The Operation That Keeps Getting a New Name
On the Iranian pattern from 1953 to 2026, and who is allowed to see it as a pattern
Every intervention arrives as a first time. A unique crisis, a unique tyrant, a unique necessity. So why does the script never change?
There is a way of telling the story of Iran that keeps every chapter separate. In this telling, 1953 was a Cold War episode about Soviet containment. 1979 was a religious revolution that came from nowhere. The long confrontation over the nuclear program was about non-proliferation. And the war of 2026 was about a bomb and a threat and a moment that could not wait. Four discrete events, four separate justifications, each sealed in its own decade so that none of them touches the others.
There is another way to tell it. In this telling, the same country is approached again and again by the same outside powers, for reasons that shift on the surface while the action underneath stays identical. A leader is identified as intolerable. A campaign prepares the ground. The leader is removed or targeted for removal. A replacement is waiting, often abroad, often connected to the last arrangement the outside powers preferred. And when the result curdles, as it did spectacularly in 1953 and again after, each new failure becomes the reason offered for the next intervention.
The first telling produces a series of unrelated news stories. The second produces a pattern. This piece is about that difference, and about a simple question that follows from it. When the same operation is run four times against the same nation across seventy years, who gets to call it a pattern, and who is required to keep calling it a first time?
1953, the template that its own architect feared
Begin where the modern story begins, because the people who ran it told us it began there.
In 1951 the Iranian parliament passed a law nationalizing the oil industry, and the leader who carried that law into office sought to reverse decades in which the country’s oil wealth had been controlled by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, later British Petroleum. London was alarmed at the loss of revenue and pushed for a coup. President Truman refused. When Eisenhower took office, the pitch was reframed from oil to communism, Iran recast as a domino that might fall to Moscow, and the CIA was ordered into one of its first covert operations against a foreign government. It was called Operation Ajax. A slush fund was established in Tehran, money was handed to organizers of street demonstrations, and influential media figures were reportedly visited with cash to manufacture sentiment.
The archive: the CIA’s own declassified account of Operation Ajax, released by the National Security Archive. Source: National Security Archive, George Washington University.
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/iran/2017-06-27/cia-confirms-role-1953-iran-coup
After days of street battles in which several hundred people died, the elected prime minister was forced out and placed under house arrest, and centralized power was restored to the monarchy.
Hold the moral question to one side, because the structural facts are what matter here and they are not in dispute. They were declassified by the CIA itself in 2013, and the British solicitation of American help was confirmed by further documents in 2017. This is not a contested claim from one side of a war. It is the official record of the victors.
Two details from that record travel all the way to the present. The first is that the justification was swapped mid-stream, from British oil revenue to the Soviet threat, because the second reason sold in Washington where the first did not. The second detail is a warning from the man who ran the operation. Kermit Roosevelt, the CIA officer who ignored a cable from headquarters ordering him to stop and pushed the coup through anyway, later warned his own government against turning what he had done into a template for future interventions. He declined the next such assignment and resigned.
The operator’s warning: Kermit Roosevelt cautioned against turning the 1953 coup into a template for future interventions. Source: Open Magazine.
https://openthemagazine.com/world/kim-roosevelt-architect-of-1953-iran-coup-had-warned-usabout-regime-range-interventions So the person with the most intimate knowledge of the first operation looked at it and saw not a triumph but a machine that would be reused badly. Why was the warning of the one man who knew the machine best the single part of the 1953 record that Washington chose not to keep?
The pattern’s cruelest feature, that it manufactures its own next chapter
Here is the mechanism that makes this a pattern rather than a list, and it is the part the separate-chapters telling cannot absorb.
The 1953 coup did not settle Iran. Many historians argue it did the opposite, that the restored and increasingly repressive monarchy, propped up as a Western client, fueled the nationalist and religious resentment that erupted in 1979 and produced the very Islamic Republic that every subsequent intervention has been aimed at. In other words, the removal of a secular, elected nationalist in 1953 helped produce the theocratic adversary of 2026.
The mechanism: how the 1953 coup fed the nationalism that culminated in the 1979 revolution. Source: Foreign Policy.
The first operation created the conditions that are now cited to justify the fourth.
This is the signature of the pattern. Each intervention is sold as the correction of a problem, and each intervention generates the problem that the next one is sold to correct. The nationalizing prime minister was intolerable, so he was removed, which produced the Shah, whose repression produced the revolution, which produced the theocracy, which is now intolerable, so it must be removed. At no point in this chain does the outside actor read the chain itself as evidence about its own role. Each link is presented to the public as a fresh emergency with a fresh villain.
And the frame resets every time. Notice how rarely, in the coverage of 2026, the events of 1953 are placed in the same sentence as the events of today, and how, when they are, 1953 appears as distant background rather than as the first run of the identical operation. A pattern that cannot be named as a pattern is very useful, because it lets each new chapter borrow the innocence of a first time. So what would it take for the seventy-year chain to be seen whole, and who benefits for as long as it is seen only in pieces?
2026, the operation runs again, this time in the open
Now the present, described in the words of the people conducting it, so there is no question of framing.
On the twenty-eighth of February 2026, the United States and Israel began a series of strikes against Iran and said openly that one aim was regime change. The American president urged Iranians in a video message to rise against their government and seize control of their destiny. The Israeli prime minister addressed Iranians in Farsi and called on them to come into the streets in their millions to finish the job.
The operation runs openly: the 2026 war aim of regime change, stated from podiums. Source: Al Jazeera.
The Iranian supreme leader was killed. An exiled figure connected to the pre-1979 monarchy, the son of the last Shah, positioned himself as a figure for the aftermath and told protesters to await his call. The replacement waiting abroad, connected to the arrangement the outside powers had preferred before, is not a detail invented for this analysis. It is a matter of open reporting.
What is remarkable about 2026 is only that the operation has stopped hiding. In 1953 the cash was passed in secret and the American role was denied for decades. In 2026 the regime-change aim was announced from podiums. The covert template Roosevelt feared has simply become overt. And here the pattern shows its final, self-consuming feature, the one that even Western analysts have documented. Several of them concluded that the strikes and the decapitation did not shatter the Iranian state but hardened it, that the security forces closed ranks rather than defected, and that the war may have postponed the very collapse it was meant to cause.
The self-consuming result: Western analysts conclude the strikes may have hardened the state rather than toppled it. Source: The Times of Israel.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/irans-regime-was-teetering-this-war-could-be-keeping-it-from-collapse/
Once again the operation appears to be manufacturing the opposite of its stated goal, and once again the failure will be available as a reason for whatever comes next.
The structural objection deserves its full weight here, not a caricature. The Iranian state has genuine victims, and they are not a Western fabrication. There were mass protests in early 2026 driven by a broken economy and a population with real grievances, and those protests were put down with force.
The receiving side: a scholar of Iran on why regime change from outside rarely works as promised, and how Iranians experience it. Source: PBS NewsHour.
https://www.pbs.org/video/israel-iran-war-1750538166/
A defender of the 2026 operation would say that a government that fires on its own people forfeits the protection of sovereignty, and that the pattern this piece traces cannot be used to launder a state’s treatment of its citizens. That objection is serious and it is correct on its own terms. But it does not dissolve the pattern, it sits inside it. The suffering of Iranians under their own government and the seventy-year record of outside intervention are not competing claims to be traded against each other. Both are true at once, and the second has repeatedly made the first worse rather than better. To name the operation is not to absolve the target. It is to refuse the deal in which caring about Iranians requires you to endorse the next operation run in their name.
That deal is worth naming directly, because it is how the pattern protects itself. Point to 1953 and you will be asked about the theocracy’s cruelties, as though the two cancel. Point to the cruelties and you will be offered the next intervention as the remedy. The two arguments are kept in separate rooms so they never have to face each other. Bring them into the same room and the question sharpens to a point. If the outside operation and the internal repression have fed each other for seventy years, why is the only remedy ever on offer another round of the operation that started the cycle?
Who is allowed to see the pattern
Step back to the widest frame, the one this whole piece has been walking toward.
The adversaries of the West see the pattern clearly and say so loudly, and it would be dishonest to pretend their motives are pure. When Russian and Chinese officials describe the 2026 war as a lawless regime-change project and invoke the long history of Western intervention in Iran, they are also deflecting from their own conduct and their own spheres. Their framing is a weapon, aimed outward, exactly as the Western framing is. That is precisely the point. The pattern is visible to whoever finds it useful to see, and invisible to whoever finds it useful to forget. Seeing it or not seeing it is not a matter of evidence, because the evidence has been declassified for over a decade. It is a matter of position.
And that is the real subject here, beneath Iran. A pattern is only called a pattern by those it does not implicate. To the power running the operation, each iteration must remain a first time, a unique response to a unique threat, because the alternative is to admit the existence of the machine. To those on the receiving end, and to those looking for a stick to beat the operator with, the machine is obvious. Neither position is neutral. But only one of them requires you to forget the contents of your own government’s archive.
I write this as someone from a people who spent the nineties cast as the unique villain of a unique crisis, watching a familiar operation be described to the world as if it had never been run before. That vantage does not make me right. It makes me unwilling to accept the sealed-chapters version, because I have seen up close how useful it is to the people doing the sealing. The Iranian government will answer for what it does to Iranians. That account is real and it is not mine to close.
But the other account, the seventy-year one, is written in documents the operators released themselves. So the question this piece leaves open is not about Iran at all. It is about the rest of us. When the same operation runs a fourth time and arrives, as always, dressed as a first time, which do we reach for first, the archive or the emergency, and what does our answer say about who the framing was built to serve?
Sources
Research collaboration: Claude (Anthropic)
Western and official sources
House of Commons Library, “Israel/US-Iran conflict 2026: Background and UK response”; Al Jazeera, “As bombing continues, Israel’s war aim in Iran becomes clear: Regime change”; The Times of Israel, “Iran’s regime was teetering. This war could be keeping it from collapse”; Brookings, “After the strike: the danger of war in Iran”; Small Wars Journal, “Iran After the War: Regime Change or Survival?”; ESCP International Politics Society, “A History of Iranian Regime Change, and Where We Are Headed”; National Security Archive (George Washington University), declassified Operation Ajax / TPAJAX documents (2013, 2017); Foreign Policy, “64 Years Later, CIA Finally Releases Details of Iranian Coup”; Lapham’s Quarterly, “Operation Ajax”; Zinn Education Project, “U.S. and Britain Topple Democratically Elected Government of Iran”; Open Magazine, “Kim Roosevelt, architect of the 1953 Iran coup, had warned the US about regime-change interventions.”
Iranian, Russian, and Chinese sources
Iranian government statements denouncing the 2026 strikes as a breach of the UN Charter (as reported via House of Commons Library and Salon/Yahoo News); PBS NewsHour interview with Narges Bajoghli (Johns Hopkins University) on the internal dynamics of regime change; Russian and Chinese official characterizations of the 2026 war as a regime-change project (as reported and analyzed via Carnegie and international coverage).
Excellent piece.