Wednesday, May 03, 2006
Iran War Roundup.
First, some context from Tariq Ali:
For the clerical state, the war on terror has been the best and the worst of times. Oil prices have soared. Enemy regimes on both sides, Baghdad and Kabul, have been overthrown. The Iraqi Shia parties that they have been fostering for years are now in office. Washington has been reliant on their help to sustain its occupations both there and in Afghanistan. Yet social tensions in Iran are high. In this context, the nuclear issue is one of the regime's few unifying projects. It is worth recalling that the Iranian nuclear programme began under the Shah with technology offered by the Americans. Khomeini put the project on hold, considering it un-Islamic. Operations were restarted, with Russians later taking over construction of the light-water reactors at Bushehr begun by the West Germans in the 1970s.
Next, Fisk interviews Hersh. Is the war in Iran for real? Hersh says,
“So we’re in a real American crisis ... we’ve had a collapse of congress ... we have had a collapse of the military ... the good news is that when we wake up tomorrow morning, there will be one less day (of Bush). But that is the only good news.”
Hersh might have said that we’d also had a “collapse” of the media in the United States...
“I brought up Iran. ‘It’s really bad,’ he said. ‘You ought to get into it. You can go to Vienna and find out how far away (from nuclear weapons production) they are.’ Then he told me they were having trouble walking back the nuclear option with Bush. People don’t want to speak out...
And, sure enough, Hersh's assessment on Congress is confirmed as John Bolton again demonstrates that he thinks the US Congress is just window dressing on the Imperium:
Despite numerous public reports stating that US troops are currently conducting operations within Iran, the United States Ambassador to the United Nations (UN) refused to answer repeated questions by Congressman Dennis J. Kucinich (D-OH) about US troops in Iran, today at a House Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations.
And, despite having delusions that this is 1953--
Reza Pahlavi, son of the late Shah of Iran, told the editors of HUMAN EVENTS last week that in the next two to three months he hopes to finalize the organization of a movement aimed at overthrowing the Islamic regime in Tehran and replacing it with a democratic government.... a revolution sparked by massive civil disobedience in which the masses in the streets are backed by elements of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard,. ---
The Shah's son is clearly not insane:
As a matter of principle there’s no way that I can support any kind of military intervention regardless of the crisis... This is a strike against Iranian installations that are part of our national assets. That it’s used wrongly by the wrong people is beside the point.
Comments:
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Who better than a king of kings to have anything to do with democracy? Here's a totally unrelated question: granting because it is actually true by all accounts that Iranians hate the mullahs, how many of them do not know what SAVAK stands for? For how few of them does it evoke uncontrollable visceral terror?
# posted by 
: 5/03/2006 06:34:00 PM
: 5/03/2006 06:34:00 PM
You make a good point, Anonymous. Iran accepted Islamic extremism in part because the US destroyed the political center in the 1953 coup against Mossadegh and in the Shah's subsequent reign of terror.
However, Iran is a very young nation. So many young men died in the war with Iraq in the 1980s and the ensuing baby boom means that perhaps most Iranians are too young to remember SAVAK.
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However, Iran is a very young nation. So many young men died in the war with Iraq in the 1980s and the ensuing baby boom means that perhaps most Iranians are too young to remember SAVAK.
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