Modern Iran: A monster of our own making
Nick Patler
Columnist
Mohammed Mossadegh held much promise for the future of Iran. Elected prime minister in 1951, he embodied the causes that had become his country's collective aspirations: democracy and reclaiming Iranian oil, which had been totally controlled by the British government since 1901.
For 50 years, Britain had managed to strike bargains with corrupt monarchs to utterly manipulate Iran's rich oil reserves, giving virtually nothing back in return and using almost all of the profits to fatten the coffers of the British government while Iran remained impoverished.
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The charismatic Mossadegh, endeared by his people and genuinely saddened by Iran's poverty and misery, promised to change all of that by using the money from oil to develop his country. He was also determined to shift power from the monarch to the popularly elected parliament and prime minister, and the nation that backed his reforms celebrated his triumphant election. In 1952, Time named him man of the year, calling him "the Iranian George Washington." This was the dawn of a new era for the Persians. Iran was on the path to self-determination and representative government.
That dream would be violently cut short, however. The American and British governments would not stand for Mossadegh and his people, whom they held in disdain, controlling their own resources. They developed what can only be described as an obsession to overthrow the popularly elected leader. "With the cold calculation of the surgeon," writes foreign policy correspondent Stephen Kinzer, the American and British governments "plotted to cut Mossadegh from his people."
The two most powerful democracies, using covert efforts that included lies, violence, coercion and the threat of murder for those who wavered in supporting their plans, trampled the sovereignty of the Iranians as Mossadegh was finally ousted on Aug. 19, 1953, fleeing his home as it was being shattered by machine-gun fire and tank shelling. Shortly after, the U.S. puppet known as the Shah was installed in his place.
With the oil safe for continued British exploitation, the West grew richer as the people of Iran grew poorer and their country more unstable. Thus began America's dark journey into covertly subverting the will of others for greed and power, often with lethal consequences, for the next half-century.
Fast forward to today. Things haven't changed much. The U.S. continues in its efforts to manipulate and abuse Iran. We are now brazenly stalking the Iranians in the Persian Gulf with superpower aircraft carriers armed to the hilt with fighter-bombers and warships bristling with Tomahawk cruise missiles. This is eerily reminiscent of the gunboat diplomacy of the Tonkin Gulf episode of 1964, which, just as we had planned, kicked off the beginning of unbridled U.S. force in Indochina.
Now once again, we are taunting and provoking, indeed hoping, it seems, that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at least pings one of our massive ships with a BB, as we claimed the North Vietnamese did when we entered their waters off the South China Sea, so we can scream bloody murder and try to wipe him from the face of the earth.
The Bush administration has been rattling their sabers for some time now, demanding that Iran give up its nuclear ambitions or else. They have used finger-shaking, threat-making marketing propaganda to depict Iran as evil and dangerous, sinisterly building WMD, praying that they make enough noise that nobody seriously brings up the monumental hypocrisy about the U.S. having the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet and being the No. 1 builder and exporter of dangerous weaponry in the world.
From Iran's perspective, the U.S. not only had violated its sovereignty in 1953, propping up a puppet to do its bidding for the next 25 years, but America has also demonstrated the ease with which it is willing to use force all over the globe, including invading Iraq, their Middle East neighbor, and unleashing WMD hell on the children, women and men living in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Moreover, during the 1980s the U.S. encouraged and supported Iraq in its terribly inhumane and destructive war with Iran, hoping that Saddam Hussein would bring America's archenemy, the Ayatollah Khomeini, to his knees. Like Mossadegh, the Ayatollah rode into power on a popular wave of discontent over Western repression vis-à-vis the Shah, and this time there was nothing we could do about it. With our superpower ego crushed and our oil god at stake, we backed one the most brutal wars of the 20th century, responsible for over a million deaths, in hopes of wiping him off the map.
U.S. support here included satellite intelligence, loans to buys arms from American weapons manufactures, direct weapons and hardware deliveries from third parties and bacterial cultures to make weapons-grade anthrax (is this what the U.S. was really trying to find during the past four years, hoping to remove its own fingerprints?)
Of course, the U.S. turned the other way as Saddam used the chemical weapons on his own Kurds as well as the Iranians. Evidently, the price of gassing, shooting and bludgeoning over 50,000 civilian Iraqi Kurds was worth the price of trying to get rid of the Ayatollah.
With all considered, putting ourselves in their shoes, who could blame Iran for wanting an inkling of leverage against a mega-superpower willing to infringe on the sovereignty of others and destroy anything in its path — particularly one that has them once again in its crosshairs?
E-mail Nick Patler at nickpatler@hotmail.com
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