A history of US relations with Iran - "All The Shahs Men"

[Postman]

Iran had a democracy, the US overthrew it because of oil.

The Iranian students took US hostages in 1979 because they were afraid the US was about to repeat what they did to Iran in the 1950's with the re-installation of the Shah.

There are reasons why certain people in other countries do not like the United States - and its not because they "hate freedom."

[HysteryDiagnosis]

1. They hate us for our greedom. Had we not been one of the

nations with the largest thirst for oil, we would not be the nation that has (manured itself) into such a vaunted position with so many peoples of the world.

[Muddy Waters Guitar]

2. So true, the Mohammed Mossadegh coup often gets left out

Bush and his neocon comrades all bray against Iran as a big theocratic dictatorship that's been standing in the way of Mideast democracy. What they fail to mention, of course, is that the US was in large part responsible for this by overthrowing the democratically elected Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953, replacing him with the ultra-corrupt and brutal Shah.

Winston Churchill in large part was responsible for this. For all his accomplishments, Churchill also had his fair share of major screw-ups-- Gallipoli, Churchill's meddling in Iraq in the 1920's (where he advocated the use of poison gas against rebellious Iraqis), the atrocious Bengal Famine that killed 3 million Indians in 1943 (which Churchill almost applauded, as he despised Indian people and made sure everyone knew it), and the coup against Mossadegh. Churchill had slipped into spoiled brat mode and, still deluded, refused to accept that his beloved, corrupt and oppressive British Empire was collapsing all around him. So he pretended that he could forestall the Empire's collapse by ensuring that Mossadegh-- who dared to defy Britain and demand that the Iranian people profit from Iran's oil sales-- be removed from office.

Allen Dulles, then head of the CIA in the US, was stupid enough to be duped into labeling Mossadegh as a commie, and sure enough, the coup went through. The Iranians staged a revolution against the shah in 1979 because they knew the US had installed him as a pliable, corrupt proxy ruler to do our bidding, and they weren't about to allow it to happen again. As they say, those who make peaceful change impossible, make violent revolution inevitable. What happened in Iran, and their extremist theocratic leadership currently, is a direct result of US actions in the region and in Iran specifically.

[Lisa]

3. an excellent read!

I lent my copy to an Iranian friend (who is actually a distant relative of Mossadegh, and lived there until he finally had to flee the Shah's regime in the early 1970s). He says it checks out, in terms of the facts it cites.

He told me that many Iranians literally could not believe that the US would have overthrown their elected government -- Americans were so high in the esteem of many countries in the Middle East back then, that even the leftist intellectuals were saying that surely the British (whom they believed were capable of anything!) had tricked the honest Americans into this.

[Neil Lisst]

4. the students who helped the Ayatolla were hardly saints

They were as evil as anything the Shah ever did.

The Shah was a US strong man, but he was no worse than what followed in Iran.

[Lisa]

5. my Persian friend told me a really creepy story about a secret prison ...

... which, after the fall of the Shah, was discovered in their neighborhood ... hidden deep under a school playground. Aside from a few pipes sticking out of the ground that turned out to be air vents (and not many of those), it was well-concealed -- it was entered through another building next door.

Anyway, the new revolutionary government took it over, and instead of destroying it, they put to exactly the same use. (My friend, being a leftist, was in danger from both sides ... the Shah's secret police, and the new regime ... he lost a number of family and friends, before and after the Revolution.)

[Postman]

6. what followed in Iran was a result of the Shah's rule and the retarding of

democracy in Iran by western foreign policy