Trevor Williams, The Argus — Oct. 2, 1951
| The Mossadegh Project | June 9, 2023 |
Trevor Williams, London correspondent for The Argus newspaper of Melbourne, Australia, on Iran in his column London Calling.
• BRITAIN’S Labor Government already facing an election, now has to face —
GRIM FACTS ON PERSIA CRISIS
LONDON CALLING — By TREVOR WILLIAMS
JUST when the British Labor Party was all set for an electoral campaign in which the Tories were to be portrayed as trigger happy lads too dangerous to let loose in an explosive world, the Persian crisis blew up again.
Prime Minister Clement Attlee and Foreign Minister Herbert Morrison were faced with the hardest decision, anyway.
But with the people’s choice at the polls only four weeks away decisions and explanations had to be made almost together.
Normally, politicians are able to make such decisions in the knowledge that they have plenty of time to inform public opinion. Mr. Attlee was without that advantage this time.
It says much, too, for Britain’s oldest political leader, Winston Churchill, that so far he has resisted the temptation to play party politics over Persia. [On the contrary!]
The same goes for his deputy, Anthony Eden, but not, I am afraid, for a big section of the Tory Press, nor for a large section of rank-and-file Tory M.P.’s.
Mr. Attlee had before him two choices. He could order the marines to land in Abadan, hold the refineries by force, and hope that a whiff of gunpowder would bring the politicians in Teheran to their senses.
Or he could accept that, however shamelessly the Persians have defaulted from their obligations, a sovereign government is within its rights in cancelling the residence permits of foreigners in its territory.
TO those brought up in the Imperial tradition, and to those rightly concerned with British interests in the Middle East, the idea of holding Abadan by force may have seemed attractive.
Refineries represent an enormous investment of British capital and were created by British skill. But Mr. Attlee had to look further than that.
One grim fact he had to keep in mind was whether international complications would be likely to arise if he sent British expeditionary forces to Persia.
Another grim fact which could not be absent from Mr. Attlee’s consideration was the knowledge that neither the American public nor the American Government are happy about the use of force in Persia nor do they think it justified.
And a third consideration for the British Cabinet was the knowledge that the Russians, if they had a mind to, could make out a case under the Russo-Persian treaty of 1920 for justifying their intervention in the north if the British troops were m the south. [Treaty was signed in Feb. 1921]
THIS I can say from my beat in London close to the British Cabinet — no one could have conceded more, no one could have been more reasonable with the Persians, than Mr Attlee and his colleagues have been during the last few months.
It may have been rhetoric when, in his first public speech as Foreign Secretary, Mr Morrison declared that he wanted to make of the Foreign Office a “Ministry of Peace”.
However, that just about summed up the aspirations both of the Government and of the people.
The great irony, the great tragedy, of the Anglo-Persian crisis is that the Mossadeqs of this world are fighting a 19th century British Imperialism which is dead, and are in danger instead of botching up the new conception of international relations toward which the British, in common with other Western peoples, are groping.
Related links:
Persia Is Our Problem | The Argus (Melbourne), Oct. 2, 1951
Ancient and New Political Weapons | Calgary Herald, Sept. 14, 1951
Amb. Walter Gifford on Iran vs Britain at Security Council (1951)
MOSSADEGH t-shirts — “If I sit silently, I have sinned”
