The History Romney Should Consider before Returning Churchill’s Bust to the Oval Office

A bust of Winston Churchill can be found in the White House today. Three-and-a-half years on from reports that Barack Obama sent Churchill packing, we learn that there were, in fact, two busts and that the "Greatest Briton" was not "unceremoniously expelled" (as Andrew Roberts said recently in the Telegraph) but still enjoys pride of place in the Residence, outside the Treaty Room, at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

A second bust was presented by Her Majesty’s Government after the September 11 attacks and this famously graced the Oval Office for the duration of George W. Bush’s presidency. When the Bush administration came to an end, though, so did the loan -- hence the reason for its hasty return to the British Embassy; all of the other artwork loaned specifically to President Bush was likewise removed by the curator’s office on Inauguration Day, as protocol dictates, prior to the arrival of the newly sworn-in successor.

As the first African American Commander-in-Chief, there is little surprise that the incoming administration did not request an extension to the loan, because Churchill’s departure made way for a bust of Obama’s hero, namely Abraham Lincoln. What is of arguably greater surprise, however, is why the original bust -- Sir Jacob Epstein’s bronze artifact presented to Lyndon Baines Johnson by Harold Wilson in 1965 -- has not been removed.

I say this not because of events surrounding the suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, and the torture Obama’s grandfather (Hussein Onyango Obama) allegedly endured in 1952, but because of the 1953 Iranian coup in which Britain and America orchestrated the overthrow of Muhammad Mossadegh only to reinstall the Shah. Given the breakdown in diplomatic relations between Washington and Tehran since Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic revolutionaries overthrew the old regime in 1979, the 44th President of the United States has every right to not want the 40th Prime Minister of the United Kingdom looking over his shoulder.

While Obama became the first serving American president to publicly admit U.S. involvement in the coup when speaking to the Muslim world in Cairo in 2009, he conceded that his nation only "played a role" in the overthrow of Iran’s (first) democratically-elected prime minister. And how right he was, since, let us not forget, this was a British-led intelligence operation to destabilise a foreign government after its leader dared to nationalize Britain’s largest overseas asset: the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Humbled by a character known for weeping uncontrollably in public, Churchill was determined to bring about the demise of Mossadegh, a figure whom he disparagingly referred to as "Mussy Duck."

Back in power after six years of opposition and Clement Attlee’s socialism (which, Churchill declared, marked "the greatest fall in the rank and stature of Britain in the world which has occurred since the loss of the American colonies nearly two hundred years ago"), Tory imperialists such as Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden were keen to close the chapter on Labour’s “dismal, drawling tides of drift” and open another in which the British Empire’s interests would be preserved through a close association with -- what Bernard Porter labels -- the American "Superempire." 

When diplomats and spies were expelled from the British Embassy ("in the hope," Iranian officials thought, "of curtailing British plotting," writes Homa Katouzian, author of Mussadiq and the Struggle for Power in Iran), America’s participation became essential if any covert operation was to be successful. The Brits had their work cut out, though, enlisting the help of their trans-Atlantic cousins in such a revenge mission -- or so you would have thought since many foreign-service officers had what Christopher de Bellaigue calls an "anti-colonial conscience."

"But," relates de Bellaigue, the author of A Patriot of Persia: Muhammad Mossadegh and a Tragic Anglo-American Coup says, "the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern, African and Far Eastern Affairs was young and in awe of Britain’s experience." And MI6 officer Monty Woodhouse was symptomatic of those British officials who took advantage of their purported Grecian-like experience when dealing with America’s warlike Rome and was nothing if not duplicitous when, in Washington, he downplayed the importance of oil interests and dwelled on the dangers of not toppling a communist stooge.

The Foreign Office’s strategy to frighten the Central Intelligence Agency into believing that Mossadegh’s Iran would be a Soviet satellite caused the CIA to mislead Messrs. Eisenhower and Dulles and not only become Britain’s accomplice but, in short, its trigger man. Worst still, though, from an American perspective, is the fact that until the 28 Mordad Coup (the date of the coup in the Persian calendar), Iranian nationalists such as Mossadegh looked to America’s example of individual freedom and liberty and erroneously believed that Uncle Sam would see them as budding George Washingtons and thus act as a buffer to the plots and plans of the British bulldog.

The consequences of Operation Ajax for American foreign policy were numerous -- not to mention, well, disastrous, as Steve Marsh, author of Anglo-American Relations and Cold War Oil, points out at length:

The US achieved short-term objectives but the methods by which it stabilised Iran ... carried a terrible ‘blow back’ legacy. It substituted for the yoke of British imperialism association with a brutal and repressive regime ... More significant still, the US became the focus of popular Iranian hatred for sponsoring the coup against Mosadeq and supporting the Shah’s dictatorship. The 1979 Iranian revolution consequently bequeathed the US an implacable enemy in the Middle East, wrecked Nixon’s regional twin-pillar strategy and forced the US to develop its own costly ‘over the horizon’ capability in the shape of the Rapid Deployment Force. Also, the bungled attempt to rescue American Embassy staff held hostage in Teheran during the revolution brought humiliation upon the Carter administration and accelerated the end of Cold War détente. Today Iran remains a thorn in America’s side, denounced by President George W. Bush as part of an ‘axis of evil.’ It is determined to develop weapons of mass destruction, causes dispute with US allies about embargo policy and harbours those who President Bush freely labels ‘terrorists’.

While it would be a gross exaggeration to say that Churchill was the sole author of the aforementioned history, his comment and actions upon re-entering Number 10 Downing Street -- that it was "of the utmost importance to get America in" to the Middle East and his Conservative government relinquishing power in the region --- should be considered by Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, and the concomitant foreign policy costs considered, before "looking forward" to returning that Churchill bust to the Oval Office.