>at the very least it disproves your unspoken assertion that the Iranians are primarily to blame for their problems
I'm very clearly stating that the Shah in particular was highly likely to have removed Mossadegh either way due to a multi-decade power struggle between the Pahlavi dynasty and the parliament /prime minister. The Majlis as a rival power center was largely a result of the Anglo-Soviet invasion which deposed Reza Shah, prior to that the Majlis had functioned in more of an advisory capacity, and Mohammed Reza Pahlavi was always lookign for ways to push back against the Majlis.
It is also important to note that the constitution in place in the early 1950s gave the power to appoint and remove the prime minister to the shah, Mossadegh was recommended to the shah by the Majlis who appointed him prime minister. That is factually how the government worked. It is also important to note that in 1952 Mossadegh stopped the counting of an election that it looked like he was going to lose. In 1953 Mossadegh organized a referendum to dissolve the parliament and vest sole power in the prime minister. This gave the shah the excuse he needed to remove Mossadegh and triggered Anglo-American support for the Shah and Iranian army to remove Mossadegh.
The CIA certainly helped the Shah get generals on side and plan the coup, this is not in dispute. However the idea that Mossadegh was democratically elected is not really true, and the idea that the coup was entirely carried out for external reasons is entirely false.
Ray Takeyh a professor of Near East studies who wrote The Last Shah: America, Iran, and the Fall of the Pahlavi Dynasty (Yale University Press, 2021) holds the position that the coup was internally driven. We also know from declassified document that the CIA thought the coup had failed and that their part was rather insignificant, but Iranian on the ground under their own direction carried out the coup.[1]
[1]https://web.archive.org/web/20150603235034/https://www.forei...
You’re being too liberal with meaning of “illegal” here.
There was a referendum to dissolve the Parliament then.
edit: typo
He was everything but democratically elected. He was installed. The Iranian people did not elect Mosaddegh. He was put there by a Shah and the elites of the Majlis, neither of which ever represented the people of Iran. At no point in the past century has Iran had representative government.
For the absurd 'democratically elected' premise to be true, there would have to be actual representative government. There wasn't, there isn't.
The UK spent a lot of resources conspiring against this project, which ultimately failed, to a large extent because he did not have a solution to the blockade that followed nationalisation of the oil production. Perhaps he also did not expect as many members of the majlis to join the foreign conspiracy as did when the blockade got inconvenient.
It's also not like democratisation followed under the shah, rather the opposite, like the establishment of rather nasty security services and a nuclear program that the later revolutionaries inherited.
Right up until he was about to lose an election, then he suspended counting votes and tried to dissolve the Majlis in alliance with the communist party.