Like most US puppets -- talk about hubris -- the Shah never understood that he was just a puppet. His corporate multinational economic model as applied to Iran had the predictable effects; much like today (even in Europe and the US), a tiny minority consuming like there's no tomorrow and a huge majority increasingly miserable, as the Shah bet on cash crops instead of an agrarian reform to guarantee the subsistence of millions of peasants -- many of them illiterate, pious Shi'ites -- who had been booted out of the countryside by American agribusiness, which dismissed them as a superfluous workforce.
These miserable masses inflated Tehran and other Iranian big cities, turning into the mass base for Khomeini's revolution. And the rest is history.
Nothing is inaccessible
Then Jimmy Carter -- that hick Hamlet -- when still campaigning for the presidency against Gerald Ford in 1976, admitted in a debate that the Shah was a torturer. Two years later, as president, Carter now considered him "an island of stability" and "a friend."
The Shah's banker was David Rockefeller, never tired of extolling the "patriotism" and "tolerance" of his client, not to mention his modernizing drive -- everything duly parroted by US corporate media even as Amnesty International and the State Department itself had Himalayas of documents proving the Shah was one of the top torturers of modern history. What mattered is that he brought excellent dividends for then Chase Manhattan.
One never lost money underestimating the cluelessness of US corporate media. When the Islamic revolution started, US media as a whole told the world that the Shah was undefeatable; that Khomeini and his followers were a minority of religious fanatics; and that the real motive for the revolution was that the Shah was a Great Modernizer (the Rockefeller script), rejected by those same Muslim fanatics. It's fair to say this script is still being peddled today.
When the Shah fled Iran, the whole US media bought the fallacy of "going for a holiday." When Khomeini boarded that Air France flight from Paris and arrived in Tehran in absolute triumph, no wonder no one in the US had a clue what was going on. US media preferred to mock Khomeini's "fanaticism" -- which at the time paled compared with Pope John Paul II, who considered women to be an inferior species.
The Iranian bourgeoisie -- modern, social democrat, inheriting the political line of Mossadegh -- managed to drive a lot of support from progressives in Europe. At a time when Le Monde was still a very good newspaper and not the sub-American trash it is today, one just needed to read the dispatches by ace correspondent Eric Rouleau to confirm it.
Khomeini, for his part, had the charisma (and that spectral voice on cassette tapes), supported by the only political organization tolerated by the Shah, the roughly 160,000 mullahs, who duly mobilized those wretched masses rendered useless by American agribusiness interests.
Yet, from the beginning, Khomeini negotiated with the bourgeoisie -- as when he named Mehdi Bazargan as prime minister and Bani Sadr as president (a socialist and a Western-style modernizer). Only when the Shah system was totally eradicated did Khomeini go into overdrive to purge everyone but his religious followers -- recreating, on a smaller scale, the Shah's inferno, but in the name of Allah. Well, as Mao said, no revolution is a dinner party.
As for Jimmy "Hamlet" Carter, he never officially recognized Khomeini as the Iranian leader. Washington didn't even try to talk to him. A whiff of geopolitical intelligence would have the Americans trying to share some tea when he was still exiled in Paris. But David Rockefeller and his parrot Kissinger would scream, so a cowed Carter retreated into his shell. After the Islamic revolution, Washington never returned the estimated US$60 billion the Shah, family and cronies stole from Iran.
This catalogue of disinformation during the 1970s and 1980s is now mirrored by the disinformation of all these past few years about the Iranian nuclear program. No wonder most Americans -- and plenty of Europeans -- remain clueless.
When Khomeini died -- and I vividly remember every newspaper in Europe on June 5, 1989, sharing the front page between that and Deng Xiaoping ordering the Tiananmen massacre -- the great philosopher Daryush Shayegan, a former professor at the University of Tehran, published a superb article in Liberation explaining the Big Picture, from the Shah's "legacy" to Khomeini.
Shayegan wrote that both men, the Shah and the Imam, committed the same fatal mistakes and "incarnated, each their own way, two typically Iranian traits: cultural schizophrenia and the dream of grandeur." So the whole drama was about two juxtaposed Irans: Imperial Iran and "the suffering Iran of the blood of the Martyr." Both expressed an impossible dream and, "like the 12th century mystical poet Ruzbehan from Shiraz would say, the same 'dementia of the inaccessible.'"
Today, 35 years after the Islamic revolution, what Iranians seek is hardly inaccessible: the end of Western sanctions and the end of sections of the West perennially treating the country as a bunch of religious "fanatics."
Russia, China, Turkey, Pakistan, other Asian nations, all Latin American nations, all African nations, all treat Iran as normal. Beyond the clash of "heroic flexibility" against American exceptionalism, if only the US establishment would finally get over it, and deal -- realistically -- with what happened in Tehran 35 years ago. Only then these talks in Vienna will go somewhere, and we may have a final nuclear deal in 2014.
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