The root cause of the war with Iran

3/19/2026

In times of war (and that’s what the U.S. is engaged in with Iran, regardless of what our government calls it), there is usually more than one cause. That’s true in spades for the current conflict.

From the American side, it’s the unsettling potential threat of eventual Iranian nuclear weapons. It’s also Iran’s mortal enmity with the nation of Israel, a close American ally. It’s also Iran’s sponsorship of client terrorist proxies like Hezbollah, the Houthis, and (to some degree) Hamas. It’s the Iranian regime’s brutal treatment of dissidents within its own nation, although the U.S. is selective about which repressive governments it finds disturbing. And America has not forgotten that the Iranian revolution held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days in 1979-81.

From the Iranian perspective, it’s the damage that the U.S. and Israel have in recent years inflicted on key Iranian military facilities and on individual leaders. It’s also the evil of “The Great Satan” (the United States) in the mind of the hardline Islamist ayatollahs who govern Iran. It’s also America’s friendly relations with Iran’s Muslim neighbor states, which generally subscribe to a different version of Islam. 

But the wellspring of Iran’s undying hatred of the United States dates from 1953, when the CIA, with the blessing of the State Department, and the Administration and with the aid of the British spy agency MI-6, secretly engineered a coup under the name Operation Ajax that toppled Iran’s elected nationalist Prime Minister Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh.

Mossadegh had campaigned fervently to win Iranian control of the nation’s natural resources, including oil. The corrupt and pliable Pahlavi royal family years earlier had granted the British-owned Anglo-Persian Oil Company (later BP Oil) exclusive development rights of Iranian oil deposits.

Mossadegh fought bitterly against the arrangement for years, and as a result won strong support among the Iranian people. In April 1951 the Iranian parliament named him prime minister, and he promptly nationalized Iran’s oil production.

By then Senator Joe McCarthy had initiated his “Red Scare” campaign in the United States, claiming large numbers of Communists skulked within the U.S. government. Anti-Communism rose sharply in America, spurred by the Soviet Union’s successful production of an atomic bomb in 1949.

Enter President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother, CIA Director Allen Dulles, both of whom Ike appointed when he took office in 1953. Before assuming their government offices, both Dulleses had been powerful attorneys in the New York-based multinational law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell. 

For decades the firm had urged, and then facilitated, the creation of business behemoths like Edison General Electric (later General Electric) and United States Steel. Its attorneys worked directly to create the Panama Canal Railway Company, then to carve off the northern peninsula of Colombia to create the new country of Panama, which swiftly allowed the United States to dig the Panama Canal, completed in 1914. Sullivan and Cromwell also advised and represented Standard Oil and General Motors during their years of strong corporate growth.

The Dulles brothers perceived little daylight between the interests of international business and those of the United States government. With an almost religious hatred of Communism, they convinced themselves that a potentially weak Mossadegh government in Iran was vulnerable to a Soviet-inspired Communist takeover. And their fellow believers, British colonial business enterprises, desperately desired to reclaim their Iranian oil rights.

Kermit Roosevelt, the head of CIA operations in the Middle East and grandson of former President Theodore Roosevelt, entered Iran on July 19, 1953, using a fake ID under the name James Lochridge. Through false media stories, bribery, and paid protestors, within weeks he crafted a plan to depose Mossadegh, which he sprung the night of August 15 using members of the shah’s Imperial Guard.

The operation failed miserably, and the guardsmen were themselves imprisoned by soldiers loyal to Mossadegh. The shah heard about it on the radio the next morning, hurriedly packed a pair of suitcases and fled into exile.

The Eisenhower Administration ordered Roosevelt home. But the operative stayed in Tehran instead, and four days later helped guide a mob, of bribed men and others who were loyal to the shah, to Mossadegh’s house, where a pitched battle resulted in 300 deaths. By dawn Roosevelt’s attack proved successful. Mossadegh was arrested, jailed for three years, and then placed under house arrest for the rest of his life. 

The shah returned from Paris, and the royal house assumed power once again. The shah awarded 40 percent of Iran’s oil rights to British oil companies and another 40 percent to U.S. companies in gratitude for the two nations’ help in returning him to leadership. 

The royal Pahlavi family thereafter enriched itself at the expense of the nation, brutally putting down any opposition through its secret police, until in 1979 Iranian dissidents overthrew the shah. By then, most secular dissidents had been killed, imprisoned, or exiled, leaving only the religious clergy capable of organized opposition to the royal family. Thus the current theocratic regime.

For 60 years the U.S. government officially denied the CIA’s role in the overthrow, although it was an open secret. It wasn’t until 2013 that some documents, partially acknowledging it, came to light. However, in 2000 U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright had noted the CIA’s “significant role” in the coup. In 2009 President Barack Obama, speaking in Cairo, said the CIA project created the “overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government.”

Finally, in October 2023, a CIA spokesperson in a podcast officially described some key elements of the 1953 coup, acknowledging that the coup undemocratically returned Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as ruler of Iran.

The 1953 coup provided the template for CIA attempts to overthrow uncooperative nationalistic governments elsewhere in the world over the next several years, including Guatemala, Indochina, Indonesia, Congo, and of course Cuba. 

And to this day the 1953 CIA coup that overthrew the elected government of Mossadegh is cited as the primary cause of anti-American sentiment in Iran. 

Did the combination of Western colonial hunger for oil and the fear of potential Communist influence in Iran justify the coup of 1953? Americans continue to grapple with that question, now more than ever, since today’s war is a fruit of Operation Ajax. ♦