The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company was not handed over to the US by Churchill during WW II. The entry of US oil interests into Iran came with the US/CIA assistance provided upon request by the British government for its partially government-owned AIOC (now British Petroleum) whose holdings had been nationalized in 1953 by Prime Minister Mossadegh. The US-organized coup was successful and the price was the admission of Iricon, a company representing a group of US oil companies, many of them second-tier types that had not previously had any entree into the Middle East oil bonanza. Barkley Rosser On Fri, 10 Jul 1998 19:12:09 -0500 Peter Kilander <peterk at enteract.com> wrote:
> >Shouldn't the FDR administration be judged
> >by the times it was in? Isn't the historical
> >context relevant to good marxmanship? I'm
> >reminded of a little book called "Flatland,"
> >a two-dimensional world whose beings understand
> >length and width but have no depth.
>
>
> Tired from a week of 9 to 5 and too lazy to put the following in my own
> words, here's some friendly reminders from Mr. Christopher Hitchens:
>
> "There was F.D.R. the good and F.D.R. the bad. F.D.R. the bad was the man
> who betrayed the Spanish Republic, shut the doors of the United States to
> desperate refugees from Europe and campaigned ruthlessly to take over the
> British Empire as an American dominion. (You can read the evidence for this
> on almost every page of the three-volume Churchill-Roosevelt Correspondence,
> published in 1984.) Every time Roosevelt extended the least support to the
> anti-Hitler policy of his supposed friend, he exacted an immense and
> immediate price. In return for a few clapped-out destroyers, the British
> bases in the West Indies. In return for some other credits, a whole shipload
> of South African gold. Gradually, Roosevelt got his hands on everything from
> British air-transport routes to the Anglo-Iranian oil company. Churchill at
> one point compared him to "a sheriff collecting the last assets of a
> helpless debtor." In many ways this was doing Britain an indirect favor by
> disencumbering it of Empire. But, as they don't teach you in school, it was
> also laying the basis for a future and much more cumbrous American imperium.
> If you add to this the fact that it was massive rearmament, and not the New
> Deal, that pulled America out of the slump then you can indeed hold
> Roosevelt responsible for the empire, the national security state and the
> military-industrial complex -- the foundations of "big government." This
> gave the rest of the globe a bit more to fear than fear itself. "
>
-- Rosser Jr, John Barkley rosserjb at jmu.edu