How Cold War Lies and GOP Myths Still Shape U.S.
Dwight D. Eisenhower is generally remembered by Democrats as the best Republican president of the last 100 years. Yet, he’s responsible for initiating hostilities with Iran that have been taken to the brink of all-out regional war by the worst GOP president ever — a war that Trump’s own base is solidly opposed to, according to multiple polls.
The idea that a single massive missile strike will end Iran’s nuclear ambitions is absurd. Russia has already hinted it could simply give Iran nuclear weapons. And Trump’s quick shift to ceasefire could be ancient history by the time you read this in print. As prominent pro-Trump podcaster Saagar Enjeti tweeted, “The sheer schizophrenia of US policy in the last week should give very few confidence that this is serious and can’t start up again at any time.” So what lies ahead is deeply unclear. But how we got here isn’t. It began with the best president the GOP can claim since Teddy Roosevelt.
Eisenhower is known for the interstate freeway system, for sending federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to integrate the high school, and for his farewell speech warning against the dangers of the military-industrial complex.
But there’s another, darker side of Eisenhower’s legacy: His role in approving the CIA-co-engineered 1953 coup that overthrew the elected government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, and ushered in 26 years of dictatorial rule until the 1979 Iranian Revolution. And that was just the first of a series of decisions Eisenhower made — including the cancellation of unification elections in Vietnam three years later — which positioned America in opposition to emerging democratic forces around the globe.
Another CIA-backed coup in Guatemala in 1954 made it clear that the Iranian coup was a template, not an aberration, which would be seen repeatedly across the developing world, perhaps most notoriously in the 1973 Chilean coup. And the CIA’s follow-up work in Iran, helping to create Iran’s secret police force, SAVAK, was a model for how it collaborated with repressive governments long-term, from Indonesia to El Salvador, Argentina and South Africa.
In American public history, nothing before 1979 is remembered. Iran is ruled by a reactionary theocratic regime harboring deep hostility to America and Israel for no earthly good reason. Iran started it by holding 52 American embassy officials for 444 days, during which ABC’s Nightline program was launched to report on every detail, day by day, fixing a simplistic, deceptive drama of good and evil in the public’s mind.
But all of that is as much of a lie as the Confederate “Lost Cause” mythology that denies the central role of slavery in the Civil War. The new Lost Cause myth is that we’re universal champions of freedom. But the facts say otherwise.
The Iranian people overthrew the Shah of Iran in 1979 for very good historical reasons, even if the government that eventually emerged only replaced one kind of repression with another. And it all began with our meddling, initiated by the best Republican president any Democrat alive today can remember. The idea that we’re always the white-hatted heroes fighting for freedom is starkly at odds with what happened in Iran — it’s our own modern-day Lost Cause mythology that sanitized the whole Cold War era and subsequent “War on Terror” that continues even today.
We would like to think we’re freedom’s foremost advocate across the world, and after World War II, people in many countries looked at us and hoped that would be true. Sometimes it was, if the situation was right. But it couldn’t be counted on. After all, while America was the first country to fight for and win its own freedom in the colonial era, it refused to recognize and support the second such country — Haiti — not least because Haiti’s abolition of slavery put it well in the vanguard ahead of us, threatening our contradictory ideology of slaveholders’ freedom, which haunts us even to this day.
Eisenhower Starts It
In 1952, Eisenhower’s predecessor, Harry Truman, rejected a CIA push to initiate the coup in support of Britain and her interests in Iranian oil. Iran’s parliament had voted to nationalize Iran’s oil industry after the British Anglo-Iranian Oil Company refused to allow audits to see if it was paying agreed-upon royalties and otherwise obeying the law. Under Labor Prime Minister Clement Atlee, Britain had initiated a worldwide boycott of Iranian oil, but when Conservative Winston Churchill returned to power, Britain began planning to overthrow Iran’s government and pressuring America to help, which Truman initially refused to do.
In fact, “We are presently thinking of unilateral action to assist the Mosadeq Government in the event that the British do not agree to an oil settlement acceptable to Mosadeq,” a memo declassified in 2017 stated.
It was only under Eisenhower that America switched sides, working secretly through the CIA, the first of many CIA-supported coups that occurred throughout the Cold War, almost always justified in terms of “fighting Communism” while actually deposing elected governments.
While the Cold War is conventionally framed as an ideological battle between the U.S.-led capitalist West and the Soviet-led communist block, in reality much of what it involved was similar to what happened in Iran: nationalist democratic aspirations were covertly or overtly opposed by the U.S., assumed to be enemies, simply because they resisted outside direction or control.
Even the Vietnam War could have been avoided, given that North Vietnam’s leader, Ho Chi Minh, had first reached out for U.S. support in 1919, under the principle of national self-determination articulated by Woodrow Wilson during negotiations of the Treaty of Versailles. He only sought communist support after Wilson rejected him. Even so, he was a U.S. secret agent during WWII, and when it ended, he issued Vietnam’s Declaration of Independence, beginning with a direct quote from our own. That began a successful nine-year war of independence, concluding with a guarantee of elections in 1956, which Eisenhower helped block, knowing that Minh would easily win. As with Iran, Eisenhower ensured decades of conflict to come.
While the war that followed profoundly shaped American history, the basic reason for it — the refusal to allow democratic self-determination in a “third world” country, the same as in Iran — was largely hidden from the American people by our modern Lost Cause mythology. But it wasn’t hidden from the people of most of the world, regardless of how they judged the rights and wrongs of all that followed — and there was certainly plenty of both.
Eisenhower’s Handiwork Fails
When Iran’s U.S.-backed government finally fell, it was a very messy affair. The most popular opposition figure, Islamic cleric Ruhollah Khomeini, had been in European exile for a decade, and his plans for a theocratic state were deliberately vague and removed from many Iranians’ immediate concerns. His repeated gestures of collaboration with the secular opposition were all eventually betrayed. If America’s official version of what unfolded was deceptively simplified, the same was equally true of Iran’s.
In January 1979, the Shah left for exile in Egypt, leaving a short-lived secular government behind. In March, a referendum was overwhelmingly approved to replace the monarchy with an “Islamic republic,” but just what that meant was undefined. A draft constitution released in June included a Guardian Council to veto un-Islamic legislation, but had no guardian jurist ruler — the position that Khomeini had long secretly craved for himself. Nonetheless, he initially declared it “correct.” But after a much more contentious, violence-marred and potentially rigged election produced a small clerically-dominated “Assembly of Experts,” they rejected the constitution and rewrote it in a much more theocratic, anti-democratic form, with Khomeini’s leadership position restored.
None of this had anything substantial to do with America — until Jimmy Carter, following the advice of Henry Kissinger, agreed to let the ailing Shah come to America for cancer treatment in late October 1979. This led to a band of youthful Islamists invading the U.S. embassy, motivated in part by rumors of another U.S. coup attempt to reinstall him and with the demand that the U.S. return him to stand trial instead, in exchange for release of the hostages. Even after the Shah died in July 1980, the hostages were kept. At the time, Khomeini told future President Abolhassan Banisadr, “This action has many benefits. … This has united our people. Our opponents do not dare act against us. We can put the constitution to the people’s vote without difficulty.” And so, inadvertently, but foreseeably, Kissinger’s spectacularly misguided advice helped to entrench the Iranian theocracy.
The hostages were finally released just as Ronald Reagan was being inaugurated, and Banisadr as well as several other witnesses credibly claim that the Reagan campaign cut a deal with Khomeini to prevent him from agreeing to release the hostages before the election — an echo of Kissinger’s own role in sabotaging peace talks to end the Vietnam War in 1968, before that election.
In short, the simplistic picture of Iran’s evil hostage-taking as the origin of all U.S.-Iranian hostility hides a much more complicated reality in which Republican politicians and operatives play a leading negative role, while Democrats at least sometimes try to live up to our ideals, and other times let themselves be misled.
Failure’s Aftermath
There’s been much more of that in the 44 years since, with offshoots like our multi-faceted support for Iraq in its eight-year war with Iran that began in September 1980, which proved quite embarrassing when it became time to demonize Saddam Hussein in turn. Of course, the real story has always been about oil on the one hand and Lost Cause myths of our own moral purity on the other.
Israel fits neatly into the latter, with its founding myth of being a refuge from persecution, “a land without people for a people without land.” Except that it was neither. Palestinians had been living there for thousands of years, including small numbers of Palestinian Jews. The people who came there weren’t landless. They were fleeing European antisemitism for good reason, particularly after the Holocaust. But it wasn’t about being landless. It was about racist persecution. And that’s precisely what they ended up visiting on the Palestinians, whose land they stole.
“Those to whom evil is done do evil in return,” W.H. Auden wrote. It’s an explanation, but not an excuse. Or better yet, a diagnosis: to cure evil in others, start with yourself. Or perhaps you didn’t do anything. But what did you accept being done in your name? That’s the question that Americans should be asking ourselves now. The danger and chaos we see around us in the world didn’t just come out of nowhere. As the small slice of history described above shows, America itself is responsible for generating a substantial portion of it, precisely because we keep telling ourselves Lost Cause lies — or at least listening to those among us who tell them.
Twenty-four years ago, when a handful of terrorist criminals destroyed the Twin Towers on 9/11, Gallup International polled the people of the world, and found that almost everywhere large majorities — generally 3-to-1 or more — said that we should treat the terrorists as criminals and put them on trial, rather than treat them as warriors (like the terrorists wanted) to be killed on the battlefield. There were only three exceptions. Two countries — Israel and India — with generations-long histories of fighting fruitless wars against Muslims, insisted that war was the answer. Their abject failures alone should have been enough to reject that approach, if the wisdom of the rest of the world wasn’t already enough.
But the third country favoring war — sort of — was the United States. I say “sort of” because there was a significant portion who were uncertain. There was also, at the time, a unified chorus of opinion leaders telling us war was the only choice we had; the only question was against whom? Where? And when?
For anyone who even considered asking “why?” President George Bush had a ready answer: “They hate us for our freedoms.” But that was just the same old Lost Cause gaslighting again. The vast majority of Muslims vehemently condemned the 9/11 terrorists. Even the Afghan government that had sheltered them soon agreed to turn them over to a court to decide their fate, with the caveat that it had to be an Islamic court, in keeping with their faith. Bush, of course, ignored the offer because he wanted war, not justice. In fact, he wanted war with Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11. And he got that war, too, because a complacent press gave it to him.
The truth was, 9/11 was a terrible intelligence failure on the Bush administration’s part. Just as 10/6 was a terrible intelligence failure on the Benjamin Netanyahu administration’s part. Rather than owning up to their failures, Bush in 2001 and Netanyahu in 2023 chose to plunge their countries into horrific wars with no clear plans for how to win them, or even ideas of what winning would look like.
When Trump first ran for office in 2016, he pretended he’d been a leading vocal critic of the Iraq War — just one of countless lies he’s told, but politically one of the most important. It’s his way of pretending he’s fundamentally different from all the other GOP presidents before him. And in one sense, he’s right: he’s far more proudly ignorant and narcissistically self-absorbed than any of them. He can change his mind mid-sentence without missing a beat. But in another sense, he’s almost exactly the same: too self-assured of his own righteousness to seriously consider where his actions may lead.
Initial polling suggests that the American people have learned some painful lessons since the Iraq War in 2003. The question now is: have we learned how to act on what we’ve learned?