Iran And The West

I was struck by two things about Dr Mossadegh.

One was that, of course, he was from his own point of view entirely correct in believing that a country’s most important economic resources and assets must be owned within that country, and that that can only be guaranteed absolutely by public ownership. A lesson for our own time and place.

And the other was that his, and indeed the Shah’s, blaming of the British for absolutely everything echoed, and echoes, a certain sort of Irish-American barroom rant against “the Anglophile network”. Such talk was favoured by many of those who surrounded Bill Clinton. And it made a significant contribution to the emergence of neoconservatism, both as those particular barroom ranters moved from the Democrats to the Republicans, and because hardline Zionists are also, as all Zionists used to be, violently anti-British.