From: Pat Fallon (pfallon@ptd.net)
Date: Sat Feb 22 2003 - 10:38:21 MST
> The US regime wont let the people of Iraq decide for themself.
Yes, time for another regime change...
[begin quote from Time Bomb in the Middle East: A Long Time Ticking By Ken Schoolland, 1/29/2003]
What was the US intervention in Iran and Iraq? It isn't a secret. The masterminds wrote books about it. Yet fewer people in the US than in the Middle East are aware that the CIA, in a 1953 mission code-named Operation Ajax, overthrew the first democratically elected leader of Iran. (4)
In 1953, the popularly elected Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh had asked the British government's oil concessionaires for a larger share of revenues, a share that American oil companies had already granted in Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. When the British government refused this split in revenues, Mossadegh did to Iranian oil what the British government had long before done to British oil: he nationalized it. In response, and worrying that Mossadegh would cozy up to the Soviets, western intelligence agencies engineered his overthrow and replaced Mossadegh with Shah Reza Pahlavi.
Iran's oil revenues were then evenly split between U.S. and British oil companies. Ah, nice for them! And Shah Pahlavi maintained his dictatorial rule for the next quarter century through the support of the CIA. The CIA even trained SAVAK, the Shah's secret police who were responsible for torturing or killing as many as 10,000 Iranian political dissidents. Not nice for U.S./Iran relations and not so nice for the dead.
The same U.S. government schools that neglected to teach students how to locate Iran and New Jersey on the map, also neglected to reveal to American students much of what U.S. politicians were doing over the decades since World War II. If government schools had been doing an effective job of preparing America's youth, they might have paused on this question: Would America's George Washington have approved of overthrowing the first democratically elected leader of another country, the "George Washington" of Iran?
Hostilities
After 25 years of U.S. supported dictatorial rule, Shah Pahlavi was finally overthrown by a fundamentalist revolution in 1979 in Iran. Understandably, suspicion and hostilities were then very great between the governments of the US and Iran. Soon thereafter, the governments of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait feared the spread of religious fundamentalism against their own autocratic regimes and provided as much as $20 billion of support to Saddam Hussein in his 8-year long Iraqi invasion of Iran. The war left more than a million people dead on both sides.
The U.S. usually condemns such invasions, but not this one. On the contrary, the U.S. supplied at least a billion dollars of military support to Saddam Hussein's invasion of Iran. (5) In those days, Saddam Hussein's murderous tactics were known and excused.
When the Iranians tried to block the oil trafficking that was financing Saddam's war machine, the US sent a naval fleet to guarantee "freedom of the seas," a policy that even resulted in an airborne Iraqi attack that killed 37 American sailors on the USS Stark.
The killing of American sailors was excused because, at that time, Saddam Hussein was the ally of US politicians and their desire to crush Iran. Now, American sailors are being asked to risk their lives to enforce a blockade against Iraq, the opposite task for which the 37 American sailors died in the 1980s. It was also during this time that the U.S. government was secretly supplying the Iranians during the infamous Iran-Contra affair.
Saddam Hussein was "America's ally," like Noriega, Mobutu, Suharto, Papa Doc, Samosa, Pinochet, Marcos, and others before him. It is doubtful that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson would have approved of any of these alliances. Why? Not only were these alliances immoral, but they increased, not diminished, the risk to American security. It brings to mind the quip of Will Rogers: "When you get into trouble 5,000 miles from home, you've got to have been looking for it."
(4) "Iran coup mastermind Kermit Roosevelt dies," Honolulu Advertiser, June 11, 2000, see also, Solberg, Carl, Oil Power, pp. 196-7
(5) Representative Henry Gonzales, Chairman of the House Banking Committee, made these revelations in a televised interview, "The Chairman," 60 Minutes, CBS, November 11, 1992, Also, Dobbs, Michael, "U.S. Had Key Role in Iraq Buildup Trade in Chemical Arms Allowed Despite Their Use on Iranians, Kurds," WashingtonPost.com, December 30, 2002
[end quote]
Pat Fallon
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