Mr. Moussadek Shomm - America.
The performance of Dr. Moussadek before the United Nations Security Council at Flushing Meadow may conceivably have done something to correct the peculiar view of the Persian oil dispute which has grown up in the United States in recent weeks. The tendency has been to jump from the plain fact that the British Government has completely botched its case in the past seven months, to the entirely false conclusions that the Persian Government was right all the time, that a fairly satisfactory agreement could have been made, and that Dr. Moussadek might be led gently into negotiations. It is perfectly true that, by sheer incompetence, the British Foreign Office threw away the last faint chance of negotiation, but Dr. Moussadek has given no evidence whatever that he wanted an agreed solution. At the Security Council meetings he has simply continued to follow the line which he has always followed, of asserting that nobody but the Persian Government had any right to settle the future of the Persian oil industry and of completely disregarding the disastrous practical consequences of his own policy. While Dr. Moussadek addressed the Security ,Council at Flushing Meadow the head of the Persian National Oil Board, Mr. Hussein Makki, in Teheran demonstrated all Over again the irrelevance of all the arguments about devoting the profits of the oil industry to the relief of Persian poverty by revealing that although his Board could not work the Abadan refinery he would have set it on fire rather than allow the British to defend it. It must be clear, after this demonstration of the Moussadek policy, that nobody comes out of the episode with any particular credit—not even the Americans. The submission of the case to the Security Council may have been a forlorn hope, but it should now be clear that the toning down of the British resolu- tion to accord with American views is only the latest stage of the dismal process of vacillation and confusion of purpose.
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