SIR,— The Americans have not as yet insisted on the Zahedi administration enforcing a censorship of foreign newspapers in Persia, and though living in Teheran I am still lucky enough to get a sight of most British dailies and weeklies. I had never supposed that your press would present a picture of the Persian political situation and of the oil crisis corresponding at all with the point of view of the majority of Persians, but I confess that I was very surprised to read the remarks in your issue of February 27. You summarize the position with the remark, “the main difficulty that lies ahead is technical,” and this seems to me to show a complete misunderstanding of our position and a misunderstanding, shared as far as I can see, by the whole of the British press.

As we Persians see it, the main difficulty that lies ahead is precisely the same old difficulty that lies behind. The British press calls this difficulty “extreme nationalism,” hoping, I suppose, that this cliché will obscure or explain away the intense feeling of the main (and increasing) body of Persians that somehow or another political power in Persia must be taken from the small group of courtiers, landowners and profiteers who, working uneasily together, once sold their country to Reza Shah and are now busy doing a deal with the Americans. What Persians are after is some form of better housekeeping in their own establishment, and what they have hoped for is support or at least friendly understanding from their sympathizers abroad. But at each crisis since the war it seems that foreign pressure always works in favor of the “old gang,” and from the abdication of Reza Shah onwards we have suffered from foreign support of the extremes, the Soviet standing by the extreme Left wing of the Tudeh party and the Western democracies supporting the members of the old, old political poker school whose names were sometimes those of statesman mature even in the first world war. The middle parties, numerically and intellectually much the strongest, are completely ignored. If he did nothing else, Dr. Mossadeq showed the powerful support the middle parties could release. Dr. Mossadeq was not their leader (he himself stemmed in every sense from the old ruling circles) but he was their advertising agent, a great theatrical figure from whom the western democracies might have learned something of the growing middle potential between the two extremes of political life in Persia. The democracies learned nothing. Mossadeq was passed off as a figure of fun and now where do we find Western democratic pressure being exerted? Why, in support of a Government called in every Persian town and village “naukar-i-Americai” (America’s flunky). And whom does this government represent in Persia? Practically no one. Not one single name belonging to the middle progressive parties is numbered amongst its supporters and those middle groupings are left with a rather rather dismal hope of finding help from the Tudeh or of doing nothing at all. It was the middle groups’ desire for good housekeeping that allowed Dr. Mossadeq to nationalize Persian oil; and his action, from the Persian angle, was not so much a blow at the British concessionaires as a violent theatrical gesture indicating the feelings and the strength of the middle parties.

The enormous mistake being made by the Western democracies at the moment is that of concentrating on the oil issue. Interested in the oil crisis financially, they do not see it for what it is, a labor pain heralding the birth of a new kind of regime in Persia. It may be that the main difficulty that lies ahead is technical as you remark. Still, even a technical problem has its end and if the end of this one is an oil agreement with the Zahedi administration and its approval by a rigged Majlis no one should be allowed to imagine that this amounts to an agreement with the Persian people or that another Persian Majlis will not be in as great a hurry to annul the agreement as it seems the Americans are to push it through.

M. PARSPOUR