American Historical Amnesia Behind Pompeo’s Claim of
‘40 Years of Unprovoked Iranian Aggression’
Brett Wilkins
June 20, 2019
Common Dreams
Someone attacked two oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman
last week. The Trump administration wants the world to believe that Iran is the
culprit. Yet there is no serious evidence that Tehran was behind the attacks on
the Norwegian and Japanese ships. Not only is there no proof of Iranian
involvement, such an attack by Iran makes no sense at all. Japan and Iran are
friends. Just last month, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe — who was
visiting Tehran during the tanker incident — affirmed this friendship in
the presence of Donald Trump during the US president’s recent state visit to
Japan. Most importantly of all, the crew and owner of the Japanese tanker
attacked in the gulf vehemently reject the US claim that the vessel
was damaged by a mine, asserting instead that a “flying object” struck the
ship.
Still, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo blamed Iran for
what he called a “blatant assault” on the tankers. Pompeo also said
that the attacks “should be understood in the context of 40 years of unprovoked
aggression” against the US and other “freedom-loving nations” by Iran. There is
no such history. Iran hasn’t started a war since the mid-19th century, when it
was still the Persian Empire. The true context which must be understood is one
of a century of US and Western exploitation of Iranian people and resources,
and decades of US threats and aggression against Iran that once reportedly
included a plan to stage a false flag attack very similar to last week’s tanker
incident.
Destroying Democracy
Many Americans suffer a collective historical amnesia
that renders a true and complete understanding of the causes, conduct and
consequences of their nation’s perpetual conflicts all but impossible. This
explains why most Americans trace the origins of US-Iran enmity to the 1979
hostage crisis, when Islamists occupied the US Embassy in Tehran for 444 days
and Iran was transformed from close ally to arch-enemy practically overnight.
US leaders and media portrayed those young revolutionaries as wild-eyed Muslim
fanatics consumed by irrational hatred of the United States. Their legitimate
grievances, chief among these the repression and brutality of the US-backed
regime they dethroned, were ignored.
Pompeo’s preposterous claim that the US wants to
“restore democracy” to Iran begs the question of when Iranians ever enjoyed
democracy in the first place. The closest they ever came was in the early
1950s, when the reformist prime minister Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh set
out to end British and American exploitation of Iranian oil resources by
nationalizing the assets of companies including the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company,
which despite its equitable-looking hyphenation was really a British-owned
near-monopoly known today as BP. Iran’s monarchy, led by Mohammad Reza Shah
Pahlavi, had sold out his country to foreign capitalists to the extent that one
State Department official wrote in 1942 that the US would “soon be in
the position of actually running Iran.”
Emboldened, perhaps, by President Harry S. Truman’s
hollow promise to “assist free people to work out their own destinies in their
own way,” Iranians rallied behind Mossadegh as he fought to take what was
rightfully Iran’s back from foreign predators. In addition to nationalization,
he expelled foreign technicians from oil refineries and even broke off
diplomatic relations with Britain. Mossadegh’s was the most popular and
democratic government Iranians had ever known. Time magazine, in naming him
its “Man of the Year”for 1951, called him “the Iranian George Washington.”
The British were nearly as infuriated by Mossadegh as
they had been by the original George Washington, and London enlisted its former
colony to hatch a plan to depose the Iranian leader. Truman demurred but his
successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was game. Secretary of State John Foster
Dulles and his brother, Central Intelligence Agency Director Allen Dulles, had
both previously worked as lawyers at a firm that represented Anglo-Iranian Oil.
In 1953 the CIA launched a coup, codenamed Operation Ajax, which fomented
unrest through violence including false flag attacks on religious
leaders that were then blamed on pro-Mossadegh communists. A very reluctant
Shah was swiftly restored to his throne and Mossadegh was deposed and
imprisoned. US corporations then seized control of 40 percent of Iran’s oil
fields.
In order to help the Shah maintain an iron grip on
Iranians, the CIA, along with Israel’s Mossad, created SAVAK,
the notoriously brutal state security force whose tortures included
amputations, electric chairs and anal rape with electric cattle prods. The
CIA reportedly taught SAVAK how to torture men and women
and filmed these sessions for instructional purposes. Meanwhile, five
successive US presidents lavished the Shah with aid and arms. Jimmy Carter, the
so-called “human rights president,” feted the dictator at a 1978 White House
New Year’s Eve soirée, toasting his “brilliant leadership” as angry
protests against his ill-fated regime’s tyranny raged outside.
“Unprovoked Aggression?”
Forty years ago, long-simmering animosity toward the
United States inevitably boiled over, culminating in the now-familiar events of
those 444 days in 1979-81. Instead of acknowledging its role in stoking the
flames of revolt, the Carter and Ronald Reagan administrations partnered with
an even worse dictator than the Shah, Saddam Hussein in neighboring Iraq, as it
attempted to thwart Iran’s nascent Islamic Republic. In 1980 the US encouraged
Hussein to invade Iran, providing crucial support— including the transfer
of deadly chemical and biological materials Iraq weaponized and unleashed upon
Iranians and Iraqi Kurds — in an eight-year war of attrition that claimed
more than a million lives. Reagan officials knew for years that Iraq
was attacking Iran with WMDs but kept up US support while publicly denying
knowledge of Iraq’s heinous war crimes.
As the war died down, an accidental US attack on Iran
further inflamed Iranians. On July 3, 1988, the USS Vincennes, which was in
Iranian waters, shot down Iran Air Flight 655, killing all 290 passengers
and crew aboard, including 66 children. An indignant Reagan blamed the
“barbaric Iranians” for the wholesale aerial slaughter; Vice President George
H.W. Bush, who was running for president, infamously spat, “I will never
apologize for the United States of America. Ever. I don’t care what the facts
are.”
Fast-forward to the second Bush presidency, when
provocation toward Iran escalated to the brink of all-out war. In addition to
senior US officials’ constant threats and even jokes about
bombing “Axis of Evil” member Iran, the US secretly deployed Special Forces
troops inside Iran on reconnaissance missions and to forge alliances with
dissident groups. Chief among these was the People’s Mujahedin of Iran (MEK), a
State Department-designated terrorist group that had previously assassinated
six US officials when it was fighting the Shah’s regime. Despite this, the US
military secretly trained MEK fighters while the terror
group paid leading US officials to lobby for its cause.
The Bush administration also pressured the World Bank
into suspending emergency relief aid after the 2003 Bam earthquake, which
killed more than 26,000 Iranians, and imposed harsh new economic sanctions on
Iran which continue to cause great suffering for ordinary Iranians even as a
well-connected elite grows fantastically wealthy. Bush-era war plans
against Iran reportedly even included a false flag plot hatched in
Vice President Dick Cheney’s office to send Navy SEALs in boats disguised as
Iranian naval vessels to attack US warships in the Straits of Hormuz.
The menacing of Iran continued unabated through most
of Barack Obama’s administration, when Israeli and/or
US assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists, cyber
attacks and sabotage — actions that would surely be seen as acts of
war if they were committed against the United States — occurred along with
the usual threats of war. Meanwhile, the
administration sold a record amount of weapons to Iran’s adversaries,
further inflaming tensions in the world’s most volatile region. Obama
ultimately chose cautions cooperation over confrontation with Iran. His wise
decision led to the landmark 2015 Iran nuclear deal, a highly controversial
move that faced strong bipartisan opposition from liberal lawmakers as well as
from Republicans including neoconservative hawks like John Bolton, who has
been itching to bomb Iran for decades — and who is now President
Donald Trump’s national security advisor.
The Real Aggressor
US and Israeli intelligence agencies have long
asserted that Iran is not trying to develop nuclear weapons, and even
President Trump has admitted that Iran was complying with the terms
of the nuclear deal. Trump nevertheless withdrew the US from the agreement,
with predictably dangerous consequences as Iran’s leaders, like
so many before them, realized that a deal with the United States all too often
isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. The administration and its allies
in Congress and the corporate mainstream mediahave ratcheted up their
warmongering against Iran to a near-fever pitch, all based upon “evidence”
every bit as suspect as the lies that led to the disastrous invasion and
occupation of Iraq. It is unclear who attacked the Norwegian and Japanese oil
tankers in the Gulf of Oman last week. What is clear is that a world wary of US
lies and endless war isn’t buying the Trump administration’s story.
Actors including Israel, Saudi Arabia and
some in the Trump administration seem hell-bent on waging a war against Iran
that would ideally end in the overthrow of that country’s Islamist regime. Iran
isn’t without its serious faults. However, these pale in comparison to those of
the US, which has — and has used— nuclear weapons, staged or
supported numerous coups, attacked half a dozen Middle Eastern countries
already this century and nearly encircled Iran with military bases. Iran has no
nuclear weapons, no bases within 10,000 kilometers of the United States and has
never directly attacked the US or, of course, overthrown its government. Who is
the real aggressor here?
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