Your war questions answered: Is oil or religion more to blame for Iran’s ills?
July 2nd, 2009 by Andisheh Nouraee in News, Politics
Ed. note: This piece, by Andisheh Nouraee, will appear in next week’s issue of Creative Loafing.
Is oil or religion more to blame for Iran’s ills?
Relax.
I’m not gonna hate you for not hating the things I hate. But I want you to know, I hate oil.
Not all oil. Just some. I’m actually a big fan of canola oil. I’m not sure what a canola is, or how one extracts oil from a canola, but the hash browns my father fried for me in canola oil this morning tasted great. Thanks, dad. And thanks, canola, whatever/whoever you are.
I love grapeseed oil, too. It’s not an erotic love. I wouldn’t fly to Argentina to fondle a bottle of it. But it’s great for stir-frying vegetables. A fragrant extra virgin olive oil, balsamic vinegar and a drop of lime oil make a top-notch salad dressing. Lime oil classes up nearly anything.
And my favorite sport depends so heavily on the presence of oil for its spectator appeal, they put oil in the name. I’m referring, of course, to topless hot oil wrestling.
I’m cool with pretty much all oils, but I really hate petroleum.
I’m not gonna pretend it’s a rational hatred. Modern transportation, agriculture and manufacturing could not exist rely on oil. I move around, eat and buy stuff. I’m not a hypocrite. It’s an emotional hatred. Like many Americans of Iranian descent, I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about the turmoil in Iran.
When I try to figure out how the place got so screwed up, I keep going back to petroleum.
People in the West, and this includes pretty much every Iranian or Iranian-American I know, blames religious extremists for Iran’s misery. Even though I’m a theocracy-hating non-believer, I actually think Iran’s primary illness is that it has oil. In my opinion, the country’s evil theocrats are merely secondary symptom of the main sickness.
Remember, Iran’s theocrats came to power in a bloody revolution in 1979. What exactly were they revolting against? They were revolting against 80 years of colonial meddling inspired almost entirely by the West’s thirst for Iranian oil.
The meddling started in earnest in 1901. That’s when a British businessman named William Knox D’Arcy talked Iran’s monarch into giving him the exclusive right to drill for oil in almost all of Iran. In exchange, D’Arcy promised Iran’s ruler a small share of his net profits.
By many measurements, the deal was a huge success, at least for the British.
It led to the 1908 discovery of the first commercial oil field in the Middle East. It spawned the Anglo-Persian Oil Company — a commercial titan now known as BP. BP generated $367 billion in revenues last year, an amount greater than the GDP of all but 26 countries.
Iran didn’t fare so well in the deal. While Anglo-Persian made a mint from Iranian oil, the overwhelming majority of Iranians continued to live in extreme poverty. While Iranian oil powered cars and heated homes in Europe, rural Iranians lived in shacks with no running water, and no way to get from town to town with the help of a mule or horse.
Enforcing this bizarre, parasitic economic arrangement: the British government.
The Brits had no qualms about using force or subterfuge to support its corporate/colonial interests in Iran. The Brits propped up Iranian leaders who supported the oil rip-off scheme and helped marginalize leaders who protested it. It wasn’t till after World War II severely weakened the British military that an Iranian leader emerged to challenge them.
His name was Mohammad Mossadegh. He and many others had for years tried to make the Brits split oil profits 50-50 with Iran. The Brits wouldn’t budge. So after he was elected Prime Minister in 1951, Mossadegh said, “Screw it” (presumably in Farsi), and kicked the Brits out.
Too weak to act on their own, the Brits turned to the U.S. for help. In 1953, a joint British and CIA operation toppled Mossadegh — replacing Iran’s budding democracy with a weak monarch surrounded by pro-U.S. and -British “advisers.”
The U.S. and Britain destroyed Iran’s only successful secular, democratic political movement for oil. When the Iranian people rose up against the monarchy in 1979, Iran’s clerics were the only group with the organizational heft to take control.
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