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Iran, Turkey, and America's Future
By Stephen Kinzer Henry Holt and Company
Copyright © 2010 Stephen Kinzer
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-4828-9
CHAPTER 1
THE REAL LIFE AND SOUL OF THE SHOW
The sunburned, dust-covered gentleman who stepped out of a rough carriage in Tehran at dusk on May 12, 1911, arrived like a lawman into a terrified town. He came to help a once-proud country that had fallen pitifully from past glories. Two foreign powers, Russia and Britain, had signed a "convention" dividing Iran between them. To consummate it, they needed to crush Iran's fledgling Parliament. Members of Parliament cast desperately about for a way to resist and save their country's democracy. They decided they had but one hope: hire an American.
The one they found, Morgan Shuster, agreed to serve for three years in a post Parliament created especially for him: Treasurer General of the Persian Empire. His assignment, with no tool other than law, was to force the Russians and the British to submit to Parliament's will.
Turning to an American was a logical step for Iranian democrats. The United States was their inspiration: a former British colony that had thrown off its chains and advanced to glorious self-rule, just as Iran hoped to do.
"The United States at this stage looked like the partner Iran had long hoped to find in the West — anti-feudal, anti-colonialist, modern but not imperialist — a truly benevolent foreign power that would, for once, treat Iran with respect," one historian has written. "If we think of the British and the Russians in the nineteenth century as the ugly sisters, then at this time Morgan Shuster and his United States looked like Prince Charming."
Though he was just thirty-four years old, Shuster had impressive experience in the esoteric art of organizing chaotic countries. He had designed a tax system for the Philippines, where he worked under governor-general William Howard Taft, and then became director of the Cuban customs service. In both posts he had won a reputation as hardworking and utterly incorruptible.
"I had never even dreamed of going to Persia before my appointment," he later wrote, "but the eloquence of the Persian chargé d'affaires at Washington, Mirza Ali Kuli Khan, removed my early doubts, and I finally decided to do what I could to help a people who had certainly given evidence of an abiding faith in our institutions and business methods."
Upon arriving in Tehran, Shuster made an instant and shocking impression, not by something he did but by something he failed to do. Foreigners normally called on diplomats from Russia and Britain — the countries that had divided Iran into "spheres of influence" four years earlier — to beg permission to begin work. Shuster ignored this custom. He let it be known that since he worked only for Parliament, he would pay fealty to no one else.
This was the beginning of his rise and fall.
Iran had made remarkable strides toward democracy in the five years since its Constitutional Revolution. There had been two elections. A royalist counterrevolution — the one in which Parliament was bombarded and Howard Baskerville killed — had been defeated. Universal male suffrage had been proclaimed. Religious minorities were guaranteed seats in Parliament. Two vigorous political parties had emerged, one favoring women's rights and public education, the other promoting conservative religious values.
This vibrant democracy, though, was only a shadow. Parliament had no authority over most of the country. British and Russian occupiers ignored its laws. Between these commanding imperial powers and an increasingly assertive Parliament, conflict was inevitable.
A few days after Shuster arrived in Tehran, parliamentary leaders visited him at Atabak Palace, the thirty-room stone villa they had given him as an office and residence. He told them he intended to follow the same principle that had guided his work in the Philippines and Cuba: taxation is the indispensable foundation of a stable state, and therefore taxes must be collected vigorously and impartially. In Iran, though, many wealthy landowners lived under British or Russian protection and paid no taxes to the central government. They would do so only if forced.
Shuster asked Parliament to raise a twelve-thousand-man gendarmerie dedicated exclusively to enforcing tax laws. Parliament agreed, and recruitment began. The first trained units were sent to confiscate property from tax delinquents in the Russian sphere of influence. That set off a fateful crisis.
The aroused Czar Nicholas II sent thousands of troops to Russian bases in northern Iran and threatened to occupy Tehran if Parliament did not stop its meddling. Britain joined the saber-rattling, reinforcing its garrisons in the south.
Shuster did not flinch. Parliament, he later wrote, "more truly represented the best aspirations of the Persians than any other body that has ever existed in that country. It was as representative as it could be under the difficult circumstances which surround the institution of the Constitutional government. It was loyally supported by the great mass of the Persians, and that alone was sufficient justification for its existence. The Russian and British governments, however, were constantly instructing their Ministers at Tehran to obtain this concession or block that one, failing utterly to recognize that the days had passed in which the affairs, lives and interests of twelve millions of people were entirely in the hands of an easily intimidated and willingly bribed despot."
The final confrontation began at midday on December 9, 1911, with an ultimatum from the Russian ambassador in Tehran. Parliament must dismiss Shuster within forty-eight hours — and also promise "not to engage in the service of Persia foreign subjects, without first obtaining the consent of the Russian and British legations."
Many Iranians were outraged by the directness of this demand. Shuster's insistent defense of democracy had captivated them, and he suddenly found himself the embodiment of a nation's dreams. Patriots clamored to defend him. One of the country's most beloved poets, Aref Qazvini, vented his passion in a tasnif, or popular song:
The thief is out for theft and the brigand for brigandage, my friend,
Our history will become the laughingstock of the world if we allow Shuster to go from
Iran, from Iran Shuster to go.
O life of the body, O soul of the world, O real treasure, O eternal pleasure — O Shuster!
May God keep thee here ... Thou art a part of us, how can we live apart from thee, O Shuster?
By agreeing to dismiss Shuster, Parliament would be accepting the rule of foreign powers over Iran. Refusing would bring unknown but certainly terrible consequences. When Parliament convened on the morning of December 11, all of its members knew that Iran's infant democracy was facing its first decisive choice. Shuster was there, and described the scene in his poignant memoir, The Strangling of Persia:
It was an hour before noon, and the Parliament grounds and buildings were filled with eager, excited throngs, while the galleries of the chamber were packed with Persian notables of all ranks and with the representatives of many of the foreign legations. At noon the fate of Persia as a nation was to be decided....
The proposal was read amid deep silence. At its conclusion a hush fell upon the gathering. Seventy-six deputies, old men and young, priests, lawyers, doctors, merchants and princes, sat tense in their seats.
A venerable priest of Islam arose. Time was slipping away, and at noon the question would be beyond their vote to decide. This servant of God spoke briefly and to the point: "It may be the will of Allah that our liberty and our sovereignty shall be taken away from us, but let us not sign them away with our own hands!" One gesture of his hands, and he resumed his seat.
Simple words, these, yet winged ones. Easy to utter in academic discussions; hard, bitterly hard, to say under the eye of a cruel and overpowering tyrant whose emissaries watched the speaker from the galleries and mentally marked him down for future torture, imprisonment or worse.
Other deputies followed. In dignified appeals, brief because the time was so short, they upheld their country's honor and proclaimed their hard-earned right to live and govern themselves.
A few minutes before noon the vote was taken. ... And when the roll call was ended, every man, priest or layman, youth or octogenarian, had cast his own die of fate, had staked the safety of himself and his family, and hurled back into the teeth of the great Bear from the North the unanimous answer of a desperate and down-trodden people who preferred a future of unknown terror to the voluntary sacrifice of their national dignity and their recently earned right to work out their own salvation.
By its defiance, Parliament invited its own destruction. Russian troops marched on Tehran and occupied it. Their commander then ordered the submissive Ahmad Shah — actually his British-educated regent, since the shah was just fourteen years old — to dissolve Parliament and dismiss Shuster. The orders were quickly drawn up. Soon afterward, a despondent former Treasurer General of the Persian Empire stepped into an automobile to begin his long trip home.
"Our task in Persia, to which we had looked forward with both pleasure and pride, had come to a sudden and most unpleasant end," Shuster wrote. "As I stood in a circle of gloomy American and Persian friends, about to step into the automobile, I could not help recalling the evening of my arrival at the same spot just eight months before, and there swept over me the realization that the hopes of a patient, long-suffering Muhammadan people of reclaiming their position in the world had been ruthlessly stamped out by the armies of a so-called civilized and Christian nation."
Iran's first experiment with democracy was over, crushed by foreign power. It left a vivid imprint on the nation's collective psyche. During these early years of the twentieth century, Iranians discovered what democracy is. They wanted it — and might have had it if their country had not been found to be sitting atop an ocean of oil.
In photographs, William Knox D'Arcy looks like the eminent Victorian solicitor he was: portly, round-faced, and generously mustachioed, usually with a pipe in his mouth and a watch chain across his vest. In his youth he made a fortune backing gold miners in Australia, and then he did what many a man would do in such circumstances: he moved to Europe to enjoy his money. He married an actress, toured extravagantly, lived in palaces, and hired Enrico Caruso to sing at his Grosvenor Square dinner parties. By the beginning of the twentieth century, his fortune was running out.
The petroleum age was just dawning, but geologists had already guessed that the Middle East would become a rich source of oil. British leaders wanted to know whether Iran had any; D'Arcy was looking for a speculative project that could make him rich again. They were ideal partners.
To drill in Iran, D'Arcy needed permission from the decadent and sickly Mozaffer al-Din Shah, who ruled with the aid of soothsayers and financed his regime by selling concessions to foreigners. British diplomats helped him secure the necessary royal order. Under their tutelage, he bribed everyone in the royal court from the prime minister to the servant who brought the shah his morning pipe and coffee. The concession agreement, signed in 1901, gave D'Arcy the exclusive right to seek oil in almost all of Iran's territory, and then, if he found any oil, the exclusive right to extract, refine, and sell it. For this concession, which was to run for sixty years, he paid £20,000 in cash, then equivalent to about $95,000; promised to pay an equal amount when he began production; and agreed to give Iran 16 percent of his future profits.
"Such was the contract that turned out to be one of the more significant documents of the twentieth century," one scholar has written. "Its subsequent fate, the vast industrial complex to which it gave rise, the passionate hatred it evoked, the conflicts it precipitated, could not have been guessed by its signers, who, in a city remote from the centers of world power, in almost total secrecy, acted out a drama the implications of which they were only half aware."
At four o'clock on the morning of May 26, 1908, after several years of frustration, geologists working for D'Arcy at a stony outpost called Masjid-iSuleiman were awakened by a tremendous explosion. Oil was spurting high into the air. They had made the greatest find in the history of the young petroleum industry.
Winston Churchill, who became Great Britain's First Lord of the Admiralty soon after this spectacular strike, fully grasped its meaning. He understood that in the coming era, navies and national economies would be powered by oil, meaning that countries with oil would rule. Britain had none, nor any colony that produced it. Upon learning of the gusher at Masjid-i-Suleiman, Churchill realized that controlling Iran would be a key to the survival of British power in the new century. On the eve of World War I he arranged for the D'Arcy concession to be transformed into a corporation, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, and for the British government to buy 51 percent of its shares.
"Fortune brought us a prize from fairyland beyond our wildest dreams," Churchill later wrote. "Mastery itself was the prize of the venture."
This proved to be no exaggeration. In World War I, as the British statesman Lord Curzon observed, the Allies "floated to victory on a wave of oil." That made British leaders more determined than ever to control Iran. With the Russians gone — they renounced their claims in Iran after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution — the British seemed to have a free hand. In mid-1918 they sent twenty-five hundred soldiers to fan out across Iran. Once they were in place, Curzon unveiled a staggeringly one-sided "Anglo-Persian Agreement" under which Britain would turn Iran into a protectorate by taking control of its army, treasury, communications system, and transport network. The three Iranian officials who signed this agreement were induced to do so by generous bribes. They were also promised asylum in the British Empire "should necessity arise."
Lord Curzon, a former viceroy of India who became foreign secretary in 1919, considered Iran one of "the pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a game for dominion of the world." Britain, he eloquently argued, must hold it at all costs:
If it be asked why we should undertake the task at all, and why Persia should not be left to herself and allowed to rot into picturesque decay, the answer is that her geographical position, the magnitude of our interests in the country, and the future safety of our Eastern Empire render it impossible for us now — just as it would have been impossible for us any time in the last fifty years — to disinherit ourselves from what happens in Persia. Moreover, now that we are about to assume the mandate for Mesopotamia, which will make us coterminous with the western frontiers of Asia, we cannot permit the existence between the frontiers of our Indian Empire and Baluchistan and those of our new protectorate, a hotbed of misrule, enemy intrigue, financial chaos and political disorder. Further, if Persia were to be alone, there is every reason to fear that she would be overrun by Bolshevik influence from the north. Lastly, we possess in the southwestern corner of Persia great assets in the shape of oil fields, which are worked for the British navy and which give us a commanding interest in that part of the world.
The Iranian people erupted in a paroxysm of outrage when the Anglo-Persian Agreement became public. Newspapers demanded that Parliament refuse to ratify it. Politicians venomously denounced it. Mullahs issued a fatwa declaring that any Iranian who endorsed it was an enemy of Islam. Warlords vowed to fight any regime that accepted it. Nationalists in Tehran formed a "Punishment Committee" dedicated to assassinating officials who supported it. They killed four of the prime minister's aides; the prime minister resigned.
"It does not appear to be realized at home how intensely unpopular Agreement was in Persia," the British military commander wrote in a dispatch to London. "Secrecy with which Agreement had been concluded, fact that [Parliament] was not summoned and attempt created to pack [Parliament] by resorting to most dishonest methods in carrying out elections, all added to conviction that Great Britain ... was in reality no better than the hereditary foe, Russia."
Little is known about the childhood of the soldier called Reza. He was born in the Caspian province of Mazandaran, probably in the early spring of 1876. His father, a soldier, died when he was still an infant, and his mother took him from their mountain village to live with her family near Tehran. According to legend, a blizzard broke out during their trek. Reza froze, apparently to death, but revived after his mother was able to find shelter and place him beside a fire.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Reset by Stephen Kinzer. Copyright © 2010 Stephen Kinzer. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
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