Crowbar Diplomacy
February 10, 1952 — The Buffalo Courier-Express

The Mossadegh Project | June 9, 2016                                   


An editorial in The Buffalo Courier-Express newspaper in New York from 1952.



World Bank Tries Once More
to Pry Loose Iran’s Oil

You have to give the World Bank credit for trying. It still has hopes of getting Iran’s vast oil facilities back into production and circulation.

The World Bank has tried before, as have so many others. But it ran squarely against the refusal of stubborn Premier Mohammed Mossadegh to accept any proposal for reviving oil production unless his government was given full control over operations.

Now the World Bank is trying again. It has sent a mission to Iran to renew negotiations in an effort to find a basis for agreement. Its plan is said to call for the bank to finance oil production and to divide proceeds from the sale of oil with Iran, part of the bank’s income being set aside to reimburse the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co., which Premier Mossadegh threw out in a fit of ultra-nationalism which has reduced his country’s oil revenues to nothing. [The plan was to pay ⅓ of the oil revenue to Iran, ⅓ to AIOC (after the settlement), and ⅓ to the biggest purchaser of oil, meaning AIOC! Naturally, Mossadegh objected.]

The world needs Iran’s oil. And certainly Iran stands in desperate need of money. The situation has all the earmarks of being ripe for compromise. But nothing resembling a spirit of compromise has been displayed by Premier Mossadegh to date. We wish the World Bank mission luck in a difficult endeavor.


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Related links:

More Details Wanted.The Times Record, February 15, 1952

International Bank Holds Hope Of Settling Iranian Oil CrisisCourier-Express, Jan. 3, 1952

More Than Iran Can ChewThe Lawrence Daily Journal-World, Dec. 12, 1951



MOSSADEGH t-shirts — “If I sit silently, I have sinned”

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