A history lesson on American relations with Iran:
0 Retweet 51 Share 86 StumbleUpon 0 Printer Friendly Send via email
Posted in Uncategorized | 9 Comments | Print
Juan Cole
Welcome to Informed Comment, where I do my best to provide an independent and informed perspective on Middle Eastern and American politics.
Informed Comment is made possible by your support. If you value the information and essays, I make available and write here, please take a moment to contribute what you can.
Iranians were not quite innocent in the 1953 coup.
Sounds accurate. Who made it?
I remember coming home filled with righteous indignation during my first semester of college and telling my republican, WWII vet father about the CIA sponsored overthrow of Mossadeq, Arbenz and others.
He told me it couldn’t have happened because America didn’t do that, and said I was a ‘Commie dupe’.
That can’t be correct. Everybody knows that Iranian history began with the 1979 hostage crisis.
And Nicaraguans, some of them, and South Vietnamese, some of them, and Chileans, some of them, and so forth, were “not quite innocent” in the “coups” they have lived through. And if you believe some pretty competent scholarship and the testimony of one Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, some “Americans” were not quite innocent in plotting to overthrow the Evil Roosevelt and install a more “business-friendly” regime. link to en.wikipedia.org
What’s the point of your pithy comment, again? “Collective guilt?” “They got what they deserved?”
The Kleptocrats, across the planet, have gotten smarter and more subtle over the years, about ensuring the ascendancy of their “business interests” in the operation of our “democracy” and other forms of government elsewhere…
This kind of fixation, blaming, and bickering is exactly what destroyed the usefulness of the 1979 revolution. What must be done is the question and not how we hate the past.
Very well-made video. However, I think stating that Hussein invaded Iran without any provocation is an oversimplification of the complicated dynamics that led up to the war.
This is interesting. One has to remember that Iran’s chief source of revenue has been and is fossil fuel exports. They generate more revenue by moving their domestic energy production/consumption to stuff other than fossil fuels. The Shah wanted a French or Japanese-like source of nuclear energy. It made fiscal sense-of course wind and solar can replace a lot of the nuclear today, but the vision is not there yet! Nor is it here yet!
The Shah, like Dr. Mossadegh, was educated in western Europe and ultimately and ironically met a similar fate. Both were forcefully removed and exiled. The developed countries, and their undeveloped allies, do not seem to have a clear vision of a future other than war and constant threat of war. What a total waste! Dr. Mossadegh and the military had no intention of deposing the Shah-they wanted a better more efficient distribution of power as evident in the successful European monarchies of their era-Holland, Sweden, Norway, etc. However, absolute dictatorship played a stronger hand at the time-cold war, dominos, etc. It is almost as if the great powers, blind and deaf, were not able to see the gaping difference between communism and democratic aspirations!
Andrew Scott Cooper’s book The Oil Kings covers an important period of time (1969-1978) for US-Iran relations. It tells fascinating stories of the US-approved Iranian contingency plan for invading Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, Nixon giving the Shah a secret greenlight to buy any military technology he wanted and to raise oil prices to whatever he wanted, the Shah’s involvement in the election of 1972 and illegal arm shipments to South Vietnam. He was finally brought down by the American effort to break OPEC and his desire to be the regional hegemon.
Well worth the read.