History the Media Neglects

The drums are getting louder...Bush, Cheney, and their war machine's fear-mongering about the imminent threat from Iran are all over the news. (Why wasn't Iran an imminent threat when Iraq was an imminent threat?).

All of a sudden, Iran is the new Iraq, they want nuclear weapons that Israel, Pakistan, India, North Korea, and the U.S. have, and they're supposedly training Iraqi's - a people who are their religious enemies.

They are enriching uranium which can be used for two things: 1. nuclear power and/or 2. nuclear weapons. The funny thing is that Iran has signed the UN Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty which allow it to enrich uranium for nuclear power.

In any event, aside from the very astute Ron Paul, I have yet to hear any politician or major media news outlet bring up the history between Iran and the United States. My presumption is that when one does this, it becomes easy to see that we bear a lot of the fault for the Middle East in Crisis.

Excerpts from the main story (1) in this month's edition of Adbusters tells the tale simply:

1953: After an economic blockade and the presence of British warships in the Persian Gulf failed to break Mohammed Mossadegh's will, the British government persuaded the incoming Eisenhower administration to send in the CIA. (Mossadegh was a liberal democrat who believed fervently in national independence - Time magazine's Man of the Year - and was democratically elected as Prime Minister in 1952). A CIA operative named Kermit Roosevelt helped bring about this cautionary note in an official CIA report: "Possibilities of blowback against the United States should always be in the back of the minds of all CIA officers involved in this type of operation."


1954: Anglo-Iranian (Oil) changes its name to British Petroleum and regains its assets, but must share its monopoly with American oil companies. Mohammed Reza Shah is restored to the throne with help from the American-trained SAVAK secret police who torture and disappear even the most timid of dissidents. (Mossadegh had nationalized Iran's oil industry in 1951).


1971: The Shah throws himself a $100-million party at Persepolis to commemorate the 2,500th anniversary of the Persian Empire...the party must be held behind barbed wire, guarded by men with machine guns as protests erupt at Tehran University.


1979: After enduring a long reign of terror, a broad-based popular revolution overthrows the Shah. Five million Iranians crowd the streets of Tehran to welcome the revolution's symbolic leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, on his return from exile in Paris.


November 1979: Fueled by the belief that the U.S. is about to launch another coup after allowing the Shah to take refuge there, militant students seize the American embassy in Tehran, holding 52 hostages for 444 days. Ayatollah Khomeini, who was not involved in the hostage-taking, nevertheless lends his support and uses the distraction to consolidate power. Students piece together hundreds of pages of secret documents outlining the extent of former American control of Iran and its plans to destabilize the new regime.


1980: President Jimmy Carter orders a hostage rescue operation that goes terribly wrong. With Carter's popularity plummeting, Ronald Reagan wins a landslide victory in the presidential election. The hostages are released six minutes after Reagan is sworn in, contributing to allegations that his emissaries secretly negotiated to extend the hostage-taking until after the elections.


1983: Saddam Hussein, who invaded Iran in 1980 with the quiet encouragement of the U.S., has begun to use poison gas on Iranians on an almost daily basis. According to the Washington Post, "The administration of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush authorized the sale to Iraq of numerous items that had both military and civilian applications, including poisonous chemicals and deadly biological viruses, such as anthrax and bubonic plague."


1983: Donald Rumsfeld visits Saddam Hussein in Baghdad as special envoy of Ronald Reagan to discuss common interests and Iraqi oil shipments. Rumsfeld was previously involved (along with Dick Cheney) in promoting the development of Iran's nuclear program under the Shah.


2005: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war, is elected president of Iran. Within days of his election, the country announces it is proceeding with uranium enrichment.


2007: As Iraq descends into chaos with 700,000 Iraqis dead, the U.S. administration issues a troop "surge" in hope of regaining control, and makes the unusual argument that Tehran is arming anti-US insurgents - most of whom are Sunni and traditional enemies of the Shia Iranians. In January the U.S. raids an Iranian consulate in Kurdish Iraq, capturing low-level Iranian diplomatic staff; Iraqi troops working for the U.S. later capture an Iranian diplomat in Baghdad. Soon after, Iran captures 12 British sailors on an intelligence mission in disputed waters. The sailors are released a day after the Iranian diplomat, who claims to have been tortured by the CIA, is returned to Iran.


2007: U.S. fleet carriers gather in the Persian Gulf; Mohammad ElBaradei, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, announces that a military attack on Iran would be "an act of madness," and stresses that nonproliferation efforts are undermined as long as the "big boys" - such as the U.S. and Israel - are permitted to have nuclear weapons. The U.S. president authorizes the CIA to engage in covert operations to destabilize the Iranian regime.

In the media coverage, comparisons to the 1953 CIA regime change in Iran are nowhere to be found.





1. Campbell, Deborah Iran vs. The United States of Amnesia; Adbusters #73, Volume 15 Number 5; 2007.