IRAN-U.S.

Nice Article Fariba

Agree with you! Thanks.

Freshteh,   The Coup

Freshteh,

The Coup was executed by Shah, an Iranian, not U.S.

Here is the list of crimes of IRI against America:

1-     Occupying the embassy and taking the diplomats hostage.

2-     Responsibility for the Marine bombing in Lebanon in 1982.

3-     Responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing of a civilian airplane over Scotland.

4-     Responsibility of the Khobar bombing in S Arabia.

5-     Initiating nonsense hostility between the two nations.

6-     Holding Al Qaeda members in Iran after 9/11 as a tool to scare America.

7-     Aiding IRI-like fundamentalist groups in Iraq and Afghanistan to kill U.S soldiers.

IRI owes Iran, America and the world apology for ever existing.

Fariba jaan,  

Fariba jaan,

Wonderful article and an excellent analysis. Very encouraging to see the silent majority speaking out.

Good job.

India was under direct English occupation for centuries until about the same time the 1953 coup happened. Now in the year 2009, you don’t see Indians burning English flag, or occupying English embassy, or demanding an “apology”! Rather, they have turned their once poorest country in the world to a mega power by hard work and civility and being part of the International community. But in our country, these IRI thugs are demanding an apology from a country that never dropped a bomb on us nor attacked us nor occupied us!!

Ms Amini

Well said, I hope and wish that both administration in Iran and U.S take this opportunity and work it out so ordinary people can benefit from healthy relationship. I am afraid the special interest, old grudges, and ego will get in the way.

peace

my father

I resent the fact that instead of a civil discourse, people use this site to discredit one's family member.

MR. factfinder.

My father wanted to serve his country. He accepted the post of Governor of Fars; the day he arrived in Shiraz, he delcared through a radio broadcast on BBC that as of today all of the entities referred as Komite Imam are dismantled. He was the first governor, to have personally taken his resignation to Khomeini, only a month after he was appointed. My father was imprisoned 6 times during the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah only because he believed in the rule of law.

Another piece of Information you may want to know before you accuse people. In March 1979 while he was still the Governor, Khalkhali and his thugs were approaching Shiraz to destroy Persepolis as a sign of decadence. Nosratollah Amini sent the army to confront them and in a radio address delcared : "Persepolis will only be destroyed over my dead body!"

So be careful what you say.

My father was a true patriot and he still is.

FA

US should Apologize

This is the list of US crimes against Iranian people:

1. American support for the 1953 coup
2. Shooting down of an Iran Air Airbus
3. Supporting Saddam in Iran_Iraq War
4. Economic sanctions for the last 30 years
5. Opposing Nuclear Technology

As you mentioned in your article:
"if it were not for the involvement of Iranians, the 1953 coup would never have succeeded. "
You are a good example of such Iranians that giving a helping hand to our enemies.

Bazargan chose Khomeini too

"Iranians chose Khomeini, not Bazargan, not Bakhtiar, not the Shah, they picked Khomeini… not just ordinary people but even the brightest intellectuals followed the Imam. So we all are culprits in a way."

Ms Amini, why don't you have the guts to admit that your father was among the same people who chose to follow Khomeini. Are you brave enough to admit that ALL Bazargan's cabinet and his cronies, your dad included, chose to "serve" in Khomeini's regime or are you going to twist the facts, in your own clumsy style, again.

Who should apologize?

Bravo Fariba Amini,
excellent article. thank you.

Apology is in order

We must all apologize. I think JJ was the one who started it. He apologized for having supported Khomeini. I apologize that I went around and petitioned people not to extradite Ayatollah Khomeini from Najaf. They should have cut off my hands!
I have written numerous articles on this very website about the role of the US so I am not guilty as charged.
Indeed, the US government should apologize: to many people around the world- from Guatemala to Chile, from Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan, the list is long. But the crux of this article is not about a US apology. It is about us and our own choices.
The fact is one day Iranians shouted long live Mossadeq, the next day they said long live the Shah.
Iranians chose Khomeini, not Bazargan, not Bakhtiar, not the Shah, they picked Khomeini… not just ordinary people but even the brightest intellectuals followed the Imam. So we all are culprits in a way.

The other day, they were shouting Marg Bar Khatami. I just think we must eliminate the word Marg from our vocabulary once and for all and go forward.
FA

Albright's comments in 2000

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT, U.S. SECRETARY OF STATE: “The coup was clearly a setback for Iran's political development, and it is easy to see now why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America in their internal affairs.”

CNN Insight
U.S. Comes Clean About The Coup In Iran
Aired April 19, 2000
//transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0004/19/i_i...

Fariba

I'm in complete agreement with you on this. It was expressed perfectly.

What's the point?

Why are so many people are obsessed with apologies? What would it solve if Mohammad Reza Shah or Rohollah Khomeini could rise from their graves and apologise for not appreciating Mohammad Mossedegh's aspirations for a more sovereign Iran? Equally what difference would an apology from the White House make when you know that the US, for what it sees itself to be, does not even treat its closest allies as equals? And could someone please explain why so many Iranian-Americans believe that Iran can't have a meaningful existance without becoming like Egypt, Israel or Saudi Arabia? Look, if America treats UK, Japan and Germany like a poodl, what chance is there for an "equal relatioship based on mutual respect" being established with Iran? Iran should establish a "normal" diplomatic and commercial relationship with the US and leave it at that- no apologies and no favours fron either side.

Nice Article

Thanks for your excellent article.  I hate to stereotype, but I do have to say that it is refreshing to see a non-IRI supporting, non-status quo female Iranian on this site.  For some unknown and mind boggling reason (and despite the severe limitations placed on women’s individual and legal rights in Iran which essentially makes them second class citizens), most female Iranians who write on this site are pro status quo, if not pro-IRI.  Perhaps it’s a collective case of Stockholm Syndrome…but who knows.

Just to add to your point about the regime never talking about Mossadegh, I remember my post revolution Iranian school history books about this issue.  The trick was to essentially make Mossadegh a lackey of “Ayatollah Kashani”, by giving that unknown akhoond all the credit for Mossadegh’s efforts.  It was Kashani who struggled for independence.  It was him who wanted the oil industry nationalized, etc., and Mossadegh was just his sidekick and go-to guy!!!  So, they pretty much tried to wipe out Mossadegh’s nationalistic ideology and turn him into another akhoond sidekick, if not an akhoond wannabe.  It was just another example of shameless history revisionism by this regime.  

It should have been the high

It should have been the high point of festivities for the glorious 30th anniversary of Iran's revolution. But 15 minutes or so into President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's speech, people began to leave.

And among the millions of Iranians who stayed away, most, even if they support a tough nuclear policy, long for an end to isolation and reconciliation with the US. "You in the West have to decode what is going on," said a student who sums up the Iranian paradox. She wears a full chador, yet thinks her President is "a joke" who has needlessly picked fights with the world Iranians never wanted. "People in Iran are not opposed to engagement with the US, as long as it is on equal terms."

//www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-eas...

Talk is Cheep!

I like the fact that the mullah and the majority of iranians decided against selling their sole and identity for a daily dose of "Me Too" gratification.

Given the population growth and all the melicious acts that's been aimed at these guys for over 30 years now, the mullah's have done an outstanding job in driving Iran closer to independance.

Hopefully they'll have their nuclear project in full motion soon, and by then our pirate culture protoje's can refocus back on their own area of expertise like new facial and back wax products.

Counter-coup Not Coup

"A lie told often enough becomes truth" or so said Vladimir Lenin and was later adopted by Joseph Goebbels.  

In 1953, the government of Mossadegh expelled the Shah's sister and shortly afterward ousted the Shah and Queen Soraya, sealed their palaces and confiscated their assets. With the Majless already (and unconstitutionally) dissolved by Mossadegh, thus the people's only symbol of soverenity removed, Mossadegh's a coup d'etat against the constitutionally installed monarch was fully and firmly in place.  The reins of power were eventaully taken away from Mossadegh in a counter-coup staged by the passive reaction from the people of Iran who were disappointed in his government's handling of the oil crisis and assisted by an Anglo-American partnership who were threathened by his economic and political policies.   

 Is it not time that we revisited and revised the stories that have been manufactured by the mythology machine of the Jebhe Melli in the last 55 years?

FR

Will Obama say 'We Are Sorry'?

Will Obama say 'we're sorry'?
By Pepe Escobar

Originaly printed in Atimes.com

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.

This gallery symbolizes the official Washington policy of US neo-colonialism - always indirect and non-ostensive, contrary to historical examples of European colonialism.

Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad has demanded apologies from the US as essential for smashing the wall of mistrust between Iran and the US. He has a point.

If president Jimmy Carter had apologized to Iran for the fact that the US since president Harry S Truman supported Mohammad Reza Pahlavi - aka the shah of Iran - and his tyranny; if he had promised not to subvert the Iranian revolution; and if he had committed to give back to the country the up to US$60 billion stolen by the shah, his family and acolytes, the infamous Iranian hostage crisis would have been solved swiftly.

But a weak Carter - often perceived as a country bumpkin Hamlet - was not the real power anyway. The real power behind the throne was David Rockefeller. German-Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt was right when she wrote that after 1918, political power, except revolutionary power, is pure operetta.

Do the Rockefeller shuffle
The shah's banker was David Rockefeller. He was the man responsible for the entry into the US of the "ailing" shah in 1979, which led to the attack on the US Embassy in Tehran (the "nest of spies") and the interminable hostage crisis. Rockefeller at the time stressed the "patriotism", "independence" and "tolerance" by the shah towards women and religious minorities and stressed his "modernization" of Iran - this when Amnesty International and even the US State Department itself were amassing stacks of documents showing the shah as one of the most brutal rulers in modern history. But Mohammad Reza provided excellent dividends to then Chase Manhattan. Rockefeller was duly taking the interests of his shareholders into account.

In the late 1940s, the shah did not even live in Iran. He preferred New York and the French Riviera - while Iran was fermenting with democratic and nationalist ideas. These ideas led to the emergence of Mohammad Mossadegh's party, who was later elected prime minister. Mossadegh committed the enormous sin of nationalizing the Iranian oil industry - so he was duly deposed via a US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) inspired coup; thus Mohammad Reza was invited to become the new CIA puppet in Iran (during the Mossadegh affair he was no more than a de luxe refugee in Europe).

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.

The shah used to be no more than a playboy. John F Kennedy, who met him on the Rivera party circuit before he became US president, thought he was a dangerous megalomaniac. As president, Kennedy anyway supported him, suggesting a little harmless reform here and there. The shah made a few cosmetic overtures towards women, for instance declaring non-obligatory the use of the chador. But this only concerned the wealthy and the Iranian upper-middle class, the small consumer society created by the multinational corporations to whom the shah opened up the country.

What the shah and his secret police did with relish was to persecute all political parties, as well as Kurds, one of the very "minorities" David Rockefeller said was protected.

And just like president George W Bush a few decades later, Mohammad Reza started to believe in his own propaganda and regard himself as king of kings. Especially because he was instrumental behind the spectacular rise in the price of oil in 1973 of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). This - the real story - will never be featured in the mainstream US media.

Now do the Kissinger shuffle
The shah got his green light from national security advisor cum secretary of state Henry Kissinger. In 1972, president Richard Nixon had introduced the Nixon Doctrine (pity no one never asked Alaska governor Sarah Palin about that). Based on the US defeat in Vietnam, and convinced he would never be able to directly combat all the global subversion nodes springing up against US interests, Nixon started to promote global "gatekeepers". No gatekeeper was more essential than the one in charge of the Persian Gulf. The shah gladly accepted the role, but complained he was broke - he could not buy the weapons the US was trying to sell him.

The wily Kissinger found out how: the rise of OPEC oil prices. This is how Kissinger - employed by the Rockefellers - drove to the roof the profits by US Big Oil, which at the time consisted of five of the Seven Sisters, and especially Rockefeller Big Oil (Exxon, Mobil and SoCal, three of the four majors, the other being Texaco). And all this with an added big bonus. Japan, Germany and the rest of Western Europe depended on Persian Gulf oil much more than the US; thus Kissinger also found out how to undermine the devastating industrial and commercial competition to the US by especially Japan and Germany.

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.

Save us from these barbarians
The US ruling class simply could not - and still cannot - acknowledge the power of Third World nationalism; there's the risk American public opinion, if well informed, could sympathize with nationalists everywhere.

That's why the Vietnamese were portrayed as puppets of Beijing; after taking out Indochina, they would - according to the domino theory - invade the Philippines and in the end Los Angeles and San Francisco.

US corporate media endlessly denounced the horrendous crimes of the genocidal psychopath Pol Pot in Cambodia; but US public opinion was never told that it was Nixon and Kissinger who destroyed neutral Cambodia in 1970, thus allowing the Khmer Rouge to flower and take over power, destroying it even further.

As for the Iranian revolution against the oppressive, mega-corrupt shah/US multinational corporations regime, it was relentlessly depicted as "subversion" perpetrated by an old religious fanatic and a demented mob (the CIA at least got it right in 1978, depicting Khomeini in a memo as "a sort of moralist, a philosopher-king").

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.

It's never enough to remember today: virtually everything happening in the world during the Cold War had to have behind it the hand – and the gold - of Moscow. Why didn't Carter block Iran - whose oil Japan and Europe badly needed? It was fear that Khomeini would fall into Moscow's arms.

The Islamic Revolution was received with supreme perplexity in Washington. The perplexity remains to this day - the 30th anniversary of the revolution. The process inevitably went through the paranoia of a (frustrated) attempt to blame it all on Moscow.

Recent history has shown - from Vietnam to Iraq - that the "policies" concocted by the Washington establishment never matched reality, and that's why they spectacularly failed. Added to the inevitable decadence of empire, it has become increasingly difficult to hide the stark consequences from American public opinion. Nevertheless, it's still taboo in the US to acknowledge September 11, 2001, as blowback for US foreign policy in the Arab and Muslim world. So how far would Obama really go to explain in detail to US public opinion how the CIA coup against Mossadegh in 1953, and the support for the shah dictatorship, led to the 1979 Islamic Revolution and 30 years (or 56 years?) of mistrust?

Hail to the revolution
Thirty years after the fact, the shadow of the Smasher of Idols, the Glorious Upholder of the Faith, the Sole Hope of the Downtrodden, the Vicar of Islam, His Holiness Grand Ayatollah Haj Sayyed Ruhollah Mussavi Khomeini still looms large over Iran.

He was no less than a living essay on hieratic severity. After 16 years in exile, back to Iran to lead his revolution, he said he felt "nothing". A few months later, on April 1, 1979, an astonishing 98.2% of Iranians, in a national referendum, endorsed his dream of an Islamic Republic.

Khomeini had the genius to brand himself as the incarnated utopia of a world where the weak would be strong, where the law of god would erase the injustice of man, where faith would be knowledge, where the certitude of tradition would trump the angst of progress. Even the Arab masses were seduced; they did not understand any talk of class struggle or plus value, but Khomeini talked in terms of god and satan - the global language of the downtrodden.

This dream of a world devoid of contradiction and conflict, united under the watchful eye of Allah, died with the death of Khomeini - by a fabulous twist of history on the day in 1989 Chinese paramount leader Deng Xiaoping's squads were smashing students in Tiananmen Square, thus, in Deng's view, preventing luan ("chaos") from hijacking the Chinese economic miracle.

Khomeini adopted "neither East or West", neither the Great Satan nor communism. He offered redemption through martyrdom - sending hundreds of thousands of young martyrs to certain death into a horrendous war in the 1980s against Saddam that of course he did not want but in the end fully adopted, deploying an incendiary rhetoric of death and proclamations. The victims were in the end the same mostazaffin - the oppressed - whom he claimed to defend.

Khomeini deployed instant tribunals and suicide commandos, the human waves of the Iran-Iraq war and the hostage crisis humiliation. Carter lost his re-election because of the hostage crisis. Iran ridiculed the US with Irangate. Against the terrorism of the Great Satan, Khomeini deployed sacred terrorism. None won. Everyone lost.

For the past two decades, the "dream" has been carried out by the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, born in 1940 in Mashhad into a family of preachers, and just a second-tier cleric. When Khomeini died, he was not even an ayatollah, not to mention an imam: just a hojjatoleslam, a student. He had studied the Koran in Najaf under Khomeini. Today his grip on absolute power is tighter than ever. Iran today is not a theocracy or a democracy: it's a clerical autocracy, where Khamenei is indeed supreme. He will decide under which terms Iran will talk to Obama.

Still, those apologies remain in order. Like the Airbus from Iran Air, flight 655, destroyed by two Standard ER2 missiles shot from the USS Vincennes under the orders of Captain Will Rogers, killing almost 300 civilians in 1988 (that was one of the key reasons that led Khomeini to accept an "ignominious" ceasefire ending the Iran-Iraq war).

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'."

The good news is that from Obama's point of view, the "inaccessible" can become more than accessible with just a simple "we're sorry".

(Copyright 2009 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

Yes, US should apologize to

Yes, US should apologize to Iranians not the IRI. The mullahs helped the Shah to overthrow Mossadegh.

Confusion

Dear Ms Amini, I totally agree with you on Ahmadinejad's (and his pasdar accomplices)culpability in ruining (especially poor) people's livelihood in the past four years. Also, on IRI's violation of our people's rights for the past 30 years (in addition to Shah's in the preceding 37 years). However, you seem to be confusing two different issues here. Domestic acts of wrong-doing do not justify an international act of aggression or vice versa! Why should it be one or the other? Why not both U.S. and Ahamadinejad apologize to our people?!

Criminal conducts of the U.S. against our nation, as well as peoples of other developing countries, is not something to be washed away with a half-hearted "apology." Regardless of who (or what regime) is in power in Iran, the U.S. has a heck of lot of explaining and apologies to do. I'm not sure what you mean by the following phrase: "This begins with the recognition that if it were not for the involvement of Iranians, the 1953 coup would never have succeeded."

How could native involvement justify a foreign military intervention? About 100% of the coups involve natives of the subject country, otherwise it would be called invasion! Does that imply that the 1953 coup was inevitable and that the U.S. and the CIA are off the hook?! In that case, the bloody Indonesian coup of the 1967 (in which CIA-backed Suharto toppled Sukarno) was legitimate because it succeeded! After all, if it weren't for involvement of Indonesians in that coup, it would not have succeeded. In that case, every successful act of foreign interference in a nation’s affairs could be justified due to involvement of its native citizens, hence giving way to the rule of jungle!

I agree with the sentiment

I agree with the sentiment expressed below by TH.

Reasonable people will agree there have been terrible deeds by IRI and US governments. 

Both sides should acknowledge wrong doing, appologize, and clear the air so progress can be made.  

Picking Sides

Everything you have said about the IRI regime is true. BUT, why is it that because the IRI should apologize and are hypocrites, therefore the U.S. does not have to apologize??? All you are doing is transferring all your hatred to one side, why even pick sides?

It is a myth that Albright apologized for the coup, she merely acknowledged it. Even if she did, that was 9 yrs ago. Why didn't Carter apologize when he had the chance during the hostage crisis, instead of calling it "ancient history"? //www.mohammadmossadegh.com/news/jimmy-carter

What's stopping Obama from apologizing to Iranians? Would it kill us to apologize? //www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/would-...

Damn he's got a lot of hair

Even though his hairdo is quite dehati but I should admit he's got quite a lot of hair at his age.

parnoid IRI!

Thanks for your excellent blog.  IRI is paranoid and never would have a dialog with US.

Totally agree as well.

Totally agree as well. However, one, namely the US, has to recognize and understand that we are not dealing with very logical people who are adept at thinking "outside the box".

Having said that, an apology should start with these thugs apologizing to the masses for ruining a once prosperous nation that was brimming with so much promise and a bright future.

Well Said

Totally Agree with You Fariba Jaan on this.

Best,

DK