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A Little History You Need to Know

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But we didn’t learn anything from it, and every drop of blood shed and every dollar spent was one of each that we might just as well have jammed into a honey-bucket and dumped in the furrows of a rice paddy.  

 

The story of Iraq, however much more incredibly complicated, is not so incredibly different: Iraq is an ugly stepchild of our ugly history in Iran (Interestingly, the name derives from Aryan, land of the Aryans), until 1935, known as Persia; a country that was the confection, entirely, of Great Britain, France and Russia, and it was all about oil!

 

At the beginning of the century, the Brits grabbed it — every last pint — in a corrupt deal with the fading Qajar Dynasty. In fact, the very lifeblood of the pan-global British Empire — every vehicle, every factory, the entire Royal Navy — was pure Iranian crude. Moreover, fully 90% of business profits through all Europe were fueled by just one British petroleum company’s Iranian wells. That at the same moment the overwhelming bulk of the Iranian population suffered in genuine privation.

What did the Iranian people get from Britain in exchange for their oil? The constitutional monarchy, most deprecatingly got back of the hand insults, and damned little else.

 

In 1921, Reza Khan overthrew the Qajar Dynasty and became shah. To balance the influence of Britain and the Soviet Union, Reza Shah made overtures to Germany. When, using this as pretense, Britain and the Soviet Union invaded Iran in 1941, Reza Shah abdicated in favor of his son, Reza Pahlavi. 

 

Following World War II, in 1951, Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh, in a thoroughly democratic election, was elected

prime minister of Iran. Mossadegh was extremely popular, but never more so as when he nationalized the country’s oil reserves. The by then powerless Brits were incensed over the sheer audacity of Mossadegh’s action. But being powerless, they appealed to everyone they hoped might listen sympathetically. They went to the UN. They went to the World Court. They went to the United States. All, including President Truman, turned a deaf ear to British pleas.

 

Things turned in Britain’s favor, however when the Eisenhower Administration gained control of the White House, and the lifelong international corporate counsel for the largest multinationals, John Foster Dulles, was named Secretary of State, and his younger brother, Allen Dulles became head of the CIA. (Of interest is the fact that John Foster, an ardent and very public supporter of the Nazi Party following Hitler’s election in 1933, gave $1 billion in assets to the regime; terminated only after his law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, threatened revolt unless he ceased his beneficent activities.)

 

Dulles, aghast that any government anywhere might threaten a huge corporation by nationalizing assets the corporation claimed as its own, regardless however title to the assets might have been gained, led the Secretary to work through his brother to overthrow the regime, and thus set an international example, lest other audacious leaders contemplate following Mossadegh’s lead.    

 

In 1953, Eisenhower gave the go ahead to Dulles’ Operation Ajax, the CIA plot that overthrew the democratically elected Mossadegh, and reinstalled Reza Pahlavi as Shah. The ensuing 25 US supported years in Iran were marked by the most brutal of dictatorial government policies, most notably using torture and murder by SAVAK, the Shah’s 60,000 secret agent strong National Intelligence and Security Organization.     

 

Tragically, what historical evidence suggests that dominating powers — from the earliest Greeks through the Romans, and from them to the French, and onward to the United States — tend to forget is the most elemental of human truths: you can only subjugate a people for just so long. Eventually, like spring steel, the intrinsic strength of the steel will prove greater than the force bending it, and it will spring back with extraordinary ferocity.

 

In 1978, the Iranians overthrew the Shah and installed Ayatollah Ruhollah  Khomeini as Supreme Leader of the country. Instructive, or should be instructive, or what could have been instructive, is the fact that, in the stead of the thriving democracy, in the very heart of the Moslem world that was available to us in 1951, what we wound up with, through much of the mid-East, was a clique of viscerally fanatic, anti-American mullahs bent on harming the United States — any way they could.

 

Bitter, and understandably so, at the US support of the Shah, on November 4, 1979, a group of Iranian students seized the American embassy, taking 52 hostages, and holding them for 444 days.

 

Anecdotally, historian Stephen Kinzer tells of an exchange between one of the hostages and a guard. The hostage, angry over the seizing of the embassy, excoriates the guard in the harshest terms. The guard thereupon replies, “You have nothing to complain about, you seized our entire country . . . and held it for 25 years!”

 

What surprised me then, what has surprised me since, is that anything about the Iranian’s response to the United States would, or might, be at all surprising. If the shoe had been on the other foot, given the emotive last four words in our National Anthem, “home of the brave,” precisely how much differently do you think we would have reacted? (Ya know, I’ve known a few long-haul Teamsters, some biker-bar fellas, and a couple longshoremen, and I just can’t picture any of them being especially polite, were the shoe to be on the other foot.)          

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An "Old Army Vet" and liberal, qua liberal, with a passion for open inquiry in a neverending quest for truth unpoisoned by religious superstitions. Per Voltaire: "He who can lead you to believe an absurdity can lead you to commit an atrocity."
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