IRAN: Shock Treatment

IRAN Shock Treatment And lo! The phantom caravan has reach'd the nothing it set out from. —Omar Khayyam

Teheran's "informed public," the students and the intellectuals, the swarming bureaucracy, the editors and the tea-shop sages, were feeling depressed. It was not the heat: one could always take a bus to the cool foothills of the Elburz Mountains, or sit beside a pool in a garden nightclub and watch the moon glide across the sky. It was not business: apart from the standstill import trade, business was fair. It was not politics, the capital's favorite indoor & outdoor sport. What really bothered Teherani was the growing realization that the West no longer seemed to care so much what happened to them, having just about exhausted its supply of sympathy, patience and surprise. It was particularly disconcerting, for example, to shout "Yankee go home" at some passing American and to hear him reply, "Of course, tomorrow."

The newspapers tried to keep up the pretense. They wrote as if the Big Three conference in Washington was really called just to force the British imperialists to lift their oil blockade; it was learned from "travelers approached unofficially in Europe" that the U.S. would soon have new proposals for the nation to spurn. Premier Mossadegh, alas, knew better, and as a result was laid up for a "threeday rest." He had got Eisenhower's firm rejection of his plea for "effective economic assistance" (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS). Cried one of his aides: "If Churchill himself had written it, he would not have used stiffer or sterner phrases."

For two years Mossadegh had refused to deal with the British, sure that the U.S. would back him in the end, if only to save Iran from the Russians. Now, the Eisenhower Administration had come around to the thesis that further economic aid would only postpone Mossadegh's inevitable day of reckoning. Angrily, the pro-government newspaper Khabar cried: "We can see dirty hands stretched out from under a Point Four cover trying to rule us by dollar . . . The U.S. must know that we won't allow Yankees to take the evil British place." Extremists would surely demand a break with the West and an approach to the Soviet Union. The U.S. was taking a risk. But there was some hope that Eisenhower's shock treatment might bring Iranians to their senses.