Since the United States overthrew democracy in Iran in 1953 and empowered the Shah until 1979, the Shah's son has been spending time in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, reportedly on the CIA pay roll, awaiting his turn. I think the relative lack of bloodthirsty support in the United States for a war on Iran right now is in part people having learned from the past, and in part the failed propaganda of building up former Iranian President Ahmadinejad as an Evil Dictator and then him getting voted out (an odd thing to happen to a dictator). Dictators and royal heirs are not particularly popular, which may also explain why we've never heard very much about the Shah's son.
How did we get to where we are on U.S.-Iranian relations? Through decades of warmongering and lying, and through Congress refusing to prevent war or to impeach for war or even to stop increasing the world's largest military budget every year.
What we need to do now is to act both short- and long-term. We need to prevent a new war, and end the existing ones. We also need to move in the direction of de-militarization more generally. We can't put this whole country into a witness protection program if it turns against its mafia ways. But we can act as if we don't want to be recognized as what the U.S. government used to be.
One place to start is by demanding that U.S. troops finally get out of Iraq. Whether we pretend they're there to spread democracy among the people who have demanded they leave, or whether we admit they're there to steal oil, the occupation is a criminal and counterproductive enterprise. Getting U.S. troops out of Iraq would be an enormous boost to movements to get U.S. troops out of dozens of other nations they have no business being in. If the U.S. and Iraqi publics were to both loudly demand the departure of U.S. troops from Iraq and succeed, that lesson might do more for the cause of democracy on earth than 10 million targeted strategic murders.
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