The Iran crisis was decades in the making. You reap what you sow

A number of conflicting, seemingly unrelated thoughts run into my mind as I reflect on current events. For instance, who was to know back in the post-Second World War world that one day the world economy would be so enormous, and individual economies so geared and tied to each other?

Back then the west could still see Africa and Asia as playthings. To do with as it wished. Now the Strait of Hormuz gets closed and markets flounder worldwide. Not just because 25% of global oil goes that way, but so does a third of artificial fertilisers.  

Who was to know when Churchill’s government and the US government engineered the overthrow of Mossadegh, the legally elected prime minister of Iran in 1953, and his replacement with the Shah of Persia, that this would lead to the militant and military Iran of today? That the west-loving Shah would inadvertently sire a revolution that would sweep him away, as well as any desire for compromise with his former friends. A world economy so buoyed by vast increases in population and consumerism that oil and its byproducts would change the weak into the strong.  

When Israel was fashioned out of Palestine it was a different world entirely. A certain quietness existed, especially in the oil-rich lands of the Middle East. Even the term ‘Middle East’ suggested everything was measured from Big Ben. The world was the oyster of London, and then Washington. Until capitalism made everyone a consumer, making oil and its derivatives essential to all our lives. The current war with Iran was sewn into the fabric of future events when Iran had the cheek to nationalise its oil production. The oil-producing wealth ended up largely being exported to the west.  

Read more:

• Iranians in Britain call on UK government to stand with the people of Iran against brutal repression
• The Middle East has been betrayed – but despite everything, there is always hope
• What will the Middle East conflict mean for UK energy bills?

The Shah’s imposition as head of state suited the oil companies and their governments. But history was waiting and changing. You reap what you sow. The debris of history, past events producing tectonic changes, led to the Iranian Revolution and the current injuries to the world economy. The background was always capitalism hungrily demanding new forms of wealth, driving forward the exportation of jobs from the west to the east. Bringing more trade worldwide. And turning the Strait of Hormuz – the result of the tectonic plates of Arabia and Eurasia crashing together many millennia ago (you can’t blame capitalism for that) – into the fulcrum of a world crisis.  

How well-behaved, pliant, push-about-able were Asia and the Middle East in those days. Israel, a new ‘European’ nation, could be made in its midst, creating fear and loathing locally, but an impotence to respond. For now, as America and Israel seem determined to take out Iran, the historical child of western connivance, the world holds its breath. Quietism has disappeared.  

To bring us back to the new everyday last week: a shrew got into our kitchen and fed on the crumbs in our toaster. Unfortunately, I did not notice it there and when I toasted some gluten-free bread, it was killed. I went to my local Tesco to buy a new toaster. A perfect creation of Chinese manufacture. Made on the other side of the world and shipped here. Not made in Birmingham or Manchester, as it would have been in my youth. No, capitalism demands new levels of profit and English workers cannot supply that.  

That self-same Churchill, as well as indirectly creating the preconditions for the Iranian Revolution by squashing democracy in Iran, helped to put oil on the map. As first lord of the admiralty, before the First World War, Churchill insisted that oil replace coal in the ships of the Royal Navy. His instinct tied in with the vast new oilfields discovered in the US and the Middle East. What a busy little chap his legacy has made him post-life. 

Recently Trump described Keir Starmer as “no Churchill” and in many ways he was right. Give him a chance, though. Perhaps giving away Diego Garcia and not tackling poverty in a consistent form while in office may resound unhappily down through time.  

It’s astonishing how little understanding flows through the minds of our current political leaders. How history always trips up the future and cause future wars to happen. In fact our leaders have, from time immemorial, been busy fucking up the future for future generations. Their lack of a grasp of history means they risk producing a more poisoned future.  

Possibly the greatest crime committed by our western leaders was in the ’90s with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The raids made on Russia by Wall Street did not help. But possibly moving Nato to Russia’s borders caused the biggest fear for that slumbering empire. Napoleon’s invasion over 200 years ago, the Crimean War, and, of course, Germany in two world wars, put the historical shits up her and informed her
current thinking.  

Clumsy wars of the 21st century have not helped unravel the threats to world peace but exacerbated them. The whirligig of modern times, you might call it. At the same time innovation and new markets for new products heat up the world economy. AI is leaving its imprint everywhere, while the same old tired forms of government, with their tenacious passion to do more of the same, continue.

AI will bring advances; I’m looking forward to my first AI doctor who hopefully at last will cure my nose-picking and sort out my cyclist’s rash. Hopefully an AI-made Ministry of Poverty Prevention and Cure will decimate poverty for us as earlier human ministers have not.  

This Iranian war owes its immediate germination in some ways to the appalling events of 7 October 2023, when Netanyahu’s system broke and left innocent Israelis to be slaughtered. As of yet, there is no evidence that that particular leader is being made answerable for his crimes against his own people; let alone for the crimes committed in their name against Palestine. 

John Bird is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Big Issue. Read more of his words from our archive.

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