From Operation Ajax to Operation Midnight Hammer: What Colonialism’s Defenders Don’t Count
As I write this, the Pentagon is moving warships, fighter jets, and refueling tankers toward the Persian Gulf. President Trump has given Iran ten to fifteen days to make a deal on its nuclear program or face what could be a second round of Operation Midnight Hammer. The first round, last June, sent seven B-2 stealth bombers from Missouri to drop bunker-busting bombs on three Iranian nuclear facilities. It lasted twenty-five minutes.
I know what happens to ordinary people when Washington decides to intervene in Iran. I am an Iranian-born American who left Iran in the 1980s after the Revolution and the war made staying untenable. The chain of events that put me on that path begins in 1953, when the CIA and MI6 overthrew Mohammad Mossadegh, Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, because he nationalized the country’s oil. That coup installed the Shah. The Shah’s dictatorship produced the 1979 Revolution. The Revolution produced the war, the purges, and the exodus that scattered Iranian families across four continents.
I mention all of this because for the past several years, I have had a colleague at Portland State University who argues that colonialism was a gift.
The Case and Its Author
Bruce Gilley is a professor of political science at PSU’s Hatfield School of Government. In 2017, he published “The Case for Colonialism” in Third World Quarterly, arguing that Western colonialism was “both objectively beneficial and subjectively legitimate” and calling for its revival. Fifteen editorial board members resigned. Three peer reviewers had recommended against publication. The journal withdrew the article after the editor received death threats, but the National Association of Scholars republished it, and Gilley reversed his earlier regrets and leaned in. By 2023, he had expanded it into a book. The title had not changed. Neither had the argument.
The premise: colonized peoples were better off under European rule than before, and the post-colonial record proves they needed it. Gilley builds this case with cherry-picked accounts and selective economic data. The massacres, famines, and forced labor are filed under what he calls an “ugly side.” Every colonial ledger has one. You just have to know which column not to read.
From Malaysia to Mar-a-Lago
In April 2024, Gilley delivered a lecture at the University of Malaya. He told his audience that Malaysia’s support for Palestinians amounted to advocating “a second Holocaust against the Jewish people.” The university apologized. The Malaysian government ordered all his events canceled. Gilley fled the country, launched a GoFundMe to cover his airfare, and described the backlash as an “Islamo-fascist mob.” The GoFundMe was for $2,346. The man who wants to bring back colonialism could not cover his own hotel bill.
That same spring, he was hired as a Presidential Scholar in Residence at New College of Florida, the small liberal arts college that Governor DeSantis has been converting into a conservative experiment. The salary was $130,000. The job description was undefined. The faculty were not consulted. When The Guardian asked Gilley for comment, he responded: “F*** you, you ideological midwit.” The scholar making the intellectual case for colonialism, everyone.
What the Gift Cost
Gilley writes about colonialism as though it happened to spreadsheets. Iran offers a useful corrective.
In 1953, the CIA and British intelligence orchestrated a coup against Mossadegh because he had the nerve to audit the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s books. Agents bribed newspaper editors, manufactured street protests, and armed local thugs. Around three hundred people died in the streets of Tehran, the democratic government collapsed, and the Shah was restored.
What followed was twenty-five years of a Western-backed dictatorship propped up by billions in American arms sales and a secret police force, SAVAK, trained by the CIA. SAVAK tortured and killed political dissidents with methods that human rights organizations documented in detail. The Shah’s autocracy crushed the democratic, secular, modernizing politics that Gilley claims colonialism was supposed to deliver.
When the revolution finally erupted in 1979, it did not produce the liberal democracy that might have emerged had Mossadegh been left alone. It produced a theocratic revolution, because the coup had wiped out the moderate secular middle of Iranian politics decades earlier. As the political scientist Mark Gasiorowski has argued, the coup removed the pro-democracy faction from Iranian politics and opened the field to radical Islamists and radical leftists.
The Revolution led to the Iran-Iraq War, a conflict that killed a million people, displaced millions more, and created the refugee crisis that emptied entire communities of religious and ethnic minorities. Gilley’s framework has no accounting line for any of this. By his accounting, Western intervention is a deposit. The withdrawals do not appear on the ledger.
Beachfront Property and Bunker-Busters
If Gilley’s argument sounds like it belongs in a different century, consider what it looks like with a press office.
On February 4, 2025, President Trump stood next to Benjamin Netanyahu and announced that the United States would “take over” the Gaza Strip, remove its 2.2 million Palestinian inhabitants, and turn it into “the Riviera of the Middle East.” Palestinians would be relocated to unspecified “beautiful areas.” Gaza would be demolished and rebuilt for “the world’s people.” When a reporter pointed out that Gaza is the Palestinians’ home, Trump asked, “Why would they want to return? The place has been hell.”
It has been hell because it was bombed into rubble. Then the person who supported the bombing proposed to seize the rubble, evict the survivors, and develop beachfront condos. Jared Kushner had floated the same idea a year earlier, calling Gaza’s waterfront “very valuable.” The family business never really left real estate.
A 38-page planning document later surfaced. It proposed “AI-powered smart cities,” digital tokens for displaced Palestinians, a manufacturing hub named after Elon Musk, and a U.S. trusteeship lasting at least a decade. International law was not mentioned. Palestinian consent was not mentioned. The document read like a pitch deck. The product was forced displacement.
By June, Trump authorized Operation Midnight Hammer, hitting Iran’s nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. As of this writing, the military buildup for a possible second strike is underway. Two aircraft carriers sit in the Arabian Sea. Fighter squadrons are in position. The parallels to the lead-up to the Iraq War are hard to miss, except that this time the administration is not even pretending to build a coalition or seek congressional authorization.
Inside Iran, the largest protests since 2022 erupted in late December, driven by a collapsing currency and decades of mismanagement. The regime responded by killing thousands of its own citizens. Human rights organizations report over seven thousand confirmed dead and more than fifty thousand arrested. Trump threatened the regime, warned against executing protesters, and at the same time positioned forces for a bombing campaign that would devastate the very population he claimed to be defending.
The Iranian people are caught between a theocracy that murders them in the streets and a superpower that threatens to bomb them into a deal. That is the geopolitical trap that Western intervention built, and it has been under construction since 1953.
Same University, Different Ledger
I am a faculty member at Portland State. So is Gilley. My students, most of them working professionals in education, are learning to think about how power shapes institutions. Gilley, across campus, is teaching them that the most extreme exercise of that power was a net positive.
The academy has always had its share of contrarians and provocateurs. That is not the issue. The issue is that Gilley’s argument is no longer academic. When an American president proposes to annex Gaza and turn it into a resort, when the U.S. Air Force drops bunker-busters on Iranian soil for the first time in a generation, when the language of “taking over” other people’s territory re-enters mainstream political discourse without embarrassment, the intellectual scaffolding for those actions has an author.
Gilley provides that scaffolding. His work tells policymakers that colonized peoples were better off being ruled, that their resistance was irrational, and that the West should consider doing it again. Trump’s Middle East policy does not cite Gilley, but it does not need to. The logic is the same: we know what is best for you, we will take what we want, and you should thank us for it.
As an Iranian Jew who grew up inside the wreckage of that logic, I can tell you: the invoice always arrives. It just gets delivered to people who never placed the order.