It is quite likely that most of the Iranians have never heard of Aesop but they have now learned his lessons. The ancient Greek never spoke of oil wells but he said many things about greed and willfulness and the troubles they can make for men and nations.

It is likely, too, that most of the Iranians didn’t know till the other day just how much trouble former Premier Mossadegh’s greed and willfulness had made for them. But the figures show the lessons to have been costly ones.

The government of Premier Zahedi—which overthrew Mossadegh last August—has now reported to its people that seizure of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and nationalization of all Iranian oil has run the little country more than $87 million in the red, and that if the great refinery at Abadan is to be restored to operation the foreign experts Mossadegh kicked out will have to return. The best the government alone could do, Premier Zahedi said, would be to operate at 25 per cent of capacity, which would throw a lot of Iranians out of work. [Fazlollah Zahedi] Instead the government proposes “to take efficient steps toward exploiting this resource which is the main source of the income of the Iran nation.”

Even this sorry sketch doesn’t show the full picture of what Mossadegh led his nation to in his willful search for dictatorial power. It may be that he thought at first that his people could operate the intricate and the machines and produce the oil and thus get rich. But sooner or later he must have known that Iran’s treasury was shrinking because no royalties were coming in and everything was going out. It wasn’t very long after he seized the industries less than thirty months ago that the losses set in—the total income since that time is less $2,000,000 and the losses forty times as great.

But the greed and willfulness cost even more than $87 million. For added to that actual loss must be the loss of royalties that otherwise would have been received. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company says that in 1950 royalties alone put $45,000,000 into Iran’s treasury, and that if Mossadegh’s government had ratified an agreement it signed the year before that sum would have doubled.

Mossadegh didn’t want a share; he wanted it all. And when he took it, crying out against exploitation and theft, Mossadegh learned that there weren’t any golden eggs after all. And those who follow him in governing Iran must now repair the learning of the bitter lessons the fabler taught so long ago.