AN AUGURY OF REVOLUTION: THE IRANIAN STUDENT ...

Mosaddeq was soft on communism, resulting in the CIA-led coup that ousted Mosaddeq from
office.
After the post-World War II historiographic consensus of the 1950s and early 1960s
concerning the benevolent nature of American foreign policy in Iran unraveled, revisionist
accounts published amidst the disastrous failure in Vietnam led to a more imperialist and
economically-driven view of the United States While a post-revisionist synthesis of the origins
of the Cold War emerged by the 1980s, the scholarship of the decade was consumed by varied
explanations of the role that the United States played in pushing Iran towards revolution. Bill
authored the most comprehensive account of the revolution from the vantage points of
Washington and Tehran. By the 1990s, more narrowly focused studies on the interaction
between the shah and Washington during the Cold War brought new light to events such as
Operation Ajax, which was the CIA coup that removed Mosaddeq from power. 64 By the early
twenty-first century, a consensus that American policy in Iran was short-sighted emerged,
although a plethora of reasons for this existed. 65
The best scholarship of the new millennium
places U.S. – Iranian relations into the broader context of the international Cold War and was
indicative of the direction that the field was heading.
This study attempts to add greater depth to the understanding of U.S. – Iranian relations
throughout the Cold War, and denies the argument made by Barry Rubin that American foreign
64 For the account of the orchestrator of Operation Ajax see Kermit Roosevelt, Countercoup: The Struggle for the
Control of Iran (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1979). For the official CIA account of the coup see
Donald Wilber, “CIA Clandestine Service History, Overthrow of Premier Mossadeq of Iran, November 1952-
August 1953,” National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No 28, ed. Malcolm Byrne, November 29, 2000.
For varying accounts of the coup by scholars see: Mark Gasiorowski “The 1953 Coup D’etat in Iran.” International
Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 19, No. 3 Aug., 1987), 261-286; Mark Gasiorowski, U.S. Foreign Policy and
the Shah: Building a Client State in Iran (Cornell University Press, 1991); Amir Taheri, Nest of Spies: America’s
Journey to Disaster in Iran (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988); James Bill and William Roger Louis, Mussadiq,
Iranian Nationalism, and Oil (University of Texas Press, 1988); Stephen Kinzer, All the Shah’s Men.
65 Some of the more recent literature on Iran includes Ali M. Ansari, Modern Iran Since 1921; David Farber, Taken
Hostage: The Iran Hostage Crisis and America’s First Encounter with Radical Islam (Princeton University Press,
2005); Kenneth Pollack, The Persian Puzzle.
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