That what this country did was undeniably abominable, it was at least consonant with the history of our foreign policy conduct. On behalf of corporate interests and hemispheric hegemony we'd overthrown the governments of Columbia, of Guatemala, of Chile and in every instance installed autocratic despots beholden to us. When Eisenhower's Secretary of State Dulles, whose brother Alan was head of the CIA and the author of Operation Ajax, was called on the carpet for our support of one or another tin-horn banana republic dictator by a reporter, the Secretary of State responded, "He may be a sonofabitch, but he's our sonofabitch."
With the Shah, the Iranian people also got the Shah's SAVAK; the secret police who had a habit of torturing and disappearing everyone who might be perceived by them as a potential threat to the regime--students, professors, newspaper editors, etc. Meanwhile the Shah and his beautiful wife, Empress Farah, were being lavishly red-carpet fêted in Washington for twenty-six years through a series of presidential administrations from Eisenhower through Kennedy, through Johnson, through Nixon and Ford, all the way to Carter.
The Shah was our sonofabitch, and, by proxy, the Iranian people were the victims of our insidious machinations. However the youth may feel a predisposition to more liberal, Western manners and philosophies, we ought to consider that there exists a residue of resentments to the United States lingering subsurface. Thus it is, when the far-right wing-nuts toss catcalls to Obama for not being more unequivocally demonstrative in support of today's Iranian protesters, when even the less immoderate Republicans denigrate the president for some supposed timidity, perhaps we will be best served by not saying or doing anything that might remind any Iranians they have legitimate cause to question the authenticity of our claims of support. However they would not be the first people we've shafted, and likely not the last, they are among the most recent.
Hands way off could well be the most productive policy in this instance. Keep our hands from the scab. Let the Iranian wound heal a bit longer, lest we reinfect it.
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