weekend
themes
1. The
founder of Reuters purchased Iran in 1872
Nasir al-Din
Shah, Shah of Iran from 1848-1896, sold Baron Julius de Reuter the
right to operate all of Iran’s railroads and canals, most of the
mines, all of the government’s forests, and all future industries.
The famous British statesman Lord Curzon called it “the most
complete and extraordinary surrender of the entire industrial
resources of a kingdom into foreign hands that has probably ever been
dreamed of.” Iranians were so infuriated that the Shah had to
rescind the sale the next year.
2. The
BBC lent a hand to the CIA’s 1953 overthrow of Iran’s Prime
Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh
If the
Reuters thing weren’t enough to give Iranians a grudge against the
Western media, the BBC transmitted a secret code to help Kermit
Roosevelt (Teddy’s grandson) lay the groundwork for an American and
British coup against Mosaddegh. (BBC Persian also assisted by
broadcasting pro-coup propaganda on the orders of the British
government.) Soon enough the U.S. was training the regime’s secret
police in how to interrogate Iranians with methods a CIA analyst said
were “based on German torture techniques from World War II.”
3. The
U.S. had extensive plans to use nuclear weapons in Iran
In 1980 the
U.S. military was terrified the Soviet Union would take advantage of
the Iranian Revolution to invade Iran and seize the Straits of Hormuz
in the Persian Gulf. So the Pentagon came up with a plan: If the
Soviets began massing their troops, we would use small nuclear
weapons to destroy the mountain passes in northern Iran the Soviets
needed to move their troops into the country. So we wouldn’t be
using nukes on Iran, just in Iran. As Pentagon historian David Crist
put it, “No one reflected on how the Iranians might view such a
scenario.” But they probably would have been fine with it, just as
we’d be fine with Iran nuking Minnesota to prevent Canada from
gaining control of the Gulf of Mexico. “No problem,” we’d say.
“Nuestra casa es su casa.”
4. The
U.S. did nothing about Saudi Arabia giving Saddam $5 billion to build
nukes during the Iran-Iraq war
You probably
know that, after Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in 1980, Iraq went all
out (with our help) trying to make biological, chemical and nuclear
weapons, and actually used chemical weapons on Iranian soldiers. What
you probably don’t know is that Saudi Arabia was funding Saddam’s
nuclear program with billions of dollars, and the Reagan
administration knew all about it and didn’t care. To understand how
this looks to Iran, remember that at least 0.75% of Iran’s total
population died during the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, the per capita
equivalent today of 2.4 million Americans. For comparison’s sake,
we still constantly talk about World War II — in which 400,000
Americans died, then 0.3% of our population — 70 years later.
5. U.S.
leaders have repeatedly threatened to outright destroy Iran
It’s not
just John McCain singing “bomb bomb bomb Iran.” Admiral William
Fallon, who retired as head of CENTCOM in 2008, said about Iran:
“These guys are ants. When the time comes, you crush them.”
Admiral James Lyons Jr., commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet in the
1980s, has said we were prepared to “drill them back to the fourth
century.” Richard Armitage, then assistant secretary of defense,
explained that we considered whether to “completely obliterate
Iran.” Billionaire and GOP kingmaker Sheldon Adelson advocates an
unprovoked nuclear attack on Iran — “in the middle of the desert”
at first, then possibly moving on to places with more people. Most
seriously, the Obama administration’s 2010 Nuclear Posture Review
declared that we will not use nuclear weapons “against non-nuclear
weapons states that are party to the NPT [Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty] and in compliance with their nuclear non-proliferation
obligations.” There’s only one non-nuclear country that’s
plausibly not in this category. So we were saying we will never use
nuclear weapons against any country that doesn’t have them already
— with a single exception, Iran. Understandably, Iran found having
a nuclear target painted on it pretty upsetting.
6. The
U.S. shot down a civilian Iranian airliner — killing 290 people,
including 66 children
On July 3,
1988, the USS Vincennes, patrolling in the Persian Gulf, blew Iran
Air Flight 655 out of the sky. The New York Times had editorialized
about “Murder in the Air” in 1983 when the Soviet Union
mistakenly shot down a South Korean civilian airliner in its
airspace, declaring, “there is no conceivable excuse for any nation
shooting down a harmless airliner.” After the Vincennes missile
strike, a Times editorial announced that what happened to Flight 655
“raises stern questions for Iran.” That’s right — for Iran.
Two years later the U.S. Navy gave the Vincennes’s commander the
highly prestigious Legion of Merit commendation.
7. The
U.S. worry about Iranian nukes because they would deter their
military strikes
Our rhetoric
on Iran seems nonsensical: Do U.S. leaders actually believe Iran
would engage in a first nuclear strike on Israel or the U.S., given
that would lead to a quick and devastating retaliation from those
well-armed nuclear powers? Even conservative U.S. foreign policy
experts know that’s incredibly unlikely. They’re not worried that
we can’t deter a nuclear-armed Iran — they’re worried that a
nuclear-armed Iran could deter us. As Thomas Donnelly, a top Iran
analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, put it in 2004, “the
prospect of a nuclear Iran is a nightmare … because of the
constraining effect it threatens to impose upon U.S. strategy for the
greater Middle East. … The surest deterrent to American action is a
functioning nuclear arsenal.” This perspective — that we must
prevent other countries from being able to deter us from waging war —
is a bedrock belief of the U.S. establishment, and in fact was touted
as a major reason to invade Iraq.
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