Dec 102009
“Everything you know about U.S. involvement in Iran is wrong,” an article says. Historically the United States – far from being a puppet-master of repression – pushed hard for Iran to democratize. It would be a mistake to forget that now.
In The New Republic, Abbas Milani, an Iran expert at Stanford, challenges the enduring “Great Satan” myth – that the C.I.A. “deposed a democratically elected Iranian leader back in 1953, and then spent 26 years propping up a despotic Shah while he mercilessly abused his people.”
In fact, Milani writes, Iran’s clerics played a much bigger role than the C.I.A. in the 1953 ouster of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh – so it’s ironic that the mullahs today draw heavily on the “Satan” myth to maintain their grip on power. He says the myth has also “seduced” the “very meddlers themselves in Washington” – i.e. the Obama administration – and that’s clouding thinking about civil unrest in Iran now:
Associated Press
Great Satan? Flag-burners at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran thought so in 1979. There are, arguably, strategic reasons for the United States to keep silent on the fate of the democratic movement. But history is not one of them. Rather, the regime’s version of events (past and present) is self-serving and, at critical junctures, altogether baseless. Documents (some recently declassified) from various U.S. archives show a rather different version of foreign policy toward Iran. The Shah may have been a U.S. ally in the cold war, but the relationship was fraught. Behind closed doors, the United States pushed hard for the country to democratize. During the periods when the United States failed to stand on the side of the Iranian people, it paid a horrible price. It is worth revisiting this history, not simply because it debunks the Manichaean theory of the past touted by the mullahs, but also because it contains important lessons for how the United States can navigate the current crisis in Iran.
Read More [The New Republic]
