Time To Revisit `A People's History of Iran' Again: Part 15

(All the 2012 GOP and Democratic presidential candidates in the USA—except for Ron Paul—apparently support the U.S. government’s current policy of waging economic warfare and covert war against people in Iran and threatening people in Iran with an overt US/Israeli military attack in 2012. Yet most people in the United States know little about the history of people in Iran since foreign imperialist powers began undemocratically and illegally intervening in its internal political and economic affairs in the late 19th century. But here's part 15 of "A People's History of Iran," from a few years ago--bf).

U.S.-based transnational oil corporations profited enormously from the CIA’s illegal 1953 covert activity in Iran. As University of Alberta Professor of Economics Ed Shaffer noted in his 1983 book The United States and the Control of World Oil:

“The overthrow of Mossadegh, which was engineered by the CIA, paved the way for the displacement of Britain by the United States as the major power in Iran. The displacement took place first in oil…

“After the coup the US sent Herbert Hoover, Jr., a director of Union Oil, to negotiate a new oil pact…Oil exploration and production in southern Iran and the operation of the Abadan refinery, then the world’s largest, were to be carried out by a consortium of companies known as Iranian Oil Participants Ltd….”

Mobil, Exxon, Chevron, Texaco and Gulf Oil were each given the right to receive a 5% share of the Iranian Oil Participants Ltd.’s profits from its Iranian oil industry operations and twelve smaller U.S. oil corporations were each given the right to receive a 1% share of the consortium’s profits. Just forty percent of the Iranian Oil Participants Ltd.’s profits went to the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, now renamed British Petroleum/BP, which had previously not had to split the profits from its Iranian operations with the U.S.-based transnational oil corporations. According to The United States and the Control of World Oil:

“The establishment of the consortium was the most important factor in making the U.S. the dominant oil power in the Middle East. The entry into Iran unquestionably gave it effective control of most of the known reserves of the non-Communist world. Its basic objective, the control of world oil, had been realized.”

(end of part 15)