A friend of mine, born in Iran but brought up in the United States, attending a U.S. preparatory school and an Ivy League University, where he read "Atlas Shrugged" and took the old NBI "Basic Principles of Objectivism Course," makes this brief comment on the ongoing debate, here, about Iran...
"First, the Darcy agreement signed in 1901 with the Persian shah accorded 16% of net profits to the shah as titular head of the Persian government. When oil was discovered in commercially viable quantities in 1908 and the Anglo Persian Oil Company was created in 1909, the British adhered to the terms of the agreement for several years, but they soon felt that paying the shah 16% of the profits was inconvenient. For that reason they organized the invasion of Persia by several thousand gurkha troops in 1921, who slaughtered over a thousand poorly trained and badly equipped soldiers and overthrew the Qajar dynasty, eventually sending the Persian shah into exile, and replacing him with Reza Khan, a British stooge in the Persian Cossack brigade, who eventually in 1925 became the first Pahlavi shah (also the father of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who was overthrown in 1979). One of Reza Khan's first acts was to renegotiate the terms of the Darcy concession, and he signed the new agreement, under which the 16% paid to the shah was reduced to 5%.
Reza Shah did not miss that loss of income, as he immediately embarked on the systematic plunder of wealth of Persia's One Thousand Families, as the elites of Persia were known at the time. His relentless and merciless campaign of self-enrichment included the murder and imprisonment of all of those who opposed him. His criminal plunder was known and tolerated by the British government, who allowed it to continue until 1941 when they feared that Reza Shah was becoming cozy with Adolf Hitler, and once again invaded Persia and sent him to exile and confiscated all of the wealth that he had amassed and had it shipped back to to London, where it remained for good.
"I would not give the narrative that the British were innocents who tried to defend their property rights under a valid commercial agreement any merit, as that is obviously preposterous, given Britain's egregious use of violence in its rape and plunder of Persia. For an excellent account of what transpired, have a look at "Great Britain and Reza Shah," written by Mohammad Gholi Majd. He used the Freedom of Information act to access the diplomatic correspondence between the US Embassy and consulates in Iran and Washington. It is a fascinating source of fairly reliable information.
"My second point is that the most obvious evidence of the affinity of Iranians and Americans is the number of Iranians who emigrated from Iran to the US after the revolution and have been assimilated in American society. I have seen several estimates that about two million Iranians now live in the USA. Iranians are very family-oriented and that implies that the two million in the US maintain ties with several million relatives in Iran. I see ample evidence of that each time I meet Iranians in the US and in Iran.
"Iran is a country with close to 20,000 years of history as a complex society. The Arabs were until recently pitching tents and mostly nomadic. What passes for Arab culture is primarily Persian in substance: medicine, architecture, music, science, mathematics, poetry, astronomy and literature. Arabs contributed very little to these disciplines, when compared with what Persians accomplished. Many Americans aspire to culture, education and achievement. In that sense Americans have more in common with Persians than they do with Arabs. [There is, however, another sense in which Americans have something in common with Arabs: both tend to resort to violence as a means of settling issues.]
"Walter, I know this does not begin to do justice with what you have undertaken so admirably. But it takes me a lot of time to think coherently and reflect that in writing----and I do not always succeed with what I intend."
And so we hear one of so many non-stupid, non-savage, non-superstitious Iranian voices...