The Salsabil neighbourhood of Tehran was still a middle-class enclave when the first coup against Mohammad Mossadegh failed in the summer of 1953. As news spread of the monarch’s escape, defiant residents poured out into the streets with cries of “Death to the Shah, death to the Shah!”.

Racing ahead of their neighbours and painting anti-Shah slogans on alley walls were two brothers, ages eight and ten, my father and uncle. Many years later in middle age my father remembered with awe how three days later the neighbourhood turned out again in response to the second, successful coup. The Shah was already on his way home from Rome as the residents of Salsibil chanted ‘Death to Mossadegh, death to Mossadegh!’.

Almost every family in Iran can tell a similar story. Together they constitute ghosts, the collective memory of loss and humiliation at the hands of others. The tragedy of Mossadegh, writes the historian Ali Ansari, is the narrative of fatalism it left in the national psyche, a history of being outmanoeuvred by stronger foes, always ending in betrayal. Children are taught the lessons of this history in clichés: never trust anyone outside the family, even your closest friends. We are all members of hezb-e ba’d (the ‘wind party’), blowing in the direction of the strong and away from the weak.

Iran on the balcony Read more

How countries remember their pasts, writes Jennifer Lind, a Dartmouth professor, conveys information about their future behavior. For America and Iran to move past the emerging détente to something resembling respect, if not friendship, it’s crucial that the US comes to terms with its own history in Iran, beginning with the coup d’état against Mossadegh. America does not need to forgive itself for what it did in 1953, though surely it must be forgiven: it needs to remember that Iranians did this to themselves in cooperation with the CIA.

More than any other event, perhaps even more than the seizure of the US embassy and hostage crisis in 1979-80, the overthrow of the Mossadegh government set the terms by which Washington frames and understands its relationship with Iran and its people, an official narrative of American culpability that, although well intentioned, renders ordinary Iranians irrelevant to any future reconciliation between the two countries.



Speaking to The New York Times last month, president Barack Obama acknowledged that the US “had some involvement with overthrowing a democratically elected regime in Iran” and so it ought not be surprising that Iranians “have their own security concerns, their own narrative”. Americans, he said, would do well to put themselves in Iran’s shoes.

The president’s comments were a version of the standard narrative used by progressive Americans to signal that they get it: they understand that in overthrowing the elected government of Mossadegh, the US planted the seeds of an anti-American backlash that produced the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the rise of radical Islam in the region. In his book All the Shah’s Men, Stephen Kinzer goes so far as to draw a direct line from the CIA’s actions “through the Shah’s repressive regime and the Islamic Revolution to the fireballs that engulfed the World Trade Center in New York”.

Five books on the legacy of the 1953 coup in Iran Read more

That the 1953 coup has become a type of shorthand for the unintended consequences of meddling in the domestic affairs of other countries demonstrates a growing sophistication on the part of US policymakers. But making the causal leap from coup to theocracy confuses a partial truth for the whole. The CIA played a necessary and critical role in orchestrating the coup, but its actions were successful only through the cooperation of thousands of Iranians, from street toughs and army generals to feckless clerics and ordinary citizens eager to prove their loyalty to whoever ended up the winner.

The flip side of the conventional narrative is a population disempowered. No matter how many times the story gets told it always ends up with Iranians trapped in the tyranny of political Islam. The American fixation on the consequences of its own past actions wilfully ignores that Iran today has an elected government and a lively political process given to producing unanticipated outcomes, despite there being, as Obama put it, “an authoritarian theocracy in charge”.

Iranians are not biding their time, waiting for a new Mossadegh, nor are they mourning the loss of the original by ruminating over the counterfactuals: “What if the coup had not happened? What if Mossadegh had been allowed to carry through his mandate?” Most are more interested in improving the system as it exists right now not as it might have been. One need only look to the evidence of the over 18 million voters responsible for electing Hassan Rouhani in 2013, or the many millions who demonstrated for days and weeks in the Green Movement protests that followed Mahmoud Ahmadinenjad’s disputed re-election in 2009.

The conceit that “we Americans did this to Iran” affirms the widely shared opinion in Washington that no force – military or other – can bring resolution to the US-Iran conflict other than the US itself. Nothing demonstrates this habit of mind more than the Washington establishment’s enduring belief that “all options must remain on the table” or that sanctions alone brought Iran to the negotiating table despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, including dissidents in Iran who almost uniformly support the right of Iran to develop and possess nuclear technology.

If nothing else, the resolution of Iran’s nuclear portfolio presents the Iranians with a unique opportunity to overcome history, to move forward their limited democracy. Resolution of the nuclear issue demonstrated that fair compromise with the powerful is possible, and that Iranians of different political persuasions can work together in good faith to achieve a common purpose.

Even as much of the world looks forward to a new Middle East, many Iranians are choosing to linger, if only for a little while, over the recent past. But they do so in order to expunge the ghosts, the remainders of the war with Iraq, the complicity of Iranians in the tragedy of 1953.

Salsabil is different today. Few of the families from my father’s childhood are still around, the rest priced out of the neighbourhood by a real estate boom during the first Ahmadinejad administration. Those who remain and who were there when the coup happened tend not to remember the worst parts. Perhaps this is for the best. Change means forgetting the old days so that we can remember the new ones. Otherwise we’ll end up telling the same old stories to each other, mistakenly reassuring ourselves that this time things will be different.

Shervin Malekzadeh teaches political science at Swarthmore College