Ayatollah Redux - 1979
By Gordonskene Thursday Jun 11, 2009 5:00pm
(Jumping from one frying pan straight into another.)
With the elections in Iran less than two days away, I remembered 2009 marked the 30th anniversary of the overthrow of the Shah and the ushering in of the Ayatollah - going from one repressive regime to another in a matter of months.
And in 2009 there is talk of an ouster of the fundamentalist regime of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a swing towards moderation and an unprecedented youth vote, probably too young to remember those days in 1979.
Word on the streets in Tehran is moderation and reform - women having an equal say in government, doing away with the repressive restrictions. Losing the stranglehold the fundamentalists have had these past 30 years.
But it's interesting to look back during those first 3 months of the overthrow (January to March 1979) to hear what was unfolding. News reports and speculations and finally an interview via Face The Nation with the Ayatollah Khomeni.
A quick look back. Later on in the year it would mean American hostages - and we'll cover that in the coming months.
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Mention should be made of 1953, the CIA's overthrow of the duly elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mosaddeq and the installation of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi.
This began the CIA reign of terror in the world that continues to this day.
One report here.
Alfred W. McCoy: The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade
I've grappled for some time with the question, "How could the same Eisenhower who warned about the Military Industrial Complex, and correctly claimed that every battleship built was a theft from a child's education, how could he ALSO have supported the covert operations that 1) overthrew Mossadegh in Iran, 2) overthrew Arbenz in Guatemala, and 3) denied the Viet Minh their victory over the French, setting the stage for the American Vietnam War?"
I don't think Ike was a lying hypocrite, though that of course is one logical possibility.
I've often thought he was perhaps a pawn in the Dulles brother's game, a novice in politics who conceded to his foreign policy advisors ("handlers") rather than follow his better instincts.
But the real reason, I think, is that he thought he could successfully fight the Cold War without committing military force to do so. Remember, he ran against Truman as the Peace Candidate who promised to get the US out of the Korean War.
From The Real News Channel on YouTube, a brief analysis of the current Presidential Election in Iran:
Iran's green revolution
With Israel so hot and heavy about Iran and with the US still humiliated and stinging after the overthrow of the Shah, it could never happen that the US, UK and Israel are somehow involved in the recent sea-change in Iran.
Before the usual Carter-bashing gets underway in the media on the anniversary date of this event, mention should also be made that White House memos and documents newly declassified since the death of President Ford show that any realisitic hold on Iran by the Shah was already "broken" with the controls knowingly handed to the Ayatollahs well before Carter took office by Nixon, Ford, Rumsfeld and Kissinger during election campaign year 1976 on the fear that Ford's chances of winning that election would be threatened by the Shah's intention to increase the price of oil by 25%.
Kissinger BOASTED about their victory in doing so.
So...do I believe fellow Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower was a lying hypocrite who manipulated the overthrow of Iran's duly democratically elected government in 1953 for self-serving political reasons? You bet I do.
The same way I know that he and neither JFK nor LBJ totally committed the U.S. to the Vietnam War both economically and militarily in both word and deed on the basis that any attack on that country would be responded to as though it were an attack on the U.S....and that attack well and surely occurred and was responded to, militarily, by the Eisenhower administration months before JFK was elected, involving the Air Force's Operation Mobile Yoke.
And I believe that Ike teed up the "Commie threat" of that war he had already committed us to in order to play to the supposed strengths of his V.P., Richard Nixon, The Famous Red Menace Warrior, during election year 1960 in the hope that it would help him win if a higher profile "Commie threat" were in the air that year.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world...
From the Los Angeles Times
U.S. policies may have contributed to Iran revolution, study says
A report based on declassified documents suggests that the Nixon and Ford administrations, angry with the shah for his support for raising oil prices, worked to curb his ambitions.
By Borzou Daragahi
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
October 17, 2008
BEIRUT — A new report based on previously classified documents suggests that the Nixon and Ford administrations created conditions that helped destabilize Iran in the late 1970s and contributed to the country's Islamic Revolution.
A trove of transcripts, memos and other correspondence show sharp differences over rising oil prices developing between the Republican administrations and Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi in the mid-1970s, says a report to be published today in the fall issue of Middle East Journal, an academic journal published by the Washington-based Middle East Institute, a think tank.
Thanks for your insights and information on this. Your contribution is really welcome!
G.S.
I found a similar comment here.
'Posted By: It's Me @ 02/01/2009 2:28:13 PM'
I would like more information on 'Operation Mobile Yoke'.
Can you provide links?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKdAVYKYZfo
Fifty men taken captive in a hostile foreign land
Scorchin' sun beaming down onto miles and miles of sand
A mideast country being ruled
By a man who thinks it's fun
To hold our people in return
For a shah that's on the run
...
Storm the Iranian embassy
Before they start shootin' down you and me
Scores of suits in control
Of the diplomatic mess
While the nations of the world
Look on and could care less
The Soviet Union won't agree
To an economic plan
And then they laugh and march their troops
into Afghanistan
Orders from Moscow
Invade Tehran now!
...
A nation worries and reads the papers
Hoping that no-one has died
Hearin' rumours that the hostages
Will soon be tried as spies
Demonstrations on the street
Saying that the end is near
The man from New York Times on vacation
Wants to know what happened here
It was bad time to be a ten-year-old half-Iranian kid in America. It got to the point that my mom told me that if people asked, I was to tell them I was Saudi.
Was in high school and the nearest pub wrote on their sign: "we don't serve Iranians." Fast forward 29 years later, that pub just closed and I had to remind the readers of the local paper about that.
My Iranian drummer friend always referred to himself as "Persian." That threw the xenophobes off pretty well. (He said he didn't mind me calling him my ayatollah, lol)
I started using Persian in high school.
Man that is going to rob the wingnuts of their biggest talking point since Saddam Hussein's imaginary WMDs.
Wingers just don't get that Iranian politics, being a weird mix of theocratic and secular progressive voices, is way more complicated than they are capable of understanding.
I don't know if I've ever been this interested in another country's election before. Not only could this be a good thing for our relations with Iran, but for the people of Iran in general. After seeing the movie, "Persepolis", it opened my eyes to the fact that many of the average citizens in Iran want change. Even if the moderate candidate wins, it doesn't guarantee anything, but it gives us and the people of Iran hope of improvement.
Iran has had a very robust film industry over the last number of years. It has produced many beautiful, poetic, and moving films like Taste of Cherry, The Wind Will Carry Us, Secret Ballot, Baran, and Children of Heaven. There are also many female filmmakers. They all have censorship issues, and regardless who wins the election, these will probably continue.
But Iran is a much more complex country that our simple minded media portray them as. Their films reflect that.
You're right on that. Taste of Cherry is a classic. Their films are as complex as their country. Thanks for the reminder.
G.S.
US Funds Terror Groups to Sow Chaos in Iran
March 1, 2007 by TMO
Courtesy William Lowther in Washington DC and Colin Freeman, Sunday Telegraph
America is secretly funding militant ethnic separatist groups in Iran in an attempt to pile pressure on the Islamic regime to give up its nuclear programme.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s regime is accused of repressing minority rights and culture
In a move that reflects Washington’s growing concern with the failure of diplomatic initiatives, CIA officials are understood to be helping opposition militias among the numerous ethnic minority groups clustered in Iran’s border regions.
The operations are controversial because they involve dealing with movements that resort to terrorist methods in pursuit of their grievances against the Iranian regime.
In the past year there has been a wave of unrest in ethnic minority border areas of Iran, with bombing and assassination campaigns against soldiers and government officials.
Such incidents have been carried out by the Kurds in the west, the Azeris in the north-west, the Ahwazi Arabs in the south-west, and the Baluchis in the south-east. Non-Persians make up nearly 40 per cent of Iran’s 69 million population, with around 16 million Azeris, seven million Kurds, five million Ahwazis and one million Baluchis. Most Baluchis live over the border in Pakistan.advertisement
Funding for their separatist causes comes directly from the CIA’s classified budget but is now “no great secret”, according to one former high-ranking CIA official in Washington who spoke anonymously to The Sunday Telegraph.
His claims were backed by Fred Burton, a former US state department counter-terrorism agent, who said: “The latest attacks inside Iran fall in line with US efforts to supply and train Iran’s ethnic minorities to destabilise the Iranian regime.”
Although Washington officially denies involvement in such activity, Teheran has long claimed to detect the hand of both America and Britain in attacks by guerrilla groups on its internal security forces. Last Monday, Iran publicly hanged a man, Nasrollah Shanbe Zehi, for his involvement in a bomb attack that killed 11 Revolutionary Guards in the city of Zahedan in Sistan-Baluchistan. An unnamed local official told the semi-official Fars news agency that weapons used in the attack were British and US-made.
http://muslimmedianetwork.com/mmn/?p=761
Thanks for the reminder on Mossadegh and the 1953 CIA overthrow. I hope to put that up next week.
G.S.
...disastrous decision to sponsor the overthrow of a democratically elected president in 1953, we still have the opportunity to make Iran our closest ally in the middle east.
We have to discontinue the bullshit rhetoric and start helping them find other forms of energy besides nuclear. This country is yearning to embrace the West and we just keep pushing them aside. It's idiotic.
For all the ding-dong about Mousavi's support being a good sign for Iran, it's actually yet more wily cunning from the real leaders of the regime, Khameini and his gang.
See, under Ahmedinejad, while you kept the fundies happy you also angered the youth. And of course, an angry youth will want to oust the entire Islamic Republic system altogether. It was a similar situation before Khatami's election in '97. So the government gives and takes and lets a guy like Mousavi gain ground and his supporters rally in the street, and if he gets elected, people will be happy because they'll have a moderate in power who is easier on women's rights and the like.
But critically, the youth, the most volatile element in society, is appeased. And the Revolution lives on for at least another decade. Khatami gave a dying regime a new lease on life by letting the headscarves slip back a little while behind closed doors, the grip on power only got tighter.
The same can be expected with a Mousavi election. So for all this talk about change, and how good it is, for someone who hates the entire regime, it's the same shit in a different wrapper.
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