Цитаты из книг — Stephen Kinzer

While Mossadegh dealt with this challenge, he also had to face another that most Iranians considered far more urgent. Their country was spiraling into bankruptcy. Tens of thousands had lost their jobs at the Abadan refinery, and although most understood and passionately supported the idea of nationalization, they…

The divisive election, the tightening British oil embargo, and the World Court case all weighed on Mossadegh’s mind as he returned home from The Hague at the end of June.

Mossadegh had already proven himself adept at reaching the American public. He appeared several times on television, and the seeming logic of his case, which he always compared to the struggle for American independence, won him considerable sympathy. His personal quirks—the long, aristocratic face that would suddenly…

How did Iran reach the tragic crossroads of August 1953? The main responsibility lies with the obtuse neocolonialism that guided the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and with the British government’s willingness to accept it. If the company had shown even a modicum of good sense, it could have reached a compromise with the…

Mossadegh had naively ordered police officers not to interfere with people’s right to demonstrate, so the mob was able to rampage more or less at will. This was a great boon to [Kermit] Roosevelt, since any riots at all, even ones that he did not control, served to persuade Iranians that their country was sinking into…

The great mob that surged through the streets of Tehran on August 18 was partly mercenary and partly a genuine expression of people’s loss of faith in Mossadegh.

During that year of 1951, Mossadegh vaulted onto the world stage and came to dominate it. He had become a defining figure whose ideas, for better or worse, were reshaping history. No one was surprised when Time magazine chose him — not Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, or Winston Churchill — as its Man of the Year.

Mossadegh never saw any contradiction between his boundless respect for Britain’s constitutional tradition and his contempt for its government and imperial history.

Certainly, Mossadegh was almost as resistant to compromise as were the British. At several points he might have declared victory and made a deal. In the summer of 1952, for example, he was an unassailable national hero. He had been returned to power by a spontaneous mass uprising and had won a great victory over the…

Islamic leaders do not know quite what to make of Mossadegh. They take his defeat as proof of their view that Iran is the eternal victim of cruel foreigners. Because he was a secular liberal, however, they cannot embrace him as a hero. The Iranian press reflected this ambivalence in the way it covered the forty-ninth…

Americans were indeed latecomers to the Middle East. The British scorned them as inexperienced and naïve. To a degree they were. They were instinctively repelled by Britain’s colonial arrogance, especially in Iran, but did not have enough self-confidence to act decisively on their own

From the vantage point of history, it is easy to see the catastrophic effects of Operation Ajax. They will continue to plague the world for many years. But what would have been the effect of not launching the coup? President Truman insisted until his last day in office that the United States must not intervene in Iran.…

Fundamentalist clerics who consolidated power in Iran during the early 1980s not only imposed a form of religious fascism at home but turned their country into a center for the propagation of terror abroad.

Holding the line against Third World nationalism was one of his [Churchill's] lifelong crusades, and in the sunset of his career he was determined to make a last stand.

The world has paid a heavy price for the lack of democracy in most of the Middle East. Operation Ajax taught tyrants and aspiring tyrants there that the world’s most powerful governments were willing to tolerate limitless oppression as long as oppressive regimes were friendly to the West and to Western oil companies. That…

Like most of the world’s communist parties, Tudeh was controlled by the Soviet Union, and in times of crisis it followed orders from Moscow. On this day, however, no orders came. Stalin had died a few months earlier and the Kremlin was in turmoil. Soviet intelligence officers who would normally be concentrating on Iran…

A solution to the oil dispute was now less likely than ever. Mossadegh remained fiercely determined to press ahead with his nationalization project, and the British remained equally determined to thwart it. President Truman decided to make a last effort at compromise and invited the Iranian leader to Washington.

During his first few months in the Majlis, Mossadegh rose often to speak. He addressed topics ranging from military corruption to the need for new industries in Iran, but his central themes were always democracy and self-reliance.

Like Mossadegh, he [Liaquat Ali Khan] was a visionary statesman, highly educated and erudite. He was committed to secular Islam and sympathetic to Western values but at the same time frustrated by what he saw as crippling vestiges of imperialism that prevented poor countries from achieving true independence. Pakistan…

He [Reza] made no progress toward creating the sense of shared enterprise and civic responsibility that is at the heart of successful societies.