styles of dress were subverted by careful adjustment.
Many of the women in fashionable North Tehran stood and walked like their equivalents in Paris. There are periodic traditionalist purges, but there is a long-term weakening of the once-forbidding dress code.
The standards of hospitality to strangers are movingly high. When I fell ill in Shiraz, while touring the astonishing Persepolis ruins, my guide (who had never met me before) was so concerned that she drove me to her home so that I could rest and recover.
I was several times welcomed into the houses of highly-educated middle-class Iranians – some fiercely conservative in religion and morals, others more westernised – who relished the chance to discuss their country with a British person.
I was even able to sit, during Friday prayers, among the Tehran crowds, as a preacher urged his audience ‘Death to Britain!’ (‘Marg bar Angaleez!’).
My neighbours must have known that I was myself English, but showed no signs of putting the weary slogan into practice and allowed me to leave in peace.
There was more applause for the yells of ‘Death to America!’, which accompanied it.
Demonstrators carry pictures of Khomeini as they march through the streets of Tehran in 1979 in opposition to the Shah
Now, I have to mention here that the Iranian tyrants certainly still have the power and will to behave disgustingly.
My guide and companion on my visit was a bright young Iranian-American, Jason Rezaian, who – filled with affection for his ancestral country – had decided to try to help open it up to Westerners such as me.
Jason did a very good job of this. And that was the problem. Iran’s dark-minded rulers absolutely do not want better relations with the West.
They are sustained in power by spreading the idea that we are bent on wrecking their country. They do not want relations between us to improve.
They like our hostility. That, I think, is why Jason was later arrested on laughably false charges of spying, and eventually (thank God) was freed after John Kerry, then US Secretary of State, personally ransomed him out of Evin Prison in Tehran.
It is, by the way, perfectly reasonable of Iranians to be suspicious of us. Back in 1953, Britain and the United States collaborated in a shameful putsch against Iran’s legitimate leader Mohammed Mossadeq.
This is not just some rumour or conspiracy theory.
In August 2013, on the 60th anniversary of the coup, the CIA declassified documents that show beyond doubt that it and Britain’s MI6 collaborated to overthrow Mossadeq, and these are readily available on the internet through the National Security Archive of George Washington University in the American capital.
They make thrilling reading, being one of the few full accounts of the overthrow of a government by foreign agents ever published. In fact, the pressure for getting rid of Mossadeq came mainly from Britain, furious at losing income from Iranian oil.
A Lebanese woman holds the images of top Hamas official Saleh al-Arouri, who was killed in an alleged drone strike by Israel in Beirut on Tuesday. She also holds an image of Iranian military commander General Qassem Soleimani, who died in a US attack in Beirut four years ago
Mossadeq had nationalised the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, ancestor of today’s BP, robbing the London Treasury of key income at a bad time.
But London was too weak to act alone, and recruited newly-elected US President Dwight D. Eisenhower to the plot. We persuaded him that Mossadeq (in fact an anti-Communist) would align Iran with the Communist world. Britain’s MI6 head of station was C.M ‘Monty’ Woodhouse, who would later become Tory MP for Oxford (he represented me for a while).
His key ally in the overthrow of Mossadeq was the CIA’s brilliant operative Kermit Roosevelt (no Muppet, he), grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt and already a skilled Middle Eastern manipulator, with much experience gained in Egypt. Mobs were paid and generals bribed, and Mossadeq was swiftly brought down after tanks bombarded his house.
As the Daily Mail of August 21, 1953 then reported on its front page, Mossadeq was arrested in his pyjamas.
The Shah would become the ruler of Persia, until his own overthrow in 1979 in a revolution that eventually placed the grim Ayatollah Khomeini in power.
Many democratic-minded Iranians say this sequence of events was entirely caused by the CIA and MI6 interference in their country’s politics. They have always seemed to me to have a point. Yet most British people have no idea we even did this.
The West’s record in the Middle East in the last 60 years has been extraordinarily bad. From Britain’s bungled Suez adventure, via the fall of the Shah to the brutal and bloody Iran-Iraq war (in which Saddam Hussein was encouraged by the West), to the Bush-Blair invasion of Iraq in 2003, it has been a saga of folly and failure.
Far too often this country has behaved as if it was still a mighty imperial power. All its hostility to Iran has, in my belief, helped to cement the ghastly Mullahs in power.
As danger threatens yet again, might it be time to re-examine our view?
