Mohammed Mosaddeq: The Role Of US Intervention In Iraq

On August 19, 1953, the Iranian military, supported by the United States government, overthrew Premier Mohammed Mosaddeq and reinstated the Shah of Iran, marking the first real instance of U.S covert action and regime change. While the CIA has only recently admitted to U.S involvement, the motivations for this coup d'état were quite clear. Mosaddeq came to power in 1951 and almost instantly made his nationalist ideologies publicly known by calling for the expropriation of Iran’s oil fields. This understandably raised quite a few eyebrows, including that of the Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, who was a strong western enthusiast and ally. With the help of the American Central Intelligence Agency and British Intelligence sources, covert operations
The advertised goal: saving the lives of the ‘pro-democracy’ protestors who were being targeted by the by Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi. The actual goal: “to maintain the traditional order of things in the Arab world, with the main pillars of stability intact: Israel, Saudi Arabia, with the Gulf emirs, and the tentacles of the Atlantic world in the major capitals in the oil lands.” Just like Saddam, Qaddafi threatened this so-called “traditional order” when he began to shift towards a more nationalist ideology, one that was more publicly favorable at the time. In 2006 he threatened “Oil companies are controlled by foreigners who have made millions from them. Now, Libyans must take their place to profit from this money.” Fast forward to 2011, two days after the UN resolution passed, the United States and other NATO countries began to bomb Qaddafi’s forces. Within seven months, the rebel forces captured and killed Qaddafi, effectively ending his regime.
Initially, President Obama declared that the intervention was a success and boasted that “Without putting a single U.S. service member on the ground, we achieved our objectives.” This was a vastly premature assumption since in retrospect, Libya has not failed to establish a democracy and has developed into calamitous
It all boils down to this one sentiment: history tends to repeat itself, especially in the hands of a country so dependent on foreign profits and revenue streams. Regardless of the administration, the United States continues to employ the methods of the past against the current conflicts of the middle east; it happened in Iran, then Iraq, and Libya, and it is happening once again in Syria. Will this time be different? To quote Michael Reisman, a Professor of International Law at the Yale Law School, “In each context, let the strongest and best-intentioned government contemplating or being pressed to undertake regime change remember that not everything noble is lawful; not everything noble and lawful is feasible; and not everything noble, lawful, and feasible is