Keyhan

Book Review

Stephen Kinzer "All the Shah's Men"

This book has two monumental failure in presenting the fact and none in portray of its analysis. The most unforgivable, horrifying mistake that the author makes is the claim that Mossadeq somehow used and abused people's religious belief. Not only this claim is false, there are numerous evidence to the contrary. One could look into the works of Ervand Abrahamian and Shamseddin AmirAlaei and others for these evidence. It is important to note that this claim comes in light of the fact that the Khomeni's regime has misused the religious belief of the poor in Iran for the past thirty years.

Kinzer also fells for the claims of the CIA paropaganda machine which portrayed Mssadeq as an uncomproising madman. He writes "Mossadegh was not a pragmatist... he was a visionary, a Utopian, a millenarian," says Kinzer. He had been away from politics too long to grasp the seismic geopolitical changes the Second World War had wrought. He became a prisoner of the fanatics in his entourage, who opposed any compromise solution he considered for fear of being accused of selling out to the British.

The central idea of the book which is to be praised is that in retrospect it is reasonable to assume that an iranian without the operation TPAJAX may have been able to develope into a democracy.