Iran Had a Democracy Before We Took It Away
"Washington has never recovered from the loss of Iran-something our
intelligence services never saw coming. The overthrow of the shah, the
humiliation of the embassy hostages, the laborious piecing together of tiny
shreds of paper from classified embassy documents to expose America's venal
role in thwarting democratic movements in Iran and the region, allowed the
outside world to see the dark heart of the American empire. Washington has
demonized Iran ever since, painting it as an irrational and barbaric country
filled with primitive, religious zealots. But Iranians, as these street
protests illustrate, have proved in recent years far more courageous in the
defense of democracy than most Americans."
By Chris Hedges,
Truthdig. Posted June 23, 2009
Iranians do not need or want us to teach them about liberty and
representative government. They have long embodied this struggle. It is we
who need to be taught. It was Washington that orchestrated the 1953 coup to
topple Iran's democratically elected government, the first in the Middle
East, and install the compliant shah in power. It was Washington that forced
Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, a man who cared as much for his country
as he did for the rule of law and democracy, to spend the rest of his life
under house arrest. We gave to the Iranian people the corrupt regime of the
shah and his savage secret police and the primitive clerics that rose out of
the swamp of the dictator's Iran. Iranians know they once had a democracy
until we took it away.
The fundamental problem in the Middle East is not a degenerate and corrupt
Islam. The fundamental problem is a degenerate and corrupt Christendom. We
have not brought freedom and democracy and enlightenment to the Muslim
world. We have brought the opposite. We have used the iron fist of the
American military to implant our oil companies in Iraq, occupy Afghanistan
and ensure that the region is submissive and cowed. We have supported a
government in Israel that has carried out egregious war crimes in Lebanon
and Gaza and is daily stealing ever greater portions of Palestinian land. We
have established a network of military bases, some the size of small cities,
in Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Kuwait, and we have secured
basing rights in the Gulf states of Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab
Emirates. We have expanded our military operations to Uzbekistan, Pakistan,
Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Egypt, Algeria and Yemen. And no one naively
believes, except perhaps us, that we have any intention of leaving.
We are the biggest problem in the Middle East. We have through our cruelty
and violence created and legitimized the Mahmoud Ahmadinejads and the Osama
bin Ladens. The longer we lurch around the region dropping iron
fragmentation bombs and seizing Muslim land the more these monsters,
reflections of our own distorted image, will proliferate. The theologian
Reinhold Niebuhr wrote, "Perhaps the most significant moral characteristic
of a nation is its hypocrisy." But our hypocrisy no longer fools anyone but
ourselves. It will ensure our imperial and economic collapse.
The history of modern Iran is the history of a people battling tyranny.
These tyrants were almost always propped up and funded by foreign powers.
This suppression and distortion of legitimate democratic movements over the
decades resulted in the 1979 revolution that brought the Iranian clerics to
power, unleashing another tragic cycle of Iranian resistance.
"The central story of Iran over the last 200 years has been national
humiliation at the hands of foreign powers who have subjugated and looted
the country," Stephen Kinzer, the author of "All the Shah's Men: An American
Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror," told me. "For a long time the
perpetrators were the British and Russians. Beginning in 1953, the United
States began taking over that role. In that year, the American and British
secret services overthrew an elected government, wiped away Iranian
democracy, and set the country on the path to dictatorship."
"Then, in the 1980s, the U.S. sided with Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq
war, providing him with military equipment and intelligence that helped make
it possible for his army to kill hundreds of thousands of Iranians," Kinzer
said. "Given this history, the moral credibility of the U.S. to pose as a
promoter of democracy in Iran is close to nil.
Especially ludicrous is the sight of people in Washington calling for
intervention on behalf of democracy in Iran when just last year they were
calling for the bombing of Iran. If they had had their way then, many of the
brave protesters on the streets of Tehran today-the ones they hold up as
heroes of democracy-would be dead now."
Washington has never recovered from the loss of Iran-something our
intelligence services never saw coming. The overthrow of the shah, the
humiliation of the embassy hostages, the laborious piecing together of tiny
shreds of paper from classified embassy documents to expose America's venal
role in thwarting democratic movements in Iran and the region, allowed the
outside world to see the dark heart of the American empire. Washington has
demonized Iran ever since, painting it as an irrational and barbaric country
filled with primitive, religious zealots. But Iranians, as these street
protests illustrate, have proved in recent years far more courageous in the
defense of democracy than most Americans.
Where were we when our election was stolen from us in 2000 by Republican
operatives and a Supreme Court that overturned all legal precedent to anoint
George W. Bush president? Did tens of thousands of us fill the squares of
our major cities and denounce the fraud? Did we mobilize day after day to
restore transparency and accountability to our election process? Did we
fight back with the same courage and tenacity as the citizens of Iran? Did
Al Gore defy the power elite and, as opposition candidate Mir Hossein
Mousavi has done, demand a recount at the risk of being killed?
President Obama retreated in his Cairo speech into our spectacular moral
nihilism, suggesting that our crimes matched the crimes of Iran, that there
is, in his words, "a tumultuous history between us." He went on: "In the
middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of
a democratically elected Iranian government. Since the Islamic Revolution,
Iran has played a role in acts of hostage-taking and violence against U.S.
troops and civilians." It all, he seemed to say, balances out.
I am no friend of the Iranian regime, which helped create and arm Hezbollah,
is certainly meddling in Iraq, has persecuted human rights activists, gays,
women and religious and ethnic minorities, embraces racism and intolerance
and uses its power to deny popular will. But I do not remember Iran
orchestrating a coup in the United States to replace an elected government
with a brutal dictator who for decades persecuted, assassinated and
imprisoned democracy activists. I do not remember Iran arming and funding a
neighboring state to wage war against our country. Iran never shot down one
of our passenger jets as did the USS Vincennes-caustically nicknamed
Robocruiser by the crews of other American vessels-when in June 1988 it
fired missiles at an Airbus filled with Iranian civilians, killing everyone
on board. Iran is not sponsoring terrorism within the United States, as our
intelligence services currently do in Iran. The attacks on Iranian soil
include suicide bombings, kidnappings, beheadings, sabotage and "targeted
assassinations" of government officials, scientists and other Iranian
leaders. What would we do if the situation was reversed? How would we react
if Iran carried out these policies against us?
We are, and have long been, the primary engine for radicalism in the Middle
East. The greatest favor we can do for democracy activists in Iran, as well
as in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Gulf and the dictatorships that dot North
Africa, is withdraw our troops from the region and begin to speak to
Iranians and the rest of the Muslim world in the civilized language of
diplomacy, respect and mutual interests. The longer we cling to the doomed
doctrine of permanent war the more we give credibility to the extremists who
need, indeed yearn for, an enemy that speaks in their crude slogans of
nationalist cant and violence. The louder the Israelis and their idiot
allies in Washington call for the bombing of Iran to thwart its nuclear
ambitions, the happier are the bankrupt clerics who are ordering the beating
and murder of demonstrators. We may laugh when crowds supporting Ahmadinejad
call us "the Great Satan," but there is a very palpable reality that has
informed the terrible algebra of their hatred.
Our intoxication with our military prowess blinds us to all possibilities of
hope and mutual cooperation. It was Mohammed Khatami, the president of Iran
from 1997 to 2005-perhaps the only honorable Middle East leader of our
time-whose refusal to countenance violence by his own supporters led to the
demise of his lofty "civil society" at the hands of more ruthless, less
scrupulous opponents. It was Khatami who proclaimed that "the death of even
one Jew is a crime." And we sputtered back to this great and civilized man
the primitive slogans of all deformed militarists. We were captive, as all
bigots are, to our demons, and could not hear any sound but our own
shouting. It is time to banish these demons. It is time to stand not with
the helmeted goons who beat protesters, not with those in the Pentagon who
make endless wars, but with the unarmed demonstrators in Iran who daily show
us what we must become.
The fight of the Iranian people is our fight. And, perhaps for the first
time, we can match our actions to our ideals. We have no right under
post-Nuremberg laws to occupy Iraq or Afghanistan. These occupations are
defined by these statutes as criminal "wars of aggression." They are war
crimes. We have no right to use force, including the state-sponsored
terrorism we unleash on Iran, to turn the Middle East into a private gas
station for our large oil companies. We have no right to empower Israel's
continuing occupation of Palestine, a flagrant violation of international
law. The resistance you see in Iran will not end until Iranians, and all
those burdened with repression in the Middle East, free themselves from the
tyranny that comes from within and without. Let us, for once, be on the side
of those who share our democratic ideals.
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