My Father's Second Cousin's Father

In 1953, my father's second cousin's father, Iranian General Fazlollah Zahedi, led a CIA-sponsored military coup that overthrew the democratically-elected government of Iranian Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadegh and replaced him with the Shah of Iran (who had previously fled the country in response to a popular uprising). The reason the U.S. wanted to overthrow Mossadegh was because he had recently nationalized the Iranian oil industry, and the U.S. wanted to regain control of the Iranian oil fields.

Some historians have argued that the seeds of the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979 were planted by the 1953 United States-sponsored coup, and that the subsequent rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Iran was a direct result of misguided U.S. attempts to impose an authoritarian monarch on a country that had a functioning democratic system of government already in place.

I recently applied for several grants to make a film about this pivotal episode in the history of Iranian-American relations, but my grant proposals were all rejected. Today, however, one of the grant-giving organizations that had previously turned me down unexpectedly reversed its decision, due to a recent funding increase. And so, I will be making this film after all.

posted by Caveh Zahedi at 11:56 PM