I saw Argo a few weeks before the Oscars, and I liked about 99 and 44/100 of it. Once the plot action starts, the tone, images, language and emotional pitch of the main characters all seem high-quality replicas of historical reality. Not that I have any expertise in making or evaluating film as an art form. I just know what I like and don’t like, and that mainly depends, in the case of historical fiction, on the fit between the fictive rendering and my own experience embedded in the mysterious workings of human memory.
The problem I had, and now have more than ever with the Oscars being announced, concerns the other 56/100 of one percent of the Argo movie experience.
Before the action begins the viewer is treated to a 2-3 minute potted history of post-World War II Iranian politics and U.S.-Iranian relations. As the narrator talks, vivid period photographs flash before one’s eyes. After the action is resolved, the film ends with a taped remark, running for maybe just a minute or so, from former President Carter. From the cracked voice it sounds like Carter is commenting fairly recently, perhaps after having seen a screener of the film.
These bookends to Argo compose an atrocity committed on the historical record. It’s typical Hollywood anti-establishment, mock-heroic crap. More specifically, it’s totally unreconstructed revisionist pablum that (mis)frames for the viewer what they are about to see or have just seen. Most viewers won’t remember either bookend explicitly or in any detail, so engaging is the actual movie in between. But into their heads it will have gone, and not to no effect.
For those who may not have a good grasp of the logic of anti-U.S. historical revisionism, let me spell it out for you. In the primitive, Manichean revisionist mindset there are only two sides to any conflict or situation: good guys and bad guys. The United States is always the bad guy, making anyone who is against the United States ipso facto a good guy. The way revisions logic works is that if good guys do anything good, it’s because it’s their nature to do good things—because they are good guys. But if good guys do anything bad, it’s because bad guys make them. Similarly, if bad guys do bad things, it’s because it’s their nature. If they seem to do good things, it’s only because the good guys somehow make them.
With this “logic” in hand, a revisionist can spin any historical event into one in which the United States is always at fault, and enemies of the United States are never at fault. If you understand this, you’ll understand exactly how these bookends to Argo work. (You will also, incidentally, understand the tactical, logical innards of anything written or produced by Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky or Oliver Stone.) Thus, why did the good Iranians make hostages out of American diplomats in November 1979? Because the bad Americans made them do it, because of all the bad things we had done to them before. And why did the bad Americans pull off the Argo caper successfully? Because the good Iranians created the circumstances for their so doing—and of course the American hero succeeds not with but despite the bulk of American officialdom depicted in the movie.
Don’t misunderstand me: I am not saying that Ben Affleck knowingly lied to his audience. I’m saying that he doesn’t know any better, that he actually believes the nonsense that introduces and frames the film. He is a Hollywood type. He doesn’t know and cannot be expected to know any actual history. It’s not important to him. What is important is that he have a good storyline that appeals to the increasingly cynical, anti-Washington bias of most Americans. Well, maybe he dissimulated a little. Even he has to know, one would hope, that it was the imminent beginning of the Reagan Administration that finally sprung the hostages on January 20, 1981, the day before Reagan’s inauguration. But the name Ronald Reagan never occurs. The way things are left, Jimmy Carter gets credit for bringing the hostages home rather than blame for leaving them there so long in the first place. Well, if you’re going to lie, you might as well make it a whopper.
It is easy to lie vaguely. Indeed, the power of an historical lie rests in the juxtaposition of lots of trivial detail against a studied narrative vagueness. To explain a lie of this kind invariably takes more words than the lie itself. That is why skillful lying is so powerful: It gulls the listener by making understanding seem so easy. To unpack the lie requires more effort on the part of the listener, putting the un-packer at a distinct disadvantage. Nevertheless, I am game to do the unpacking if you are game to do the listening.
In the past, I’ve commented on President Obama’s speeches using footnotes which would pop up when you’d mouse over them on the page. This had some legibility problems online, so this time, we’ll try it a different, more standard internet way. It’s less than ideal because you’ll not get the sense of the original text as a unified whole. But for the sake of ease of reading, let’s give it a go like this: voiceover original in block quotes interspersed with my numbered comments. If you so choose, you can cut-and-paste the block quotes to reconstitute the whole on your end.
* * *
This is the Persian Empire, known today as Iran.
1. Statements do not get much more ignorant than this. Iran today is a tiny fraction of the territorial extent of three Persian empires from the past—the Achaemenid, the Sasanid and the Safavid.
For 2,500 years this land was ruled by a series of Kings, known as Shahs. In 1950, the people of Iran elected Mohammed Mossadegh, a secular democrat, as prime minister. He nationalized British and U.S. petroleum holdings, returning Iran’s oil to its people.
2. It is not possible to return something to those who never had it in the first place. The idea that Iran’s oil belonged to the Iranian people is a notion that virtually no Iranian at that point in time would have credited, except perhaps members of the Communist Tudeh Party. Iran’s oil was discovered, extracted, refined, transported and marketed by foreigners—mainly the British. Iranians could not have done these things at the time, so the money the concession paid to the government was money no Iranian would otherwise have had. What the Mossadegh government actually did was to expropriate property, mostly British, in violation of international contracts. In so doing, Mossadegh as prime minister went far beyond his constitutional authority in what was, after all, still a monarchy.
But in 1953, The U.S. and Great Britain engineered a coup d’étât that deposed Mossadegh, and installed Reza Pahlavi as Shah.
3. Here is the key lie in this passage. In the first place, the Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, had been Shah before the Mossadegh government. He became Shah at a young age when the Allies deposed his father, Reza Shah, during World War II. It is true that Great Britain and the United States played a role in the overthrow of Mossadegh and the return of the Shah to his Peacock Throne, but most of the damage to the Mossadegh government was done by Mossadegh and his political allies themselves. They made lots of mistakes, they alienated most of their original allies, and they contributed to a genuinely chaotic environment. It was feared both in Iran and beyond that a small but resolute group of Communists, with Soviet support, might take advantage of the situation. This was not an idle fear, given the machinations of the Soviet government in Iran directly after World War II. There is a parallel here to the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973. The leftist myth paints Allende as an immaculate-conception kind of hero, a political saint who could do no wrong. The truth was that he did plenty wrong. Like Mossadegh, he also alienated large swaths of his original political coalition. Had Mossadegh and Allende not been such maladroit political operators, it would not have been remotely easy to dump them, and likely not possible at all.
The young Shah was known for opulence and excess. His wife was rumored to bathe in milk, while the Shah had his lunches flown in by Concord from Paris. The people starved.
4. Even if it were true, about the milk bath and the lunches flown in from Paris, it is not as though the Shah and his wife were doing anything that the majority of Iranians did not expect them to do. They were royalty, and most people expected them to act like royalty. Nor is it true that because of the excesses of the Royal Palace the Iranian people starved. There is no evidence whatsoever of significant starvation in Iran during the Shah’s reign. There was plenty of poverty in Iran, yes, but that poverty had existed for centuries and would have existed regardless of the personal habits of the Shah and his princess.
The Shah kept power through his ruthless internal police, the SAVAK. An era of torture and fear began.
5. Another outrageous misstatement. Toward the end of the Shah’s rule, after the shocks of the oil revolution generated tremendous corruption and dislocation in the political economy, it is true that the government became fairly brutal, and the SAVAK genuinely murderous. One of the main reasons for this is that over time the reform agenda of the Shah’s regime, which included confiscating vast amounts of land both from the aristocracy and from the clergy, generated a strong backlash. More about the Shah’s reformist agenda below. The point is that no era of torture and fear began in 1953, as the statement asserts. There was always opposition to the Shah’s reformist agenda from Iran’s hidebound rentier elite, but for the most part his rule was broadly popular—until around the early 1970s.
He then began a campaign to modernize Iran, enraging a mostly traditional Shi’ite population.
6. Another whopper. As I have just said, the effort to modernize the country, known as the White Revolution, which the Shah continued from the time of his father, and which also took Mustafa Kemal in Turkey as a model, did stir up some opposition. For example, the first time that the cleric Rouhollah Mousavi Khomeini—aka Ayatollah Khomeini—got arrested for involvement in a street protest, in 1964, was on the occasion of the government granting the vote to women. This was by no means unpopular at the time, except, again, to the country’s hidebound Shi’a clergy. Is Ben Affleck trying to tell us that the Shah’s extending the franchise to women was a bad idea?! That a vast project of land reform designed to alleviate Iranian poverty was a bad idea?! If that is what Affleck believes, let him please say so directly.
In 1979 the people of Iran overthrew the Shah.
7. The “people”, generically speaking, never do anything as such. It is very romantic to make such statements, but it is sociological nonsense. Of course, no one expects an intro to a movie to be a paragon of social science virtue. Still… The Shah fell because he was old and sick, and most of his sagacious political advisers were no longer on the scene. He fell because he could not control the creative destruction he himself had unleashed with his reforms and his engineering of the quadrupling of oil prices; he was to a very considerable extent the victim of his own success. And he fell because his most important ally, the United States in the form of the Carter Administration, did next to nothing to prevent it. See below.
The exiled cleric Ayatollah Khomenei returned to rule Iran.
8. True as stated but misleading all the same. Somehow the impression has grown up that once the Shah was gone or very nearly gone, the only conceivable alternative was rule by the Iranian clergy. Anyone who remembers those days knows that the matter was vastly more complicated than that. Iran had an interregnum provisional government under Abulhasan Bani-Sadr. Any number of outcomes were imaginable at that point; there was nothing inevitable about clerical rule. One distasteful but, under the circumstances, not-beyond-the-pale solution was a temporary military takeover that could calm things down and set the stage for a parliamentary republic. There is still disagreement about the true attitude of the Carter Administration toward this option, all of it rotating around the Huyser Mission.
Anyone who has never heard of General Robert E. Huyser and his mission has absolutely no business writing so much as a single sentence on this general subject. Some say President Carter instructed Huyser to prepare a coup as a last ditch option to prevent the mullahs from coming to power. Others say the reverse: that Carter instructed Huyser to make sure there would be no coup. The truth remains to be established, but with Carter’s friend and UN Ambassador Andrew Young calling Khomeini a saint, who would soon return to his monastery in Qom, I for one lean to the latter interpretation.
It descended into score-settling, death squads, and chaos.
9. “It” descended?! What actually happened was exactly what anyone with a brain would expect to happen: The guys who won, the guys with the guns, went around the country jailing, torturing and murdering the opposition. The statement makes it seem as though everyone was equally to blame for the mayhem. The technical term for this is “bullshit”, or, better, “bullshistory.”
Dying of cancer, the Shah was given asylum in the U.S. The Iranian people took to the streets outside the U.S. Embassy, demanding that the Shah be returned, tried, and hanged.
10. Again, the Iranian people did nothing of the sort. The protests were large, drawing on a grievance culture deep within the Iranian psyche. But the foot soldiers of the protests were members of the new clerical political movements. This was their job. The intimation that the entire country was behind these protests, and took part in them enthusiastically, is simply false.
* * *
And here is the Jimmy Carter ending voice over:
* * *
They went in, as you know, under the guise of making a motion picture, and there was a high possibility of failure. And after it was successful, of course there was a lot of temptation to reveal all the stories, so that I could take a little bit of credit for it, since I was president. But we had to keep it secret. Tony Mendez has gone down in history, after his retirement, as one of the top fifty most important CIA operatives of all time. Eventually, we got every hostage back home safe and sound, and we upheld the integrity of our country, and we did it peacefully.
Jimmy Carter has become increasingly delusional as the years go by. Nowhere in the movie does anybody mention, nor does Carter mention it here, that there was a failed attempt to rescue the hostages by dint of military force. If that operation had not been grounded early on, there is every prospect that at least a limited fight would have taken place. Carter’s intimation that everything he ordered throughout the ordeal was spic-and-span peaceful is a flat lie.
As for upholding the integrity of the country, this is almost too ludicrous to believe. Carter’s indecisiveness at the critical moment lead to the rise of the clerical regime in Iran. Carter’s weakness in the face of the seizure of our embassy ended up enabling a small number of Iranian radicals to essentially take the entire foreign policy of United States hostage for more than two years—and enabled Ayatollah Khomenei to claim, famously and damagingly, that United States “cannot do a damn thing.”
Now, when Carter says that he would like to have taken credit for the Argo operation, he does not directly claim credit for the return of the hostages. But he does imply it when he says “we got every hostage back home safe and sound”—and if he does not then Affleck does. This amounts to another lie.
As already noted, nowhere is there a mention anywhere in this movie, whether in its bookends or in its main section, of Ronald Reagan. During the 1980 campaign Reagan criticized Carter repeatedly for his mishandling of Iran, and he left no doubt in anyone’s mind that, if he had it in his power, he would take a very different and much more muscular approach to the problem. The public record thus far is mute about how the incoming Reagan Administration might have communicated its intent to the Iranian regime after the results of the November 1980 election were in. But the man who would become CIA Director in that new Administration, one William Joseph Casey, was hardly at a loss to know how to do such things. Without going into detail, suffice it to say that the Iranian regime took to heart whatever was communicated to it from the Reagan transition team, possibly via Swiss intermediaries, between the election and the inauguration. They were plainly afraid of Ronald Reagan, and that is the main reason they let the hostages go. Had Jimmy Carter won the election, they almost certainly would not have been released at that time. Whatever would have become of them no one can know.
* * *
Why belabor all this? After all, it’s just a movie, and nobody takes these things seriously, right?
Alas, that’s not so. No one takes them seriously as such, perhaps, but a lie repeated in public space often enough becomes truth through a process of lazy entertainment osmosis. Most of the people who have seen, and will now see, Argo are too young to remember what was going on back in the mid to late 1970s. Most viewers, too, know little to nothing about the history of Iran or U.S.-Iranian relations—why should they?—and so they have no basis against which to protect themselves from weapons-of-misinformation-dumps (WMD). Most important, we exaggerate the capacity of most people to distinguish between fact and representations of fact, because being able to do so is very context specific. Let me tell you a story about this.
Many years ago there was an actor named Robert Young. He was famous for being the father figure on a very popular television show called Father Knows Best. Later, he played the unimpeachably marvelous Marcus Welby, MD on another very popular television show of that name. Either toward the end of or after his Marcus Welby role, Sanka hired him to sell instant coffee in TV commercials. How did they do this? They dressed him in a doctor’s white coat, put a stethoscope around his neck, and gave him a pointer to point at some graphic purporting to show how healthy this instant coffee was for you. Now, of course, if you asked viewers outright if the guy on their TV screen was actually a medical doctor, or just an actor, most of them could probably tell you that Robert Young was just an actor. But given the associational promiscuity of the human mind, and the tendency of television as a technology to put a viewer into a semi-hypnotic trance, most of the time the question was never asked and the distinction never made. As far as I know, the commercial did exactly what the Sanka people wanted to do.
The point is that in the context of our obsessive entertainment culture, narratives about real politics tend to smuggle their way from the fanciful to the factual without most people ever bringing their critical facilities to bear on what they’re hearing. In our culture, which loves to be entertained more than anything else under the sun, the temptation to believe an easy truth is tantamount to a done deal. People associate being entertained with authenticity, with emotion, with really being alive, so that anything one learns about history, say, in the midst of an entertaining experience is given pride of place as truth. I cannot resist quoting from the late Michael Crichton’s masterful 1999 novel Timeline:
What is the dominant mode of experience at the end of the twentieth century? How do people see things, how do they expect to see things? The answer is simple. In every field, from business to politics to marketing to education, the dominant mode has become entertainment. . . .
Today, everybody expects to be entertained, and they expect to be entertained all the time. Business meetings must be snappy, with bullet lists and animated graphics, so executives aren’t bored. Malls and stores must be engaging, so they amuse as well as sell us. Politicians must have pleasing video personalities and tell us only what we want to hear. Schools must be careful not to bore young minds that expect the speed and complexity of television. Students must be amused—everyone must be amused, or they will switch: switch brands, switch channels, switch parties, switch loyalties. This is the intellectual reality of Western society at the end of the century.
In other centuries, human beings wanted to be saved, or improved, or freed, or educated. But in our century, they want to be entertained. The great fear is not of disease or death, but of boredom. A sense of time is on our hands, a sense of nothing to do. A sense that we are not amused.
I fully expect that the result of Argo and its popularity will be to permanently deface recognition of the actual historical record when it comes to Iran and U.S.-Iranian relations from this period—and this for a relationship that has anything but run its course. If the revisionist logic is as insidiously contagious as I think it is, it stands to reason that the notion will spread that if the good Iranians want a nuclear weapon, it’s only because the bad Americans are forcing them to have one. Get the picture?
Oddly enough, this is the second article I’ve read today that discusses the Iranian hostage situation. The Huffington Post has an, ahem, interesting article by James Farwell on the Operation Rice Bowl, the plan to rescue the hostages using SFODD and other SOF assets.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-p-farwell/the-iranian-rescue-operat_b_2773643.html
I’ve read pretty much all the books on the operation, and have attended two briefings on what happened (one by Colonel James Kyle, the other by Major Wade Ishimoto). Last, but not least, I spent 12 years flying MH-53 helicopters that were extremely similar to the RH-53Ds used for that operation.
So, having said all that, here is my two cents: They were lucky that operation failed where it did. If they had lost another helo during the overnight laager or the exfil, or if anything else had gone wrong in any way closer to Tehran, it would have been a massacre. You have to read either Beckwith or Kyle’s book to comprehend the total clustf@#K that Desert One was (and that was merely the first step in the mission). There was no opportunity to do a full rehearsal of the mission, the Marine pilots were latter-stage replacements for Navy pilots that weren’t trained for the mission, the RH-53s had gotten covered in corrosive fire-retardant foam on the carrier, and on and on.
So, instead of being treated to a Mogadishu-like spectacle of dead Rangers and Delta operatives being dragged up and down the streets of Tehran, we managed to confine the damage to the lost helo and MC-130 that collided at Desert One. Still bad, but not the full-blown disaster that would have occurred if Colonel Beckwith had been foolish enough to proceed with that rapidly deteriorating operation.
Thank god for Charlie Beckwith, when someone once asked him what he would have done if Carter had ordered him to proceed, he replied, “I would have faked radio problems and aborted the mission anyway.” Unlike that writer Farwell at the HP, Beckwith knew what was going to happen if he pressed on after the loss of the sixth helo.
Agree, entirely. Of course, Argo is not about the failed rescue mission. But thanks for the insight al the same.
An excellent critique of a movie and a lesson in the importance of having some historical awareness all wrapped into one text. I particularly liked the put-down of Affleck and others like him (including the current inhabitant of the White House, I would argue), whose ignorance has in no way stopped them from embracing the causes of parties who views are inimical to the West — and, paradoxically, to the freedoms that permit such nonsense as Arho to make it to the big screen. Oh well…what to do? All we can do is wait and hope that the public will slowly wake up and realise that the underlying argument in this text — i.e., get an education, think critically, and do not be lulled by cinema into false understandings — is a valuable one.
Well, thank you, but: (1) recall that I did not pan the movie as such, which I think is pretty good once you set aside the dangling historical participles of the intro and closing comment–so I don’t think the movie as a whole is nonsense despite the infantile leftist bias of its creators; and (2) I don’t necessarily buy the intimation about Obama. You are referring, I guess (since you don’t say), to the accusation that he genuinely admires and supports the Muslim Brotherhood. I see no evidence for that. At best I see evidence that he’s trying to navigate a mess in which we have no real allies or reliable partners who are also candidates for rule in Egypt, and arguably other places as well.
I think you are being too generous to Obama in that I do not think there is a great deal of “strategising” behind his foreign policy – at least I cannot see any. If there were, I would have expected a very different policy response to the vast uncertainties that accompanied the outbreak of the Arab Spring and to the Libyan and Syrian civil wars, not to mention Iran. That absence, I would suggest, might well be due to the very evident arrogance of the man-in-charge.
that aside, does he admire the Muslim Brotherhood? Perhaps. Its grass roots approach to political mobilisation naturally must appeal to him. Does he endorse its agenda? I think the jury is still out, and that is itself rather worrying.
In any event, I still very much enjoyed your article as I have many of your books since I first encountered them as a student nearly three decades ago. And, I still read what you write to gain a greater apptreciation of the topics you choose to write on. Thank you!
I would go farther to refute the one about the US and Britain engineering a coup to depose Mossadegh and put the Shah on the throne — the mythic scenario that is now embedded in history books and conceded even by conservatives — and it’s always the “democratically elected Mossadegh.”
First, Missadegh was no more democratically elected than Hitler. The Shah was a constitutional monarch but one with considerable powers. He recognized Mossadegh as the rising popular choice and appointed him PM. Second, Mossadegh nationalized the oil companies and precipitated a period of political turmoil in which Mossadegh acted in an increasingly high-handed manner. Next, feeling his oats, Mossadegh called for new elections but using his control of the process, stopped the counting after enough of his supporters were in (!) claiming foreign agents’s interference. Thus “reelected,” Mossadegh demanded
that the Shah surrender his constitutional right to
appoint key military leaders. When the Shah refused,
Mossadegh, resigned and let loose huge protests strikes and demonstrations with lots of street violence. The Shah caved and Mossadegh returned with control over the military top appointments. Thus, empowered, he demanded and got from parliament the ability to rule by “emergency” decree for six months. Later, he demanded and got this unconstitutional authority extended for another 12 months. Not surprisingly, many political actors did not much care for this and a lot of plotting, some involving the Brits, commenced. To solidify his essentially dictatorial power, in August 1953, Mossadegh staged a Napoleanic referendum to dismiss the parliament and formalize Mossadegh’s power to make laws by decree. Surprise! The referendum granted him this power with a 99% majority!! On August 16, the parliament was prorogued indefinitely. A few days later, the Shah gave his approval to the military plotters to overthrow Mossadegh with the help of MI6 and the CIA.
Some “democratically elected” prime minister. IMO, the “coup” against Mossadegh could properly be understood as a counter-coup to reestablish the constitutional government. But it’s hopeless at this point to resist the narrative.
You are right (some innocent typos notwithstanding). Your account is pretty much what any standard account, from 1953/54 on through the 1960s at least, said. Thanks for the effort it took to write it out. Note that my brief comment on Mossadegh doesn’t differ from yours; it’s just a lot shorter because as much detail as you bring would have too much lengthened and imbalanced the comment.
It is frustrating to see hogwash become “common knowledge”, I know. I have written on similar outrages in the past–Black September, why SALT II was withdrawn from the Senate, and so on and so forth–as far as I can tell to no general effect whatsoever. But we must keep trying.
Wow, semantics. “This is an utter lie which though true in essence is still sort of a lie”. Bill O’ Reilly would be proud. Thanks for putting these “Hollywood-types” in their place.
It is not hard to understand the common phrase “true as spoken but false as intended” if a person understands the critical role of context in any lexical expression. It is not about “semantics.”
Great essay – one minor correction . Even he has to know, one would hope, that it was the imminent beginning of the Reagan Administration that finally sprung the hostages on January 20, 1981, the day before Reagan’s inauguration..
Reagan’s inaugeration took place on January 20. The hostages were released right after he completed his inaugeral address. The Iranian government did not want to release them until Carter was officially out of office.
Your are wrong on that account. There are plenty of people, both in government and in the Reagan whitehouse who attest that the Reagan camp struck a deal to not release the hostages until after his inauguration. Although Congressional inquiry did not find such evidence, there is evidence to suggest otherwise. Similarly, I’d suggest the author hear read up on Operation Ajax regarding Mossedegh. Interesting how the author is willing to trust congressional inquiry when it suits his political storyline, but to refute and mold events to suit your needs. You are guilty of the same indiscretions you purport the movie takes. The somersaults you do with the nationalization of oil is amazing. I wonder wait contortions you might put yourself through to justify an invasion of Iraq.
Thanks for the article and especially Point #2, Adam. I had been under the impression that it was “Iranian oil”, but you’re right about British oil production assets and prior contracts.
I’m disappointed, however, for your oversight of another major mistake with “Argo”. Near the beginning, the caption states “69 days after the embassy takeover,” yet Ben Affleck is driving through a D.C. that still has dozens of trees with fall foliage on them. It would have been mid January, when there are never trees with foliage on them. Of course, the cherry blossoms can bloom anytime of the year… Am I right, or am I right? (heh, heh)
Ha! Great catch. I missed that. But of course this is not something to do with history, just typical Hollywood production craft. My wife enjoys pointing out when tv shows and movies have the moon rising or setting where it cannot possibly be. That happens a lot. We’re such indoors types these days that few people sense the weirdness.
A heartfelt thank you for this fisking.
When I saw the movie, I instinctively discounted the voice-over introduction as Hollywood anti-American propaganda, but I had no idea of just how deceiving it was.
(No problem about the Carter comment at the end: we all know that every politician compulsively blows his own fanfare.)
WRT Mossadegh it seems to me that the most obvious parallel is to Mussolini: both ruling under a king, both appointed because the king thought they were expressing the popular will, both increasing their powers through referendums, and both economic nationalists.
At the end, both were dumped by their king.
You’re right about the parallels between Mossadegh and Mussolini, at least early in their chronologies. The cases diverge as time goes on, on account of the war in the case of Mussolini, and the coming of first the Germans and then the Allies–and the fact that Mussolini and his mistress are strung up on meat hooks by a mob, and, of course, the Italian King lasts only until 1946, when the Kingdom is abolished by referendum and Victor Emmanuel ends up, in all places, in Egypt.
Thanks, Adam Garfinkle, for challenging the widely accepted but false historical narrative in which Affleck et al. packaged Argo. It made me cringe when I saw the film, but how else would it have won Best Picture? Thanks also to Cunctator and John Burke for elaborating some crucial details about the Shah and the overthrow of Mossadegh. How rare it is to hear your voices!
You’re right; no revisionism, probably no “best picture.”
An outstanding pieces of antirevisionist history by Mr Garfinkle. The Mossadegh coup has been revised, retold and generally laundered over the past few decades, and this article puts it right.
Mr Garfinkle points out that Mossadegh was not democratically elected, as there were no democratic elections in Iran (not at that time, nor since, arguably). Mossadegh can charitably be described as a crack pot, with a mania about Britain bordering on insanity.
Arguments are sometimes made that the oil companies were enjoying excessive returns, at the cost of the Iranian government, and that Mossadegh’s action in more or less stealing these operations was no more than rough justice. Such arguments are puerile, and are grounded in a misunderstanding of what is a highly complex industry. As Mr Garfinkle points out, Iran could not have developed its own energy industry.
It is also true that there was a long history of British involvement, not to say exploitation, in Iran. Certainly, by the middle of the 20th century, Britain was regarded vis a vi Iran, rather in the same way that Israel is regarded with respect to the Levant. While it is true that Britain did meddle in Iran prior to WW1, it could also be argued that British involvement in Iran during WW2 prevented a Soviet takeover. Mossadegh manipulated this anti-British sentiment, stoked it, and profited from it. He was one of Iran’s richest landowners, and like all do-gooding politicians, safely above the day-to-day challenges of the people he tried to govern. “Playing at politics” would be a charitable description of what he was up to.
Mr Garfinkle is to be praised for exposing an incorrect, politically-driven narrative. The frightening aspect of all this is that the narrative ever existed in the first place, that it can be stated with a straight face (“The Persian Empire”, forsooth) and is so readily accepted as to pass 99% of reviewers right by.
However, it is worth noting in passing one positive sign — that the film was made at all, and at least does not glorify or sympathise too closely with the thugs that raised the revolution and brought Iran to probably the worst 30 years in its history, periods of rule by Greeks and Parthians notwithstanding.
Very good. Both the article and the comments.
All but one of my professors argue what you point out as false in point 3 as true. Thank you for correcting the point. Too bad the academy will teach the lie.
Too bad indeed. Beware academics with ideological axes to grind.
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I enjoy reading Mr. Garfinkle’s sanitized version of the transition of power in Iran. Much of this critique leaves out many important elements, and focuses on mundane suppositions (the Shah instituted the vote for woman….Is Affleck saying this is bad?). In an effort to say, “Mossedegh was a crazy power hungry nationalist who violated international law, and okay the CIA may have helped his exit a bit, but he wasn’t a good guy.” to trying to frame the Shah as a reformist, and forgiving him for a life of opulence because after all, he was a King you idiots. As I stated above he forgets about Operation Ajax, and conveniently forgets the entire Iran Arms for Hostages/Ollie North/delay of hostage release dog and pony show that occupied our nations attention for sometime back in 1987. But of course, Mr. North was a patriot. And it was never proven that Reagan’s people delayed the release, so don’t pay attention to any of this detail. I’ll simple offer that you envy Mr. Affleck because he was able to tell his altered version of the truth and you have not been able to get anyone to buy your altered version for production. Plenty of conservatives in Hollywood to make that movie.
What an unusually lame comment.
First, you mock my analysis with a tone that is manifestly unserious. Second, the reason I did not mention Ollie North and “arms for hostages” is that they have nothing to do with the period Argo and I focus on. Your intimation, without any evidence, that I was fine with all that is offensive. So who is cherry-picking?
Speaking of which, there is zero evidence that the Reagan transition team tried to delay the return of the hostages. Why would I mention someone else’s baseless, lurid fantasy?
As for your last bizarre accusation, let me just note as fact that I have worked as a Senate staffer, a federal commission in which the SectDef signed my paychecks, done consulting for the intelligence community and worked as a speechwriter for two Secretaries of State–and you think I envy Ben Affleck, and am all torn up because I’m not “in” with Hollywood? You are very funny, although I am pretty sure you don’t mean to be.
Will you be reviewing The Gatekeepers?
Maybe–have not yet seen it.
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With regards to point #1, as Iran was officially called the Imperial State of Persia under Shah Pahlavi’s rule isn’t it still more or less correct to name it the Persian Empire?
For the rest I would just say in short that I find most of Mr. Garfinkle’s points on the whole unconvincing.
I think the broad outlines of the intro captured reasonably well how most Iranians would understand their history (your defence of colonial oil concessions tends to ignore the imbalance in negotiating power). Yes, I would like some more nuance in much of the history, particularly the immediate post-revolutionary period but I always want more nuance! And there is a limit to how much nuance one can pack into a concise 2-3 minute segment.
What did surprise me, given your focus on greater historical accuracy, is how you ignored the major bloopers in the core of the film:
- understating the Canadian role
- the creation of fictional and silly events (the bazaar scene – the hostages never left the Canadian houses except for Christmas dinner and one or two other meetings, the airport scene – they simply walked through.
That being said, we liked the movie and it captured the overall time, place and tension well.
First off, you’re simply wrong. Reza Shah changed the name of the country to Iran in 1935. No one in the 1970s called the country “The Imperial State” of anything. My point was that the territorial configurations of the three great Iranian empires were each vastly different from that of the Iranian state in the 20th century. Apparently, you missed that point.
As to your not being convinced, well, that’s your problem. I don’t expect to convince those living in fact-free zones. And good luck with that…..
The “major bloopers” you mention I left alone as being within the ambit of legitimate artistic license. Film artists deserve some slack when they try their hand at this sort of thing, which is why I praise the verisimilitude of the movie once it really gets going. The framing front and back ends do not deserve that slack, in my view.
Otherwise, you’re right to say that most Iranians would have agreed with the plot line of the introductory frame at the time. I am not so sure they still think that way, what with the United States being so popular in Iran as a result of the widespread hatred of the clerical regime. There is new research too, by the way, suggesting that clerical opposition to Mossadegh had more to do with his fall than anything the CIA or British intelligence did–two relatively new books make that argument.
As to unequal negotiating power, well, the point stands that the Iranians at the time lacked the technical ability to find, extract, refine, transport and market oil. The negotiating imbalance was not imperial so much as civilizational, and the British did not force themselves on the Iranian leadership after 1906. It was a matter of mutual interest.
Fellow readers and commenters:
The Iran / Mossadegh / Shah / hostage question seems similar to the Chambers / Hiss question: no matter how much is written, how many verifiable, legitimate records are searched, and how many times historians and journalists beat through the piles of evidence, hearsay, opinion and, to be frank, cant, there are still some who produce red herrings, refuse to believe what is patently true, believe what has been demonstrated as unproven or incapable of demonstration, and maintain what can only be described as beliefs.
The following beliefs bedevil the discussion on Iran, hostages, the Shah and related matters:
1. Mossadegh was democratically elected (dealt with most thoroughly above, by John Burke and Mr Garfinkle.)
2. The CIA / MI6 perverted the course of Iranian history in operation Ajax, when Boy Scout was put back on the throne.
3. Most of the events of 1978-1979 can be explained as a result of 1, and 2.
4. When an Iranian, Egyptian, Afghani (add as many as you wish) says “democratically elected” it means just the same as when the US board that supervises elections (whatever that may be) says “democratically elected president of the US”.
5. Not exactly a belief, but some kind of an emotional reflex: “Alternatives to monarchies and dictatorships, as long as they do not wear polished boots, have little moustaches and as long as they are not caucasian, must be reflexions of the people’s will”.
This is not to belittle thoughtful people who really do want to know the truth, and who have a genuine sympathy for the Shah’s opponents (talk to victims of Savak and it is difficult not to damn the entire Iranian state apparatus of the period), and this is not throwing up straw men. It is an appeal to stop making false analogies, imputing equivalency and pulling up red herrings such as Iran / Contra, which was not even a twinkle in Oliver North’s eye in 78/79 when the hostages were taken.
And, why would anyone envy Ben Affleck? He has tried to do a decent piece of work, historical facts are not available to him, or do not fit exactly into the story he was trying to tell. Is this something to envy?
Very well stated. Thanks for contributing so masterfully to this conversation.
“As to unequal negotiating power, well, the point stands that the Iranians at the time lacked the technical ability to find, extract, refine, transport and market oil. The negotiating imbalance was not imperial so much as civilizational, and the British did not force themselves on the Iranian leadership after 1906. It was a matter of mutual interest.”
I wonder if that response doesn’t give short shrift to Andrew Griffith’s point about colonial oil concessions and the imbalance in negotiating power. If it’s true the British had the technical means and knowledge to exploit the resource, and the Iranians didn’t, just how long should we expect any people not to resent such power or indeed overthrow it? For roughly half a century, until Mossadegh, the British and others controlled the resource, and re-acquired control, I presume, for another decade or two (if that’s not true, please enlighten).
Isn’t that the crux of the issue–whose resource is it? That doesn’t mean that Mossadegh was a democrat or some sort of hero or that the current regime isn’t worse than the Shah’s, but I wonder if you haven’t ignored to a degree the struggle for ownership of the oil. Again, that doesn’t mean Iranians are better off with the clerics’ control of the oil, but I doubt very much any Iranians, including the current regime’s opponents, would favor giving it back to Western powers.
I don’t mean to ignore your criticisms of the Affleck film; they seem well grounded. But more of the context for Iranian hostility against the West might recognize even more nuance.
Sure, that’s true. As Iran became more modern and less politically passive under Reza Shah and then especially under Mohammed Reza Shah, what had been taken for granted became problematic. That’s why I said that the latter was in some ways the victim of his own successes. The point remains, now for the third time, however, that the potted history at the beginning of Argo treats this subject in a decontextualized and ideologically romantic way designed to make the West–Britain and the United States by association–evil enough to deserve having its diplomats taken hostage. That’s the revisionist logic I described at work.
Excellent piece. A couple of things.
First, the ’53 coup happened during the Cold War. We did what we thought we had do. This goes for all kinds of things across a wide range from fighting wars to persecuting Hollywood communist sympathizers. I wonder how things would be had McCarthy gone after Nazi sympathizers? Would we today be hearing about the evil ‘Nazi witch hunt’? Anyway, I thought that the geopolitical aspect to this was worth bringing up.
Second, regarding the subject of lies in general, we live in an era of gnostic ideology where what is deemed to be true is what needs to be true in order to support the illusions of a second, entirely man-made reality. Thank you for the Crichton quote. Plato would not be surprised: was there ever a more tangible embodiment of the cave allegory than the flat-panel TV and the overstuffed sofa?
Thank you, and good points. As I have written elsewhere, if I had it to do all over again I would not hesitate to put the Shah back on his throne. Can you imagine how US diplomatic and military options in the region would have been constrained in crises had Iran been a Soviet proxy? Now there’s a counterfactual to raise a fright.
And I love your equation of the cave allegory with flat-panel TVs and overstuffed sofas. That is downright masterful.