The Irateness of Iran | The Jamestown Post-Journal, Sept. 8, 1952

Nemesis²
September 8, 1952 — The Jamestown Post-Journal

The Mossadegh Project | February 6, 2015

The Jamestown Post-Journal in New York penned this ominous editorial about oil, Iran, Britain and the USA on the same Monday they blasted India’s Premier Jawaharlal Nehru for Communist “appeasement”.

We have not been able to verify any of the quotes attributed here to Mossadegh’s oil adviser Kazem Hassibi or the Iranian press.

The Irateness of Iran

The United States Government, by offering $10,000,000 to Iran to rehabilitate the country’s bankrupt treasury, “makes itself a party to the oil question,” declares Kazem Hassibi, member of the Iranian Oil Commission, who drafted the laws nationalizing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. That sum is only “the registration fee” for a joint proposal by Washington and London to settle the oil problem.

Hassibi declared that Britain owes Iran one billion dollars, and he and the country’s press strongly attacked the United States. He speaks for Premier Mossadegh, who possesses absolute powers to deal with the issue. Mossadegh’s personal organ wrote that “Churchill and Truman want to take our independence in return for a number of ifs.”

There is “slight hope,” says a London dispatch, that Mossadegh will study the joint offer further, and the Foreign Office has no official indications of interest on his part. Iran has long been bitterly anti-British. Now America seems to have become a second villain. The general situation is one almost made to order for Moscow.

Related links:

Deal in Iran? — The Knickerbocker News, September 3, 1952

Iranians Can’t Even Agree Among Themselves On Oil — Buffalo Courier-Express, Dec. 1952

Mossadegh Snarled in Twin Dilemma — The WORLD This WEEK, September 6, 1952

MOSSADEGH t-shirts — “If I sit silently, I have sinned”