In 1941 England and The USSR combined to depose the Shah and put his son in power as it was feared that the Shah at the time was going to switch his allegiance to the Germans. The new Shah ruled for almost four decades, although he only faced his first real challenge in 1951.
Mohammed Mossadegh
In 1951, Dr.Mohammed Mossadegh was selected to be the Prime Minister of Iran by a 79-12 vote in the parliament. This was significant because Mossadegh stood in opposition to many of the positions of the Shah and was particularly in favor of removing foreign influence from Iran. Perhaps the most significant instance of this was in his successful efforts to push through a nationalization of the oil industry shortly after coming to power in 1951. This nationalization angered Great Britain since Iran was both its largest oil producer and exporter. In response to this Great Britain refused to let Iran export any oil from refineries that had been made by Britain and also did its best to keep Iran from being able to staff its refineries. This led to Iran’s economy going from a huge surplus to a huge deficit almost overnight , though Mossadeh himself remained personally popular because of his efforts to modernize Iranian society by eliminating the feudal aspects within Iran’s agricultural system. However, while this was occurring both the governments of Great Britain and the United States were planning to try and remove him due to both his nationalization of oil and a fear within the US that he was shifting Iran towards the Soviet Union. This led to an intelligence operation in collaboration with the Shah known as “Operation Ajax” which occurred in 1953 when Mossadeh tried to convince the Shah to leave the country, the Shah responded by dismissing Mossadeh and appointing a general to take his place as Prime Minister. This plan failed and the Shah was forced to leave the country until pro shah forces eventually triumphed over Mossadeh and forced him out of power, he was eventually placed under house arrest and remained there until his death in 1967. There are two key results about these events that must be understood, the first is that this is perhaps the most significant example of foreign meddling in Iranian internal affairs , which means that it likely plays at least some role in the current resentment of the US.
White Revolution
In 1963, the Shah launched what became known as the White Revolution, which consisted of nineteen types of wide ranging reforms. These reforms consisted of everything from massive land reforms, improvements in education and women’s rights, along with a plethora of labor reforms. It should however be noted that these reforms were not also met with democratization or the decentralization of the rule of the Shah, which caused frustration among progressives within the country. The reforms also angered the clergy in Iran, because the perception of the clergy was that the changes were against Islamic law. Due to many factors, including endemic corruption within the country, many of the reforms were less than successful.
Iranian Revolution
Over the years the Shah failed to provide a change to the power system and continued to rule over the country as the sole power. This, coupled with both real and perceived corruption, discontent among many devout Shi’a, and frustration with the Shah’s pro western policies, led to a series of popular revolts in 1979 that eventually led to the overthrow of the Shah. After the revolt it was not clear exactly how the country would be run. This is due primarily to the fact that the coalition that overthrew the Shah consisted of both the left(communists, secularists,) and the right(Islamic extremists) that had united behind the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini, who had taken great steps not to give away his position on how he thought the post Shah Iran should be run. Shortly after the revolution Khomeni formed a council that was to determine the makeup of the new government, consisting entirely of appointments made by him. After deliberation, the council created a constitution that made Iran into an Islamic Republic after he rejected a previous proposal and declared that Iran’s new constitution was to be based “100 percent on Islam”. The constitution was eventually approved by a supermajority and set up the current government of Iran.
(This video is a news report from the time, fairly interesting picture of the revolution)
Iraq-Iran War
Amidst fears of a rising Shi’a insurgency and assuming that Irans Sunni Minority would assist them, Iraq launched an invasion of Iran in the 1980 with the intent of taking the Shat al-arab waterway and annexing the khuzetan province from Iran in order to settle a long standing border dispute.Though it was initially assumed that this war would be quick it eventually ended up becoming an incredibly bloody conflict that killed upwards of 1.2 million people.
Initially the conflict was a great success for the Iraqi army as they quickly overtook the Iranian positions around the waterway and made deep progress into Khorramshar.In addition to this a pre-emptive strike by the Iraqi air force into Iran crippled the Iranian air force. The problem that the Iraqi’s ran into was that their plans for everything after the first couple days of the invasion failed and no plausible backup plan had been set up.What happened was that the various minority groups that Iraq had been counting on to rally around them and destabilize the regime in Iran didn’t do so and instead Iran was able to muster an extra 200,000 volunteers to the front quickly and overpowered the Iraqi army and pushed back over the border by 1982.
Though Iraq was pushed back to its own borders, this was far from the end of the war. Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein tried to make a peace by calling on Iran to “consider the plight of the Lebanese” since Israel had invaded Lebanon earlier that year.Iran made a series of tough demands on Iraq for peace, including 150 billion in reparations and right of return for 100,000 Shiites that had been expelled from Iraq.It is generally agreed that Iran asked for such an exorbitant price as a way of continuing the war while making Saddam continue to look bad since he would have turned down terms for peace.Iran crossed Iraq’s border and made a move for Basra, the second largest city in Iraq at the time, however they encountered heavy, dug in Iraqi resistance.This resistance eventually forced a standstill as the Iranian armies attempts to rush the city with human wave attacks ending disastrously for Iran since superior Iraqi weapons fire and chemical weapons meant that wave after wave was constantly gunned down, leading to comparisons with the First World War.
The war continued with the same format of stalemates on and off for the course of the next three years, though Iraq did start to receive significant amounts of US assistance after the invasion, this not necessarily because the US wanted a strong Iraq as much as they wanted the Iranians to lose.The war continued on in world war one style with both sides moving back and forth over mostly the same ground with their offensives and counter offensives.Along with this the time after 1983 became known as the war of the cities because each side, using aircraft and long range missiles, would launch attacks on the others far away cities to scare the citizens and remind them that they were in a constant state of war.
Conflict would continue on in this manner until 1988, when international pressure and United Nations Security Council Resolution 598 forced both sides to back down.Though Iraq attempted as final land grab it ended rather badly for them and the war ended with both sides claiming victory, though little changing other than several million people ending up dead.
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