ADVANCED technological devices of the Western world—airplanes. automobiles, military vehicles and weapons—for a quarter of a century blotted up the oil of Iran as fast as it could be pumped from the ground. When the last dribble of the precious fluid was cut off in October, 1951, at a climax to the dispute between Iran end Great Britain’s Anglo-American Oil company, there was consternation. How was the gap to be filled?

Well, the vacuum left by denial of Iran’s oil has been filled; more than filled. The production of oil wells of other Middle Eastern countries has been stimulated to a point where American resources need not be called upon to make up the difference.

Iraq, Saudi Arabia and other of Iran’s neighbors are experiencing prosperity from oil royalties unheard of while the British and Americans were departing—deep-laden with Iranian oil—from the Abadan refinery. Iran is sinking deeper end deeper into a morass of insolvency.

However humiliating it may be to Premier Mohammed Mossadegh to find out that the West can get along without his oil, he shows no disposition to rehabilitate his country by negotiation or compromise.

Representatives of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development have collided headfirst with the same nationalistic obstinacy on the part of Mossadegh and his government that plagued a succession of arbitrators, negotiators and go-betweens from Great Britain and the United States. The Iranians can’t operate the industry themselves and they won’t consent to let British experts in to operate it for them. They’d rather go bankrupt, Mossadegh says. That’s where matters rest today. The International Bank mission has not given up. Its members are waiting for a new parliament to take office in about a month.

By the time the New Majlis (parliament) takes over, Iran’s treasury will be cleaned out. Mossadegh and the extremist nationalists consider this a political question. All the agencies which have attempted to resolve the problem have approached it from the economic angle—which, so far as Iran is concerned today, is most certainly the proper one. On the day their nation goes flat broke and the government faces revolution or worse, Premier Mossadegh and his government may see reason and agree to what’s best for everybody concerned—a plan for national rehabilitation through the country’s only important national resource. But it is only a hope.