US-Iran Wall of Mistrust

wait wait wait, before we start I'm going to insert something from a recent post --an opinion of mine that hasn't changed in the last 25 years--

"I remember thinking that Khomeini was an asshole. I also remember thinking that Reagan was an asshole. "

ok, carry on


Middle East (Asia Times)
Feb 12, 2009
US-IRAN WALL OF MISTRUST, Part 1
Obama's Persian double
By Pepe Escobar

Khatami...

... he is a reformist able to reach out to conservatives and wildly popular among women, the young and progressives of all stripes....

...He was also the man who called for a "dialogue of civilizations". The Bush administration snubbed him - as it was entangled in the failed, Huntingtonian thesis of the "clash of civilizations"....

...Years later, Ahmadinejad's definitely non-reformist economic policies proved themselves to be an absolute disaster. Official inflation stands at 24% - and rising...

... On top of it, Ahmadinejad is an apocalyptical Mahdist - believing from the bottom of his heart in the imminent arrival of the Mahdi, the "occult" Twelfth Imam. Most Iranian Shi'ites are not Mahdist...

... Khatami for his part remains very popular in Iran. His views are eminently moderate...

...And as for the Khomeinist credo of an exportable revolutionary idea, it seems to remain more alive than ever: "The popularity of the message of the revolution can be clearly witnessed in what happened in Gaza and before that in the 33-day war in Lebanon. The well-equipped Israeli army backed by the US was incapable of defeating a handful of besieged youth [Hamas and Hezbollah] and who had nothing but their faith in God."

Fasten your seat belts; it's gonna be a bumpy ride.

Middle East (Asia Times)
Feb 13, 2009
US-IRAN WALL OF MISTRUST, Part 2
Will Obama say 'we're sorry'?
By Pepe Escobar

If United States President Barack Obama is really serious about "unclenched fists" in a new US-Iran relationship, he's got to take a serious, unbiased look at the US record.

Former US secretary of state Cordell Hull's classic comment about Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo - "He's a son-of-a-bitch, but he's our son-of-a-bitch" - has been the norm for decades. From the Somozas in Nicaragua to Saddam Hussein in Iraq, from Indonesia's Suharto to the shah of Iran, US foreign policy over the past decades has enshrined a hefty SOB gallery...

...During the Cold War, stressing how easily the Soviet Union had occupied Iran earlier, the CIA trained the Savak, the shah's secret police. Being Muslim but not an Arab, Mohammad Reza also rendered a great service to the US: he did not share Arab hatred of Israel. He even sold oil to Israel (one of the reasons that later fomented ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's popularity). In sum, the shah was the perfect gatekeeper of US political and economic interests in the Persian Gulf...

...A case can be made that the whole shah/Kissinger racket inevitably led to the fall of the shah. The shah - like Somoza, Suharto or an array of Latin American dictators - never understood that he was no more than a puppet.

He spent tens of billions of dollars on American weapons. His multinational model fit the obvious pattern seen all over the developing world: a minority swimming in gold and conspicuous consumption while the absolute majority faced dire poverty. The shah pushed for cash crops instead of conducting a real agrarian reform that would guarantee the subsistence of millions of Iranian peasants - all of them diehard Shi'ites and most of them illiterate.

These peasant masses in the end got the boot from the countryside by American agribusiness; for the Americans, they were nothing but a "superfluous" workforce, non-adaptable to a Western, mechanized, selective model. It was those miserable masses, flooding Tehran and other large Iranian cities in a fight for survival, who composed the mass base of Khomeini's revolution in 1979. The rest is, of course, history....

(Jeezus Christ, I never learned that in American History 101, but I do remember the following)

In 1978, the whole US corporate media were hammering that the shah was invincible; that the Khomeinist mobs were a minority; and that the shah was a "great modernizer" opposed by "Muslim fanatics". Then, after the revolution, American guilt for the life and "work" of the shah was psychologically replaced by hatred of Iran because of the American hostage crisis...

...If Obama really wants to make the effort to understand Iran he could do no worse than read the great Iranian philosopher Daryush Shayegan , a former professor at the University of Tehran. When Khomeini died, Shayegan identified him and the shah as the two juxtaposed Irans: imperial Iran and the painful Iran of the blood of the martyr, "a juxtaposition that symbolizes an unreal dream: as the 12th century mystical poet Ruzbehan from Shiraz would say, this 'dementia of the inaccessible'."

Books by Daryush Shayegan on bookfinder