Chris Hedges: Iran Had a Democracy Before We Took It Away

from Truthdig:



Iran Had a Democracy Before We Took It Away
Posted on Jun 22, 2009

By Chris Hedges


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. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090622_iran_had_a_democracy_before_we_took_it_away/

I've been doing a little on-line research this morning on the CIA's involvement on the 1953 coup. It seems that Truman didn't go for the idea, so the Brits waited and appealed to Ike for help getting rid of Mossadegh. And even then, the CIA's lead officer in Teheran resisted the effort so strongly that Dulles 86'ed him. Then Kermit Roosevelt, Jr. was free to launch his plan.

Apparently this was the first big effort by the CIA to topple a foreign government. The success of Ajax encouraged the CIA to go on to other nefarious operations, e.g. Guatemala, Bay of Pigs, etc., etc.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=385x327801

pnorman

good reads!

The United States TOOK AWAY the Democratic Government If Iran - what price should the United States pay for that? Who will make the U.S. pay - GOD?