Many people have a selected memory about America’s role in international politics in the past sixty years. To some, the United States government can do no wrong, not now, not ever. And this is not in any way unique to America. In Russia, there are many individuals who believe that Russia is well led under any government whatsoever. If you had criticized the Communist dictatorship, you would have been tagged as unpatriotic to Mother Russia. In Nazi Germany, if you didn’t fall in line and respect Nazi authority, then your lack of loyalty was seen as not just directed to the Furher, but to the entire German nation, and German history. To these kinds of people, criticism is not allowed, especially not in a situation when the country is in danger from outside threats. But these people never ask themselves how their country became so hated in the first place. Their passion is deep, but their imagination is not wide.
Trying to understand the politics of a particular region of the world without first being knowledgeable about its history will get you nowhere. Without a firm grasp of the facts, you can’t make a rational judgment. Most of us never bother to look up the facts, and instead make guesses and generalizations that ultimately backfire.
Although I criticize America a lot, it is because I love America. A free America means a free world. An enslaved America means an enslaved world. It is that simple, at least for me. If America falls into tyranny, so does Canada, and Europe. That was true in 1941, and it is even truer now. The United States is the most powerful nation in the world, and as we know, with great power also comes great responsibility. Americans have accepted the power that they won in the post-WWII world, but they’ve fell short of accepting the responsibility. Rather than being a moral and honest nation in the world, America’s leaders decided undemocratically in the 1950’s that like all past powerful nations America should be an empire, whose role in the international sphere would center on overthrowing democratically elected leaders of strategically-significant countries, and sponsoring state-sanctioned terrorism around the world. The vision of America’s rulers for America has largely been kept hidden from the American people. Instead of leading by example, America has led with tanks, guns, and oil/drug money. And thanks to media propaganda and mass schooling, the idea that America is a democratic leader of the free world is almost unquestionable for a lot of people.
But Americans are more than capable to tap into their revolutionary tradition, and restore its great republic once more, and leave the empire game for good. Before that happens, though, it is likely that the United States in collision with Israel will attack Iran, and thereby unleash another world war. It doesn’t need to be said that if such an attack occurs, the consequences for the whole world, especially the Middle East, will be devastating. But let’s not fool ourselves, America is far from innocent in Middle East relations. It struck a large bee hive when it overthrew Mossadegh, and disgraced itself in the eyes of all Iranians. Robert Sherrill provides a brief summary of the CIA-led coup in his article “America’s 100 Years of Overthrow”:
In 1953 the brutal, venal shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was pushed into exile by Mohammad Mossadegh, the democratically elected prime minister.
“Modern Iran has produced few figures of Mossadegh’s stature,” Kinzer says.
Iranians loved Mossadegh. He made clear that his two ambitions were to set up a lasting democracy and to strengthen nationalism — by which he meant get rid of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co., which had been robbing Iran for half a century. Indeed, the British company had been earning each year as much as all the royalties it paid Iran over 50 years. Mossadegh intended to recapture those riches to rebuild Iran.
In a scheme to get rid of Mossadegh, the British enlisted Secretary of State Dulles; he in turn enlisted his brother, CIA Director Allen Dulles, and what ensued was a truly masterful piece of skullduggery. First came a propaganda campaign to convince the West that Mossadegh was a communist, which in the U.S. of the 1950s put him on the level of a child molester. Actually, Mossadegh hated communists, but most of our press swallowed the lie. Time Magazine had previously called Mossadegh “the Iranian George Washington” and “the most world-renowned man his ancient race had produced for centuries.” Now it called him “one of the worst calamities to the anti-communist world since the Red conquest of China.”
The propaganda program on the outside was followed by a bogus “revolution” inside Iran, with a CIA agent-provocateur hiring such a huge army of thugs and terrorists to roam the streets of Tehran that the town fell into violent anarchy. The CIA plotters ousted Mossadegh and restored the shah to his Peacock Throne.
For Secretary of State Dulles and his old law clients — including Gulf Oil Corp., Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey, Texaco Inc., and Mobil Corp., who were subsequently allowed to take 40 percent of Iran’s oil supply — the shah’s return was a happy and very lucrative event. But, Kinzer reminds us, “The shah did not tolerate dissent [to silence some, he simply killed them] and repressed opposition newspapers, political parties, trade unions, and civic groups. As a result, the only place Iranian dissidents could find a home was in mosques and religious schools, many of which were controlled by” radical fundamentalists. So when the revolution against the shah finally broke out in 1979, it was inevitable that these clerics led it.
They then went on to sponsor acts of terror from Saudi Arabia to Argentina, mostly to humiliate the United States, and “their example inspired Muslim fanatics around the world, including those who carried out the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001. None of this … might have happened if Mossadegh had not been overthrown.”
At roughly the same time Secretary of State Dulles was destroying democracy in Iran, he was also busy destroying democracy in Central America, and once again it was on behalf of a renegade industry: United Fruit Co. If any bureaucrat deserved to spend the rest of his life in prison for conflict of interest, it was Dulles. And several of his bureaucratic buddies would have been right there beside him breaking rocks.
In the ten-minute video below, the narrator covers the same basic facts about US-Iranian relations, and goes over the storyline from 1953 to 1979 to current times. It is by no means a definitive account, but it does a good job of making the important point that Iranian students didn't take American hostages out of sheer malice in 1979, but had a historical reason to be distrustful of the American government.
