22. Terreur voor Iran.

http://tinyurl.com/4mtkwod

Update op 10 april 2015: Zie helemaal onderaan,in blauw.


De Iraanse bevolking is nogal gemengd. Slechts 2 % is arabier.
Op de universiteiten is meer dan 50% van de studenten een vrouw.
Vrouwen spelen een steeds grotere rol in de samenleving.
( Bron: Wikipedia).
Dat is niet echt het beeld dat wij uit de Media hebben gekregen.

Maar er zijn meer onverwachte kanten aan Iran.
Zo is het nauwelijks bekend dat Het Westen daar al 100 jaar lang de ene regime –wisseling na de andere veroorzaakt.
Ik bespreek de jaren 1907, 1921, 1941, 1953 en 1979.
Voor de eerste vier jaartallen citeer ik de engelstalige Wikipedia.
.
In August 1907 an Anglo-Russian agreement divided Iran into a Russian zone in the North and a British zone in the South. The British switch their support to Shah, abandoning the Constitutionalists.

In 1921, a military coup d’état—”widely believed to be a British attempt to enforce, at least, the spirit of the Anglo-Persian agreement” effected with the “financial and logistical support of British military personnel”—permitted the political emergence of Reza Pahlavi, whom they enthroned as the “Shah of Iran” in 1925.
.
In 1941, Britain and the USSR invaded Iran to use Iranian railroad capacity during World War II. The Shah was forced to abdicate in favor of his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
.
In 1951 Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh was elected prime minister by a parliamentary vote which was then ratified by the Shah. As prime minister, Mossadegh became enormously popular in Iran after he nationalized Iran’s petroleum industry and oil reserves. In response, the British government, headed by Winston Churchill, embargoed Iranian oil and successfully enlisted the United States to join in a plot to depose the democratically elected government of Mossadegh. In 1953 US President Dwight D. Eisenhower authorized Operation Ajax. The operation was successful, and Mossadegh was arrested on 19 August 1953. The coup was the first time the US had openly overthrown an elected, civilian government.
With American support, the Shah was able to rapidly modernize Iranian infrastructure, but he simultaneously crushed all forms of political opposition with his intelligence agency, SAVAK. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini became an active critic of the Shah’s White Revolution and publicly denounced the government.

Note: In august 2013 the CIA has officially admitted to having pushed Mossadecq aside: http://www.volkskrant.nl/vk/nl/2668/Buitenland/article/detail/3494911/2013/08/19/CIA-erkent-officieel-rol-staatsgreep-Iran-1953.dhtml


In 1979 werd de Shah afgezet door een islamitische opstand.
O ja? Zou dat waar zijn? Mijn informatie is anders.

Voor de goede orde: natuurlijk was er een islamitische opstand. Maar in hoeverre was die ‘naturel’, endogeen is meen ik het juiste woord daarvoor. En in hoeverre was die van buiten af aangewakkerd en mogelijk gemaakt.

Ik citeer William Engdahl’s ‘A Century of War’, pag. 171 en 172.
( Ik heb nergens gelezen dat Engdahl is weerlegd, dus vertrouw ik op zijn verslag.)

Er was een Iran Task Force in het Witte huis en de voorzitter ( George Ball) adviseerde in 1978 om de steun voor de Shah te stoppen en steun te gaan verlenen aan de islamitische Ayatollah Khomeiny. Waarom? Ze hadden hoge verwachtingen van het Islamitische Fundamentalisme !
Volgens Islam expert Berhard Lewis ( Princeton Univ.) moest men de Muslim Brotherhood en Khomeiny steunen en op die manier zou het Midden Oosten in een lappendeken van religieuze en ethnische groepjes uiteen vallen. De chaos zou zich verspreiden in een ‘Boog van Crisis’ die tot in Rusland zou lopen.
De coup tegen de Shah werd door Britse en Amerikaanse geheime diensten georganiseerd.
Het contract tussen de Shah en Brittish Petroleum liep af en men deed de Shah onmogelijke voorstellen. ‘Bovendien kocht Engeland veel minder olie dan contractueel was vastgelegd, zodat de Shah in financiele problemen kwam.
Ondertussen instrueerden Amerikaanse adviseurs aan de Savak om extra wreed tegen de bevolking op te treden, waardoor de onvrede bij de bevolking werd aangewakkerd.
Carter maakte zich publiekelijk zorgen over de mensenrechten in Iran. Londen organiseerde een kapitaalsvlucht uit Iran. De BBC zond opruiende berichten uit in locale talen in Iran en liet Ayatollah Khomeiny aan het woord, vanuit Parijs.

Was de Islamitische Revolutie van 1979 een Islamitische revolutie ?

Hij was toegestaan en gepusht door Amerika, omdat Amerika er voordeel in zag.
Anders was Khomeiny gewoon van ouderdom gestorven in Parijs.

Zo lagen de machtsverhoudingen toen.

Als we ergens bang voor moeten zijn, dan is het voor onszelf.
Of nauwkeuriger : voor de machten die bij ons de touwtjes in handen hebben.

Hoe kan het zo zijn dat wij deze informatie niet kennen?
Wie heeft daar belang bij? En controleert die dan ook de pers?

Het kan bijna niet anders.

 Kijk op 9.42 AM ET, op 5,20 minuten  en zie hoe Jon Stewart niet wil dat de ware geschiedenis verteld wordt.
Reza Aslan krijgt een duidelijke waarschuwing: als je door gaat was dit jouw laatste optreden in deze show. 

P.S.: De zaak ligt natuurlijk iets ingewikkelder. Engdahl spreekt niet over de communisten die ook de Shah wilden wegsturen, en die de ambassade hebben bezet. Khomeiny moest die bezetting wel tollereren, omdat hij anders de communisten tegen zich kreeg. Maar daar gaat het hier niet over.
De vraag was: moeten wij bang zijn voor de Islamieten
Als dat al zo zou zijn, dan hebben wij dat volledig aan onszelf te danken.
Als we dat inzicht niet op tijd krijgen, zal het alleen maar erger worden.

Ik wil besluiten met een citaat:
Such as it is, the press has become the greatest power within the Western World, more powerful than the legislature, the executive and judiciary. One would like to ask: by whom has it been elected and to whom is it responsible?
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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Six Things You Didn’t Know the U.S. and Its Allies Did to Iran

By Jon Schwarz   Article with photographes. 

April 08, 2015 "ICH" - "The Intercept" -  It’s hard for some Americans to understand why the Obama administration is so determined to come to an agreement with Iran on its nuclear capability, given that huge Iranian rallies are constantly chanting “Death to America!” I know the chanting makes me unhappy, since I’m part of America, and I strongly oppose me dying.

But if you know our actual history with Iran, you can kind of see where they’re coming from. They have understandable reasons to be angry at and frightened of us — things we’ve done that if, say, Norway had done them to us, would have us out in the streets shouting “Death to Norway!” Unfortunately, not only have the U.S. and our allies done horrendous things to Iran, we’re not even polite enough to remember it.

Reminding ourselves of this history does not mean endorsing an Iran with nuclear-tipped ICBMs. It does mean realizing how absurd it sounds when critics of the proposed agreement say it suddenly makes the U.S. the weaker party or that we’re getting a bad deal because Iran, as Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham put it, does not fear Obama enough. It’s exactly the opposite: This is the best agreement the U.S. could get because for the first time in 35 years, U.S.-Iranian relations aren’t being driven purely by fear.

1. The founder of Reuters purchased Iran in 1872

Paul Julius Reuter (Getty)

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

Kermit Roosevelt (AP)

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. We 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. 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 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.

5. We shot down a civilian Iranian airliner — killing 290 people, including 66 children

Funeral for victims of downing of Flight 655. (AP)

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 editorializedabout “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.

6. We worry about Iranian nukes because they would deter our own 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.