Iran Had a Democracy Before We Took It Away

[laststeamtrain]

Iran Had a Democracy Before We Took It Away

By Chris Hedges

June 22, 2009 "TruthDig" -- 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 that “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.

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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.

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http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22883.htm

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090622_iran_had_a_democracy_before_we_took_it_away/

[drmeow]

1. We are the biggest problem in the Middle East.

So true!

[Junkdrawer]

2. Heck, I'd go even further back to post WW I Mandates and Winston Churchill's...

desire to maintain the Empire on the cheap.

It's a fascinating history that gets too little play.

[timeforpeace]

3. Why stop there? What about the Crusades?

[Junkdrawer]

6. Well, because the modern era of Middle East history is all about Oil....

the Crusades were all about religion and, possibly, control of trade routes.

[ColbertWatcher]

4. So much to read, so much to remember/learn. Thank you for posting. k+r, n/t

[K Gardner]

5. Pfft.. Saxby Chambliss says no one in Iran "remembers" all that stuff, too long ago..

K&R for an excellent article.

[jazzjunkysue]

7. This other piece by Hedges is absolutely frightening. America The Illiterate

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21239.htm

I quibble with one point, however.

Most public schools are trying, in vain, to get kids reading and comprehending and valuing the printed word and honest, informed debate.

But the students and the parents are not interested.

At best, they just want their kids to get accepted into good colleges, with perhaps a scholarship.

The mantra is, "Is this on the test?" Not, "why do I need to understand history and current events."

[dipsydoodle]

8. K & R

.

[pokerfan]

9. Blowback

Blowback
By Chalmers Johnson

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20011015/johnson

[Daphne08]

10. Thanks.

There's a link to a section at the NYT on the complete history of the 1953 coup at:

http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/mideast/041600iran-cia-index.html

and an archive of articles:

http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/mideast/041600iran-archive-articles.html