Challenge of the East

Mossadegh — TIME’s 1951 Man of the Year


Arash Norouzi

The Mossadegh Project | January 7, 2022                    


Challenge of the East: TIME's 1951 Man of the Year Mohammad Mossadegh

“He oiled the wheels of chaos” reads the caption underneath the finely illustrated portrait of Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh, TIME magazine’s choice of Man of the Year for 1951.

By the time the issue was released, TIME had published at least 50 articles on Prime Minister Mossadegh and the oil nationalization saga. In June, they put him on their cover for the first time. Caption: “Feet first into chaos?”. At the time, they were still incorrectly spelling his name “Mossadeq”. This was soon fixed, but the “chaos” tag stayed.

January 7, 2022 marks the 70th anniversary of this confounding article, which I have carefully examined below (someone had to do it). With no byline, it reads more like a patchwork of unrelated vignettes from various authors than a well researched profile of a significant world figure.

In fact, of its 3,745 words, only
about 35% are about Mossadegh!


TIME's Man of the Year of 1951, Mohammad Mossadegh Around 1,800 words are relevant to Iran, of which 1,325 relate to Mossadegh himself. Most of that text, however, is made up of loose assertions and meaningless anecdotes. Actual biographical details, as an encyclopedia might offer, are about 125 words, or 3%. Background info on the actual oil dispute? Maybe three lines. They had room, however, to call Mossadegh “strange” three times — twice in the same sentence.

The rest of the piece is a series of tangents, including a tedious, defensive litany of rationalizations for why other contenders (7 in all) were not chosen instead, even a dissertation on U.S. domestic problems.

TIME’s decision, announced publicly on Jan. 2, 1952, was surprising and controversial. Editor T. S. Matthews (1901-1991) had pushed for Mossadegh to be selected, against the wishes of publisher Henry Luce, who favored Gen. Douglas MacArthur. As a piece of editing, particularly for an international news publication of TIME’s stature, it is a spectacular mess.

Unfocused and frequently incoherent, “Challenge of the East” was, quite objectively, a journalistic disgrace, and the passage of time makes this all the clearer.

Time Names Iran’s Premier, Mossadegh, Man of the Year

MOSSADEGH TOP MAN OF ‘51 SAYS TIME MAGAZINE

Mossadegh, ‘Sad To Relate’, Named Man of Year by Time

Premier Mossadegh of Iran Nominated Man of Year 1951 by Editors of Time

Mossadegh Is Named ‘Man of the Year’ by Time Magazine

Mossadegh, ‘Sad to Say’, Is Time’s Man of ‘51

TIME REGRETFULLY PICKS MOSSADEGH AS ‘MAN OF YEAR’

Read reactions from newspapers across the country:

Salt Lake Tribune (Utah) | January 4, 1952
Man of Year Choice Echoes 1951 Defeatism

Jamestown Post-Journal (New York) | January 4, 1952
A Moslem Pinkney

Schenectady Gazette (New York) | January 5, 1952
Man of the Year

Corpus Christi Caller-Times (Texas) | January 5, 1952
Time’s Man of the Year

Buffalo Evening News (New York) | January 5, 1952
Pipsqueak of the Year

Fresno Bee (California) | January 6, 1952
Man Of The Year Choice Reflects Leadership Need

Greeley Daily Tribune (Colorado) | January 8, 1952
Time’s Man of Year Pinpoints Moral Issue

The Michigan Daily (Univ. of Michigan) | January 10, 1952
Iranian Scramble


TIME magazine archive
Mossadegh media archive





Time, January 7, 1952

MAN OF THE YEAR: Challenge of the East


Once upon a time, in a mountainous land between Baghdad and the Sea of Caviar, there lived a nobleman. This nobleman, after a lifetime of carping at the way the kingdom was run, became Chief Minister of the realm. In a few months he had the whole world hanging on his words and deeds, his jokes, his tears, his tantrums. Behind his grotesque antics lay great issues of peace or war, progress or decline, which would affect many lands far beyond his mountains.

With this unorthodox intro, styled like an old Oriental folk tale, TIME demonstrates their unprofessional attitude right from the jump.

His methods of government were peculiar. For example, when he decided to shift his governors, he dropped into a bowl slips of paper with the names of provinces; each governor stepped forward and drew a new province. Like all ministers, the old nobleman was plagued with friends, men-of-influence, patriots and toadies who came to him with one proposal or another. His duty bade him say no to these schemes, but he was such a kindly fellow (in some respects) that he could not bear to speak the word. He would call in his two-year-old granddaughter and repeat the proposal to her, in front of the visitor. [Susu, daughter of Gholam-Hossein] Since she was a well-brought-up little girl, to all these propositions she would unhesitatingly say no. “How can I go against her?” the old gentleman would ask. After a while, the granddaughter, bored with the routine, began to answer yes occasionally. This saddened the old man, for it ruined his favorite joke, and might even have made the administration of the country more inefficient than it was already. [What’s the source of this anecdote?]

In foreign affairs, the minister pursued a very active policy—so active that in the chancelleries of nations thousands of miles away, lamps burned late into the night as other governments tried to find a way of satisfying his demands without ruining themselves. [This could only mean Britain and America] Not that he ever threatened war. His weapon was the threat of his own political suicide, as a wilful little boy might say, “If you don’t give me what I want I’ll hold my breath until I’m blue in the face. Then you’ll be sorry.”

In this way, the old nobleman became the most world-renowned man his ancient race had produced for centuries. In this way, too, he increased the danger of a general war among nations, impoverished his country and brought it and some neighboring lands to the very brink of disaster.

Which neighboring countries did Mossadegh nearly do in? Name one.

Yet his people loved all that he did, and cheered him to the echo whenever he appeared in the streets. [They must be crazy!]

The New Menace. In the year of his rise to power, he was in some ways the most noteworthy figure on the world scene. Not that he was the best or the worst or the strongest, but because his rapid advance from obscurity was attended by the greatest stir. The stir was not only on the surface of events: in his strange way, this strange old man represented one of the most profound problems of his time. Around this dizzy old wizard swirled a crisis of human destiny.

Maddeningly vague world salad, signifying nothing.

He was Mohammed Mossadegh, Premier of Iran in the year 1951. He was the Man of the Year. He put Scheherazade in the petroleum business and oiled the wheels of chaos. His acid tears dissolved one of the remaining pillars of a once great empire. In his plaintive, singsong voice he gabbled a defiant challenge that sprang out of a hatred and envy almost incomprehensible to the West.

More frivolity, circuitousness and unsubstantiated assertions.

“If my contrast of your own abundant freedom with our shackled liberties is touched by envy,” said Mossadegh in Philadelphia, “it is because we share with you a love of liberty and because we have been less fortunate than you in wresting our prized freedom from that country which in 1776 had to yield it to you.”

Hatred of the West? Mossadegh also assured former oil buyers, “The West has the priority and will always have the priority.”


There were millions inside and outside of Iran whom Mossadegh symbolized and spoke for, and whose fanatical state of mind he had helped to create. They would rather see their own nations fall apart than continue their present relations with the West. Communism encouraged this state of mind, and stood to profit hugely from it. But Communism did not create it. The split between the West and the non-Communist East was a peril all its own to world order, quite apart from Communism. Through 1951 the Communist threat to the world continued; but nothing new was added—and little subtracted. The news of 1951 was this other danger in the Near and Middle East. In the center of that spreading web of news was Mohammed Mossadegh.

Read the above again. It doesn’t make sense. Mossadegh helped create this alleged radicalism, but it already existed prior to the Cold War!

A Matter of Conscience. The West’s military strength to resist Communism grew in 1951. But Mossadegh’s challenge could not be met by force. For all its power, the West in 1951 failed to cope with a weeping, fainting leader of a helpless country; the West had not yet developed the moral muscle to define its own goals and responsibilities in the Middle East. Until the West did develop that moral muscle, it had no chance with the millions represented by Mossadegh. [Why not just get the cojones to resist underwriting British colonialism?] In Iran, in Egypt, in a dozen other countries, when people asked: “Who are you? What are you doing here?” the West’s only answer was an unintelligible mutter. Charles Malik, Lebanon’s great delegate to the U.N., put it tersely: “Do you know why there are problems in the Near East? Because the West is not sure of itself.” The East would be in turmoil until the West achieved enough moral clarity to construct a just and fruitful policy toward the East.

“Everything depends on the strength of the West, particularly the intellectual and spiritual strength”, said Malik in an address at Harvard on Aug. 9, 1950. “When the West returns to its best self, our problems in the Near East will be solved—and not ours alone.”

In the U.S., the core of the West, the moral climate was foggy. Scandal chased scandal across the year’s headlines. Senator Estes Kefauver revived the Middle Ages morality play, on television. Kefauver’s reluctant mummers were followed by basketball players who rarely threw games—just points, and West Pointers who were taught a rigid code of honor which did not seem to apply when the football squad took academic examinations.

1) Kefauver Committee on organized crime, viewed on TV by millions, chaired by Sen. Estes Kefauver and featuring mobster Frank Costello.

2) Point shaving scandal at seven colleges in cahoots with illegal gambling syndicates and crooked cops. Soon a movie dramatizing the whole affair, The Basketball Fix (1951), was released.

3) Cheating scandal involving athletes at West Point military academy leading to the expulsion of 90 cadets for violating the Honor Code.


None of 1951’s scandals indicated thoroughgoing moral depravity, or even idiocy—just an inability to tell right from wrong if the question was put (as it usually was) in fine print. [What?] This uneducated moral sense led congressional committees through a sordid trail of mink coats and other gifts to Government officials. [Excesses of the Truman administration] Casuistry reached a high point with the official whose conscience told him that it was proper to accept a ham under twelve pounds, but not a bigger one. Democratic Chairman William Boyle resigned his job under a cumulus cloud of influence peddling, and his successor was hardly in office before clouds gathered over him too. The public worked up quite a head of indignant steam over scandals in the Bureau of Internal Revenue, which was taking more of its money than ever before. This indignation fell like a load of hay on Harry Truman. Perhaps it would be the understatement of the year to say that 1951 was not Truman’s year.

To sum up: the United States is in moral freefall, with rampant corruption reaching all the way to the White House. So who better to steer the Middle East and their ne’er do-well leaders on the right path than America?

Here’s Rep. Fritz G. Lanham (D-TX) discussing the U.S. ethics crisis in the House of Representatives, Sept. 27, 1951:

“I love the Democratic Party but I do not approve the influence peddling, the mink coats, the deep freezes, free trips to Florida, 11½ pound hams—some of them petty things it is true—that have come to light recently through investigations sponsored and carried to a successful conclusion by such stalwart young Democrats as Senator Fulbright, of Arkansas; Senator Kefauver, of Tennessee; and others who have been uncompromising in their efforts to uncover whatever bribery and corruption and whatever lowering of public morals might exist in our government.

It is true that the shady and evil-smelling acts that have come to light and that have been brought to the surface by these investigations are but emblematic and symptomatic of a general worsening of public morals and a general lowering of ethical and moral standards that have been creeping and spreading like a cancerous growth throughout our 20th century civilization. This lowering of moral and ethical standards is evident from what has been happening in a few of our colleges where students have been bribed to fix athletic games and even in our Academy at West Point. It is evident in the attitude of businessmen who seek to buy the influence of government officials and law enforcement officers. For every official who is bribed or corrupted, someone is equally guilty in offering the bribe which leads to the corruption of the public official.”


Other Men of 1951. Nor was it Dean Acheson’s year—except in the sense that he survived it. By his firm and skillful handling of the Japanese Treaty conference at San Francisco, Acheson got at least his forepaws out of the public’s doghouse, and proved once again that he would be a masterful Secretary of State if all the U.S.’s enemies could be disposed of with a gavel. Yet all through 1951, Acheson’s State Department was still caught as tight as Brer Rabbit in Tar Baby. The useless and impossible effort to justify its past mistakes consumed its energies. In this year-long waste of time, Senator Joe McCarthy, the poor man’s Torquemada, played Tar Baby. [Spanish Inquisition reference]

Note that although TIME despised McCarthyism, they had no problem weaponizing it against Mossadegh.

Credit for the big diplomatic achievement of the year goes not to the State Department but to a Republican—John Foster Dulles, who, step by careful step, won nearly all of the free world to accept the Japanese Peace Treaty, and thereby handed Communism a stunning diplomatic defeat. But the Japanese Treaty was more a beginning than an end. Whether it became the keystone of a more successful U.S. policy in the Far East would depend on how well U.S.-Japanese relations were handled in the future.

Dulles and his brother Allen were friends with TIME publisher Henry Luce and his wife, diplomat Clare Booth Luce.

Matthew Ridgway and his valiant men in Korea did all that men could be expected to do—and more. But the Korean war had been in an uneasy stalemate since May. [General who replaced MacArthur in Korea]

France’s General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny turned the tide against the Communist advance in Indo-China. At year’s end, however, De Lattre lay ill in Paris, and the Indo-China war was far from won.

In 1951’s first months, it looked as if Eisenhower would certainly be the Man of the Year. [Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, another friend and ally of Luce] Never in recent history has Europe experienced such a lifting of heart as it got from Ike’s inspiring presence and his skillful, patient incubation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. In December 1950, NATO seemed just another paper plan doomed to failure. By April 1951 it was a psychological reality: Europeans began to believe that Europe could and would be defended. By year’s end, NATO was a military reality, with six U.S. and twelve European divisions in the field. Defeatism faded, neutralism began to fade, because arms came into being; and the fading of defeatism made more arms possible. Europe, for a change, was moving in a virtuous circle.

Through no fault of Ike’s, the heart-lift and the arming both slowed down. At year’s end, Britain and France were in bad economic trouble. Headway had been made on the German problem, but the Germans, with the tragic consistency of their character, were again pushing and shoving into a bargaining position.

Ike in Europe registered a big net gain, although Europe was still in no position to beat off a Russian attack. Ike in the U.S. was a fascinating political riddle, and, to millions, the best hope in 18 years of replacing the New-Fair Deal. On the record, Ike was not the Man of 1951; 1952 might be his year. Or Robert Taft’s. Or, in spite of 1951’s scandals, Harry Truman’s.

From several paragraphs earlier: “Perhaps it would be the understatement of the year to say that 1951 was not Truman’s year.” TIME expected the U.S. to be more certain of its purpose in the Middle East, but couldn’t even abide its own reasoning.

The outstanding comeback of 1951 was Winston Churchill’s. In his first two months of office he moved with the utmost caution, apparently trying to prove that he could be almost as colorless as a Socialist. This might be good politics, but it did not make big news.

The Old Soldier. Many thought Douglas MacArthur the logical choice for Man of the Year. The arguments were impressive : 1) he was winning the Korean war, in so far as he was permitted to win it, when he was fired; 2) his speech before Congress breathed a sense of high public duty long absent from U.S. affairs; 3) the Japanese Treaty was a monument to his bold and generous effort to find a new U.S. relationship with Asian peoples; 4) to millions of Americans, he remained the No. 1 U.S. hero, by no means faded away.

However, by year’s end MacArthur had abdicated a position of national leadership to become spokesman for a particular group. Some passages in his later speeches were ambiguous and inconsistent with his own basic line of thought and action. These ambiguities, plus the distortion of MacArthur by his friends of the Hearst and McCormick press, led some to conclude that MacArthur was an isolationist; others, that he was an imperialist. Both tags were absurd, yet the figure of MacArthur in U.S. life was neither as clear nor as large in December as it had been in April.

TIME/LIFE publisher Henry Luce wanted his good friend MacArthur to be 1951 Man of the Year, but relented to the editors.

Nevertheless, his Congress speech still sang in the nation’s conscience. [Douglas MacArthur’s farewell speech on April 19, 1951, following his dismissal by Truman, slightly misquoted by TIME.] It contained a brilliant passage applicable to 1951’s biggest news — the turmoil in the Middle East. Asian peoples, MacArthur said, would continue to drive for independence from the West and for material progress, and this drive “may not be stopped.” The U.S. must “orient its policies in consonance with this basic evolutionary condition, rather than pursue a course blind to the reality that the colonial era is now past and the Asian peoples covet the right to shape their own [free] destiny. What they seek now is friendly guidance, understanding and support, not imperious direction; the dignity of equality, and not the shame of subjugation.”

Indeed, MacArthur spoke of the “long exploited” people of Asia, who yearned to “throw off the shackles of colonialism” and indulge that “normal, nationalist urge for political freedom”. Indeed, this did apply to current events, including the struggle between Iran and the world’s largest empire, Great Britain. So what made Mossadegh and the Iranian people “fanatical” for pursuing these noble goals, sanctified by the Old Soldier himself?

No George Washington. The U.S. vaguely agreed with MacArthur’s plea: it wanted to feel sympathy toward the aspirations of Asian peoples. After all, material progress and national independence are both classic American doctrines, and the U.S. could envision itself as playing Lafayette to Asian George Washingtons. But in terms of Asian realities, the Lafayette-Washington picture was sheer sentimentality, and, like all sentimentality, led to bad morals. MacArthur knew the discouraging facts of Asian politics. He wanted the U.S. to face the facts and build a policy upon them. The U.S.—or at least its official leadership—was appalled by the facts. Just as it had recoiled from Nationalist China, crying “Corruption,” so in 1951 the U.S. recoiled from the corruption, hatred, fanaticism and disorganization of the Middle East.

TIME already established that U.S. institutions from the IRS to the Army were stacked with dishonorable and corrupt individuals, so why so sensitive?

Mossadegh, by Western standards an appalling caricature of a statesman, was a fair sample of what the West would have to work with in the Middle East. To sit back and deplore him was to run away from the issue. For a long time, relations with the Middle East would mean relations with men such as Mossadegh, some better, some much worse.

What made Mossadegh so deplorable? TIME won’t tell you, just trust them.

The Iranian George Washington was probably born in 1879 (he fibs about his age). [He was born June 16, 1882, making him 69.] His mother was a princess of the Kajar dynasty then ruling Persia; [Qajar] his father was for 30 years Finance Minister of the country. Mohammed Mossadegh entered politics in 1906. An obstinate oppositionist, he was usually out of favor and several times exiled. In 1919, horrified by a colonial-style treaty between Britain and Persia, he hardened his policy into a simple Persia-for-the-Persians slogan. While the rest of the world went through Versailles, Manchuria, the Reichstag fire, Spain, Ethiopia and a World War, Mossadegh kept hammering away at his single note. Nobody in the West heard him.

TIME neglected to mention Mossadegh’s vocal opposition to “Soviet aggression” in 1946 when the Russian army remained in Iran after WWII, a violation of the Tripartite Treaty. This made news worldwide at the time.

As nationally syndicated columnist Drew Pearson — no fan of Mossadegh — put it just days later, “Mossadegh happens to be a long and courageous battler against communism and Russian influence. It was he who blocked confirmation of the 1949 treaty between Iran and Russia giving the Soviet power to exploit oil in northern Iran. It was he also who threw out the Russian puppet-rulers of Azerbaijan.”


They heard him in 1951, however. On March 8, the day after Ali Razmara, Iran’s able, pro-Western Premier, was assassinated), Mossadegh submitted to the Iranian Majlis his proposal to nationalize Iran’s oil. In a few weeks a wave of anti-foreign feeling, assisted by organized terrorism, swept him into the premiership.

• Mossadegh was nominated by a rival deputy who expected him to back down. He didn’t, and was promptly elected by the Majles (Parliament) by a vote of 79-12. Nothing terroristic about it.

• “Anti-foreign feeling”. Just say Britain. And didn’t Americans hate Soviet Russia and all those dirty Commies, or the “Japs” in World War II? Didn’t many Americans hate and fear “Negroes” and obsessively segregate themselves from them? See: Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, the gruesome murder of young Emmett Till in 1955, etc.

The Anglo-Iranian Oil Co., most of whose stock is owned by the British government, had been paying Iran much less than the British Government took from the company in taxes. [Oh! So there’s actually a basis for the resentment. How would Americans have felt about that?] The U.S. State Department warned Britain that Iran might explode unless it got a better deal, but the U.S. did not press the issue firmly enough to make London listen. Mossadegh’s nationalization bill scared the company into concessions that were made too late. The Premier, whose mind runs in a deep single track, was committed to nationalization—and much to the surprise of the British, he went through with it, right down to the expulsion of the British technicians without whom the Iranians cannot run the Abadan refinery.

The Oil Nationalization Law was passed in the Parliament and supported by the majority of Iranians, not just the Premier. Mossadegh asked the British AIOC personnel to remain for the same salaries, but they were removed from Abadan spitefully.

Results: 1) the West lost the Iranian oil supply; 2) the Iranian government lost the oil payments; 3) this loss stopped all hope of economic progress in Iran and disrupted the political life of the country; 4) in the ensuing confusion, Iran’s Tudeh (Communist) Party made great gains which it hoped to see reflected in the national elections, due to begin this week.

Tears & Laughter. Mossadegh does not promise his country a way out of this nearly hopeless situation. He would rather see the ruin of Iran than give in to the British, who, in his opinion, corrupted and exploited his country. He is not in any sense pro-Russian, but he intends to stick to his policies even though he knows they might lead to control of Iran by the Kremlin.

The suicidal quality of this fanaticism can be seen in the two men closest to Mossadegh in politics. Ayatulla Kashani is a zealot of Islam who has spent his life fighting the infidel British in Iraq and Iran. [Ayatollah Kashani, powerful cleric and future Majles speaker] He controls the Teheran mobs (except those controlled by the Communists), and his terrorist organization assassinated Razmara. [Feda’ian Islam] Hussein Makki controls the oil-rich province of Khuzistan, in which the Abadan refinery lies. [Hossein Makki] When the British got out, Mossadegh put Makki in charge of the oil installations. Makki’s view on oil: close up the wells, pull down the refinery and forget about it. Neither Makki, Kashani nor Mossadegh has ever shown any interest in rational plans for the economic reform and development of their country.

Sometimes the crisis through which Iran is passing depresses Mossadegh to the point of tears and fainting spells. Just as often, he seems to regard the state of affairs with a light heart. When he came to the U.S. to plead his cause, mercurial Mossadegh was so ready with quips, anecdotes and laughter that Secretary Acheson thought the visitor should be reminded of the gravity of the situation. At a Blair House luncheon where Mossadegh was guest of honor, Acheson told a story: a wagon train, crossing the American West, was attacked by Indians. A rescue party found the wagons burned, and the corpses of the pioneers lying around them. The only man still alive lay under a wagon, with an arrow through his back. “Does it hurt?” he was asked. The dying man whispered: “Only when I laugh.” Acheson looked pointedly at Mossadegh—who just doubled up with appreciative laughter.

TIME just stated that unlike Dean Acheson, Mossadegh was not a serious figure, and then offered an example of such mischieviousness — a dumb joke told by the U.S. Secretary of State! Note that the man who translated and recorded these conversations, Col. Vernon Walters, was an incurable wisenheimer and gossip. Did he leak this story to TIME?

Before he left the U.S., emptyhanded, Mossadegh’s name was thoroughly familiar to Americans. New York Daily News readers knew just what the News meant when it reported his return to the Iranian Majlis and his victory there, under the headline:

MOSSY WINS, 90 TO 0, ON A WET FIELD.

November 26, 1951 headline for an Associated Press article about Mossadegh earning a 90-0 vote of confidence in Parliament. It was not in all caps, however.

Five Grim Conclusions. The fact that Iranians accept Mossadegh’s suicidal policy is a measure of the hatred of the West—and especially the hatred of Britain—in the Near and Middle East. The Iranian crisis was still bubbling when Egypt exploded with the announcement that it was abrogating its 1936 treaty with Britain. The Egyptian government demanded that British troops get off the soil of Egypt. Since the British were guarding the Suez Canal, they refused. The Egyptians rioted, perhaps in the belief that the U.S., which had opposed any use of force in Iran, would take the same line in Egypt. The U.S., however, backed the British, and the troops stayed. But now they can only stay in Egypt as an armed occupation of enemy territory. Throughout the East, that kind of occupation may soon cost more than it is worth.

Since Mossadegh’s rise, U.S. correspondents have been swarming over the Near and Middle East. Their general consensus is that:

1) The British position in the whole area is hopeless. They are hated and distrusted almost everywhere. The old colonial relationship is finished, and no other power can replace Britain. [As MacArthur cautioned]

In June Mossadegh promised Truman: “You may rest assured, Mr. President, that the Iranian people are desirous of maintaining their friendship with all nations and especially with those, like the British nation, which have had age-long relations with them.”

2) If left to “work out their own destiny” without help, the countries of the Middle East will disintegrate. The living standard will drop and political life become even more chaotic. (Half a dozen important political leaders in the Near and Middle East were assassinated during 1951.)

Then why not help the non-Communist, elected Premier Mossadegh, himself the target of assassins? He literally asked for American help.

3) Left to themselves, these countries will reach the point where they will welcome Communism.

4) The U.S., which will have to make the West’s policy in the Middle East, whether it wants to or not, as yet has no policy there. The U.S. pants along behind each crisis, tossing a handful of money here, a political concession there. At the height of the Egyptian crisis (the worst possible moment), the U.S., Britain, France and Turkey invited Egypt to join a defense pact. The invitation was promptly rejected.

5) Americans and Britons in the Near and Middle East spend a large part of their energies fighting each other. No effective Western policy is possible without Western unity.

The word “American” no longer has a good sound in that part of the world. To catch the Jewish vote in the U.S., President Truman in 1946 demanded that the British admit 100,000 Jewish refugees to Palestine, in violation of British promises to the Arabs. Since then, the Arab nations surrounding Israel have regarded that state as a U.S. creation, and the U.S., therefore, as an enemy. The Israeli-Arab war created nearly a million Arab refugees, who have been huddled for three years in wretched camps. These refugees, for whom neither the U.S. nor Israel will take the slightest responsibility, keep alive the hatred of U.S. perfidy.

No enmity for the Arabs, no selfish national design motivated the clumsy U.S. support of Israel. The American crime was not to help the Jews, but to help them at the expense of the Arabs. Today, the Arab world fears and expects a further Israeli expansion. The Arabs are well aware that Alben Barkley, Vice President of the U.S., tours his country making speeches for the half-billion-dollar Israeli bond issue, the largest ever offered to the U.S. public. Nobody, they note bitterly, is raising that kind of money for them.

And they’re off on another tangent, this time vis-a-vis Israel-Palestine, which did nothing to strengthen their argument against Mossadegh or explain why he was their Man of the Year.

The Deep Problem. What is the right answer to the seething problem of the Middle East? It is much easier to see past U.S. mistakes, sins of omission and commission, than to plot a wise and firm future course. The U.S. success in Turkey, gratifying as it is, does not give much guidance on Western policy in the Arab countries and in Iran. Turkey had passed through a drastic process of modernization which in most of the Moslem world is still to come. But the U.S. cannot wait for Kemal Ataturks who are not in sight.

After Mossadegh became Premier, the State Department estimated his aims were “basically similar to ours in removing economic and political causes for discontent which allow present opportunities for Communist activity.”

The West’s new relationship with the East must start at a much deeper level than efforts at economic help or military alliance. Economic and military cooperation will be of little use unless they are part of a Western approach that involves the whole range of culture—especially religion and law.

In the current issue of Foreign Affairs, Lebanon’s Malik brilliantly lays the groundwork for such a change in Western attitude. Malik sums up:

“The disturbing rise of fanaticism in the Near East in recent years is a reaction to the thoughtlessness and superficiality of the West ... In all this we are really touching on the great present crisis in Western culture. We are saying when that culture mends its own spiritual fences, all will be well with the Near East, and not with the Near East alone. The deep problem of the Near East must await the spiritual recovery of the West. And he does not know the truth who thinks that the West does not have in its own tradition the means and the power wherewith it can once again be true to itself.”

Also from the same article: “Strategy, commerce, exploitation, securing an imperial route: these were why the West for the most part came to the Near East, not because it loved us. Add to this the immense racial arrogance of modern Europe. The West has not been true to itself, and therefore it could not have been true to us.”

In its leadership of the non-Communist world, the U.S. has some dire responsibilities to shoulder. One of them is to meet the fundamental moral challenge posed by the strange old wizard who lives in a mountainous land and who is, sad to relate, the Man of 1951.

When some readers complained, the Editors responded: “TIME’s Man of the Year is neither the winner of a popularity contest nor necessarily a great or good man, but one who has “done the most to change the news for better or for worse.”



Search MohammadMossadegh.com



Related links:

The Darbyshire Tapes: British Spy Norman Darbyshire’s Interview on Iran Examined

Pres. Truman “Most Disappointed” By Suspension of Iran Talks (Aug. 23, 1951)

In Defense Of Mossadegh | Letter to Editor, Detroit Free Press (Dec. 11, 1953)



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

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