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Banned
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Quote:
First, let's examine a few basics:
1. When did the threat to us start?
Many will say September 11, 2001. The answer as far as the United States is concerned is 1979, 22 years prior to September 2001 with the following attacks on us:
* Iran Embassy Hostages, 1979;........
2. Why were we attacked?
Envy of our position, our success, and our freedoms. The attacks happened during the administrations of Presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush 1, Clinton and Bush 2. We cannot fault either the Republicans or Democrats as there were no provocations by any of the presidents or their immediate predecessors, Presidents Ford or Carter.
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Wow my BS detector went off louder than my smoke alarm ever has, and the batteries
will now have to be replaced. What a loud of BS propaganda. Sounds like Bush's answer,
as to WHY????
I know that what happened at the US Embassy in Iran in 1979 could never be connected
with the following:
Quote:
http://www.grailwerk.com/docs/bostonglobe17.htm
July 4, 2003
A lesson from Iran on regime change
By H.D.S GREENWAY
MORE THAN 25 years ago in Tehran, I was told a story by then American Ambassador Richard Helms, the former CIA chief: The Russian ambassador had asked the shah how he could accept an ambassador who had been CIA? The shah replied that at least he could be sure the Americans had sent their top spy.
In his memoirs, Helms wrote that the shah ''had always been well impressed by the quality of CIA people he had met through the years.'' Since he owed his throne to the CIA, this is not surprising.
In this new age of ideologically driven ''regime change,'' it is fitting that we remember that first US-engineered change in government in the Middle East 50 years ago next month: the coup against Iran's Mohammed Mossadegh. Americans have largely forgotten, but Mossadegh, an eccentric but popular Iranian nationalist, was Time Magazine's Man of the Year in 1951, mainly because he was driving the West wild. In a new and timely book, ''All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror,'' New York Timesman Stephen Kinzer uses recently declassified information to trace the origins of that event.
Mossadegh wasn't your average politician. ''He projected helplessness; and while he was obviously as much a captive as a leader of the nationalist fanatics, he relented on nothing,'' Kinzer writes. ''Under pressure he would take to his bed, seemingly at times to have only a tenuous hold on life itself as he lay in his pink pajamas, his hands folded on his chest, eyes fluttering and breath shallow. At the appropriate moment, though, he could transform himself from a frail, decrepit shell of a man into a wily, vigorous adversary.''
Mossadegh bitterly resented British control of Iran's oil and sought to wrest it from them. The British howled that changing the status quo agreement on Iran's oil would be the end of Britain, but Harry Truman, a hero in Kinzer's book, steadfastly resisted any attempt to force Mossadegh from office.
Then in came Eisenhower, or, perhaps more important, John Foster Dulles as secretary of state, and the mood in Washington changed. Mossadegh had thrown out the British embassy, so the Brits had not enough assets to move against Iran's government. But the Americans, whom Mossadegh trusted, did.
Enter the CIA's Kermit Roosevelt, grandson of Teddy, tasked with overthrowing the Iranian government. He pulled off a coup that rivals any fictional thriller. The shah, who had fled to Rome, was returned to power. Roosevelt was given a medal by the CIA and praised by Winston Churchill.
To some, the Mossedegh coup was a great success that forestalled Russian influence in the Persian Gulf and bought the United States a quarter century of Iranian cooperation. The Eisenhower administration went on to overthrow Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala the following year, and Helms calls the era ''the high tide of covert action.''
Both Helms, in his book ''A Look Over My Shoulder,'' and Kinzer stress that fear of the Soviet Union was running so high at the time that the communist threat to the West loomed larger than seems reasonable in retrospect. Even Helms admits that ''with perhaps too little reflection, covert action had become America's ''panacea'' for foreign policy problems. Diplomacy had its uses, but in those years an impatient United Staes had convinced itself that even the most effective diplomacy ''took too much time and the result was often uncertain.''
Helms entertains the idea that ''had Mossadegh remained in office... he might have created an Iranian political system which would have headed off the revolution against the monarchy. But Helms attributes the fall of the shah to his inability to ''develop a political system that would accommodate the changes and development while also providing for the well-being of the largely illiterate and impoverished general population.''
Kinzer argues that ''but for the coup, Iran would probably have become a mature democracy. So traumatic was the coup's legacy that when the shah was overthrown in a popular uprising in 1979, many Iranians feared a repetition of the 1953 coup, which was one of the motivations for the student seizure of the US embassy.'' In Kinzer's view, much of the terror today comes as a result of that covert action 50 years ago.
Certainly the Iranians have never forgotten the events of August 1953. Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, justified his regime's radicalism by saying: ''We are not liberals like (Salvador) Allende and Mossadegh whom the CIA can snuff out.''
Today, we have another American administration that feels that diplomacy takes too much time, and is too uncertain; an administration that has in Donald Rumsfeld a Cabinet member as dominant and powerful as Dulles was in Eisenhower's administration. It is an administration that sees regime change as a panacea.
Today, 50 years after the last American inspired overthrow of an Iranian government, Rumsfeld and the neoconservatives around him talk of changing the present Iranian government. Some even talk of bringing back the dead shah's son and putting him on the throne.
Regime change is coming to Iran anyway as its young people tire of the theocracy. They don't need the Bush administration to do it for them. But one has to wonder whether the ideological zeal of the regime changers who surround President Bush aren't sowing the seeds for another 50 years of trouble for the United States, just as the coup against Mossedegh did. As Kinzer quotes Truman: ''There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.
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It's probably gonna take "regime change" here, before I can sell my BS detector on Ebay, batteries not included.......... |