Ike Did It Cheaper

The not unsurprising news that American oil companies have been given no bid contracts to work in Iraq, bring to mind an earlier and far better orchestrated oil grab.
There can be no doubt that Dwight D. Eisenhower managed the Iranian oil grab much more efficiently and a thousand times cheaper than George W. Bush has managed the Iraqi oil grab.
Bush took six years, the loss of tens of thousands of lives, and up to $2 trillion to get a few one and two year contracts. Ike took three months, spent a couple of million dollars and got 26 years of Iranian oil production.
In the 1950s, Iran was experimenting with democracy and elected a solid nationalist as prime minister in 1951. The nationalist, Mohammad Mosaddeq, felt that British Petroleum was raping the country by not giving it half the profits from its Iranian oil production.
In 1951, the Majlis, Iranian Parliament, voted to nationalize BP’s holdings. The British, BP was partially owned by the British government, embargoed the sale of Iranian crude in an attempt to starve Iran into submission. Mosaddeq resigned when the Majlis refused to confirm what he considered his prime ministerial powers.
He was called back in 1953 at which point the British told Ike that Mosaddeq was a Communist who wished to throw all western oil companies completely out of the Middle East. It wasn’t true, of course, but you had to say Communist to get Ike’s attention. Ike, who liked to play bridge with a couple of Fort Worth oilmen, became convinced of the grave and imminent danger and dispatched a couple of CIA agents to Tehran to fix things.
The CIA spread a couple of million dollars around, fomented a “popular” uprising, and Mosaddeq became history. A terrified Shah was dragged back to Tehran where he promptly replaced Anglo-Persian Oil (the BP operation) with Iranian Oil Participants which included BP, Exxon, Mobil, Texaco, Chevron, Shell, Arco, Sohio, Getty CFP (a French oil company). Other American companies also got exploration and production rights in the country. They included Amoco, Superior, Sun, Cities Service, Kerr-McGee, Skelly, Murphy, Sun, Unocal and Conoco.
Very few people died from the coup. It cost chicken feed in terms of dollars. American companies had a major role in Iran for 26 years. The only real cost was the undying enmity of the Iranian people towards the USA which makes us completely without influence there. Do you think it could happen again?

Tom Gordon