Y
ybeayf
Guest
Yep. Like I said, exporting our system of governance (i.e. democracy), as we didn’t like his (though we did at one time).
- Status
L
Lisa_N
Guest
So you don’t think the human rights atrocities had anything to do with the war? How about harboring terrorists? How about gassing the Kurds? How about the mass graves?
You’re right, we didn’t like his ‘governance’
Lisa N
B
Bobby_Jim
Guest
Lisa N:
Isn’t he that guy we supported during the Iran-Iraq war?
J
jlw
Guest
Bobby Jim:
Against the Soviet-backed whack-job american-hostage-taking Iranians??
Y
ybeayf
Guest
Whether Saddam was responsible for the use of poison gas is still very much an open question. And there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with mass graves – in a time of war (which Iraq was in for most of the 80s and early 90s, whether against Iran or against internal rebels) there is often no other option than to bury casualties en masse.
Oh, right – they were the ones who overthrew the dictator that we installed there in the '50s after overthrowing the democratically-elected government.
J
jlw
Guest
50 years ago??? We “overthrew” a democratically elected government?? What is your definition of “democratically elected”?? So, reply to the situation facing us in 1980 is to point out what happened 50 years ago?? I’ll do better: Ever hear of the incompetent Carter administration who idly stood by and let things get out of hand in Iran in the late '70’s???
Each president gets history handed to him, and then he must make history. Foreign policy is NOT an easy business, and ensuring our national security is NOT always a simple (or clean) business.
J
jlw
Guest
:banghead: Go to Bagdad and get on Saddam’s defense team will ya??
J
jlw
Guest
AND, furthermore…you imply that our actions in 1950 LED to our citizens being taken hostage by Iran 30 years later??? You blame US for terrorism against us??? HOW FREAKING dare you??!! What are you, a professor at the University of Colorado???
Y
ybeayf
Guest
A government that is elected by mass, free elections.
Of course. We put our puppet on the throne of Iran; the 1979 revolution was the populace of Iran rejecting that puppet and forming their own government.
I would say that our actions in the '50s were a contributing cause to the events in Iran 30 years later, yes. People don’t just wake up one morning and say “Gee, I think I’ll attack the US today!” Actions in the international arena have effects; too many Americans seem to forget that. If you stomp on enough little guys, eventually they’ll bite you back.
J
jlw
Guest
Who Should Apologize to Whom?
Amir Taheri
Where is the country that Bill Clinton, a former president of the United States, feels ideologically most at home?
Before you answer, here is the condition that such a country must fulfill: It must hold several consecutive elections that produce 70 percent majorities for “liberals and progressives.”
Well, if you thought of one of the Scandinavian countries or, perhaps, New Zealand or Canada, you are wrong.
Believe it or not, the country Bill Clinton so admires is the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Here is what Clinton said at a meeting on the margins of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, just a few weeks ago: “Iran today is, in a sense, the only country where progressive ideas enjoy a vast constituency. It is there that the ideas that I subscribe to are defended by a majority.”
And here is what Clinton had to say in a recent television interview with Charlie Rose:
“Iran is the only country in the world that has now had six elections since the first election of President Khatami (in 1997). (It is) the only one with elections, including the United States, including Israel, including you name it, where the liberals, or the progressives, have won two-thirds to 70 percent of the vote in six elections: Two for president; two for the Parliament, the Majlis; two for the mayoralties. In every single election, the guys I identify with got two-thirds to 70 percent of the vote. There is no other country in the world I can say that about, certainly not my own.”
So, while millions of Iranians, especially the young, look to the United States as a mode of progress and democracy, a former president of the US looks to the Islamic Republic as his ideological homeland.
But who are “the guys” Clinton identifies with?
There is, of course, President Muhammad Khatami who, speaking at a conference of provincial governors last week, called for the whole world to convert to Islam.
“Human beings understand different affairs within the global framework that they live in,” he said. “But when we say that Islam belongs to all times and places, it is implied that the very essence of Islam is such that despite changes (in time and place) it is always valid.”
There is also Khatami’s brother, Muhammad-Reza, the man who, in 1979, led the “students” who seized the US Embassy in Tehran and held its diplomats hostage for 444 days. There is Massumeh Ebtekar, a poor man’s pasionaria who was spokesperson for the hostage-holders in Tehran. There is also the late Ayatollah Sadeq Khalkhali, known to Iranians as “Judge Blood”.
Not surprisingly, Clinton’s utterances have been seized upon by the state-controlled media in Tehran as a means of countering President George W. Bush’s claim that the Islamic Republic is a tyranny that oppresses the Iranians and threatens the stability of the region.
Clinton’s declaration of love for the mullas shows how ill informed even a US president could be.
Didn’t anyone tell Clinton, when he was in the White House, that elections in the Islamic Republic were as meaningless as those held in the Soviet Union? Did he not know that all candidates had to be approved by the “Supreme Guide”, and that no one from opposition is allowed to stand? Did he not know that all parties are banned in the Islamic Republic, and that such terms as “progressive” and “liberal” are used by the mullas as synonyms for “apostate”, a charge that carries a death sentence?
More importantly, does he not know that while there is no democracy without elections there can be elections without democracy?
Clinton told his audience in Davos, as well as Charlie Rose, that during his presidency he had “formally apologized on behalf of the United States” for what he termed “American crimes against Iran.”
But what were those “crimes”? Clinton summed them thus: “It’s a sad story that really began in the 1950s when the United States deposed Mr. Mossadegh, who was an elected parliamentary democrat, and brought the Shah back and then he was overturned by the Ayatollah Khomeini, driving us into the arms of one Saddam Hussein. We got rid of the parliamentary democracy {there} back in the ‘50s; at least, that is my belief.”
J
jlw
Guest
Continued…
Duped by a myth spread by the Blame-America-First coalition, Clinton appears to have done little homework on Iran. The truth is that Iran in the 1950s was not a parliamentary democracy but a constitutional monarchy in which the Shah appointed, and dismissed, the prime minister. Mossadegh was named prime minister twice by the Shah and twice dismissed. In what way that meant that the US “got rid of parliamentary democracy” that did not exist is not clear.
There are at least two things that Clinton does not know about Iran and Iranians.
The first is that the claim that the US changed the course of Iranian history on a whim would be seen by most Iranians, a proud people, as an insult from an arrogant politician who exaggerates the powers of his nation more than half a century ago. The second thing that Clinton does not know is that in the Islamic Republic that he so admires, Mossadegh, far from being regarded as a national hero, is an object of intense vilification. One of the first acts of the mullas after seizing power in 1979 was to take the name of Mossadegh off a street in Tehran. They then sealed off the village where Mossadegh is buried to prevent his supporters from gathering at his tomb. History textbooks written by the mullas present Mossadegh as the “son of a feudal family of exploiters who worked for the cursed Shah, and betrayed Islam.”
Apologizing to the mullas for a wrong supposedly done to Mossadegh is like begging Josef Stalin’s pardon for a discourtesy toward Alexander Kerensky.
Clinton does not know that it was President Harry S. Truman’s energetic intervention in 1946 that forced Stalin to withdraw his armies from northwestern Iran thus foiling a Communist attempt to dismember the Iranian state.
Clinton does not know that if anyone has to apologize it is the mullas who should apologize to both the Iranian and the American peoples. He does not appear to remember images of American diplomats paraded in front of TV cameras, blindfolded, and threatened with summary execution every day — images that did lasting damage to the good name of Iran as a civilized nation.
Speaking of apologies, Clinton also ignores the fact that Iranian agents in Lebanon, led by the “ liberal progressive” Ayatollah Ali-Akbar Mohtashami, organized and carried out a string of terrorist attacks in the 1980s that cost the lives of over 300 US citizens, including 240 Marines.
And does Clinton remember the dozens of American citizens who were held hostage by the mullas’ agents in Lebanon, sometimes for more than five years?
Clinton forgets that anti-Americanism, and hatred of the West in general, is the ideological backbone of Khomeinism; that that the devise of the mullas’ regime is “Death to America”, and that the American flag is burned or trampled under foot in thousands of official buildings throughout Iran every day?
Clinton claims that the mullas “still kind of like the West in general, and America in particular.” That must be as much news to the mullas as to anyone else.
The former president endorses another claim of the mullas that Saddam Hussein, the deposed Iraqi dictator, invaded Iran on behalf of the United States.
Clinton says: “Most of the terrible things Saddam Hussein did in the 1980s he did with the full, knowing support of the United States government.”
Don’t be surprised if Clinton’s next apology is addressed to Saddam Hussein, another victim of American Imperialism!
Duped by a myth spread by the Blame-America-First coalition, Clinton appears to have done little homework on Iran. The truth is that Iran in the 1950s was not a parliamentary democracy but a constitutional monarchy in which the Shah appointed, and dismissed, the prime minister. Mossadegh was named prime minister twice by the Shah and twice dismissed. In what way that meant that the US “got rid of parliamentary democracy” that did not exist is not clear.
There are at least two things that Clinton does not know about Iran and Iranians.
The first is that the claim that the US changed the course of Iranian history on a whim would be seen by most Iranians, a proud people, as an insult from an arrogant politician who exaggerates the powers of his nation more than half a century ago. The second thing that Clinton does not know is that in the Islamic Republic that he so admires, Mossadegh, far from being regarded as a national hero, is an object of intense vilification. One of the first acts of the mullas after seizing power in 1979 was to take the name of Mossadegh off a street in Tehran. They then sealed off the village where Mossadegh is buried to prevent his supporters from gathering at his tomb. History textbooks written by the mullas present Mossadegh as the “son of a feudal family of exploiters who worked for the cursed Shah, and betrayed Islam.”
Apologizing to the mullas for a wrong supposedly done to Mossadegh is like begging Josef Stalin’s pardon for a discourtesy toward Alexander Kerensky.
Clinton does not know that it was President Harry S. Truman’s energetic intervention in 1946 that forced Stalin to withdraw his armies from northwestern Iran thus foiling a Communist attempt to dismember the Iranian state.
Clinton does not know that if anyone has to apologize it is the mullas who should apologize to both the Iranian and the American peoples. He does not appear to remember images of American diplomats paraded in front of TV cameras, blindfolded, and threatened with summary execution every day — images that did lasting damage to the good name of Iran as a civilized nation.
Speaking of apologies, Clinton also ignores the fact that Iranian agents in Lebanon, led by the “ liberal progressive” Ayatollah Ali-Akbar Mohtashami, organized and carried out a string of terrorist attacks in the 1980s that cost the lives of over 300 US citizens, including 240 Marines.
And does Clinton remember the dozens of American citizens who were held hostage by the mullas’ agents in Lebanon, sometimes for more than five years?
Clinton forgets that anti-Americanism, and hatred of the West in general, is the ideological backbone of Khomeinism; that that the devise of the mullas’ regime is “Death to America”, and that the American flag is burned or trampled under foot in thousands of official buildings throughout Iran every day?
Clinton claims that the mullas “still kind of like the West in general, and America in particular.” That must be as much news to the mullas as to anyone else.
The former president endorses another claim of the mullas that Saddam Hussein, the deposed Iraqi dictator, invaded Iran on behalf of the United States.
Clinton says: “Most of the terrible things Saddam Hussein did in the 1980s he did with the full, knowing support of the United States government.”
Don’t be surprised if Clinton’s next apology is addressed to Saddam Hussein, another victim of American Imperialism!
W
wabrams
Guest
jlw,
Trying to force everyone to follow one religion, an extremely orthodox version at that, hardly sounds progressive. Sounds more fundamentalists to me.
Trying to force everyone to follow one religion, an extremely orthodox version at that, hardly sounds progressive. Sounds more fundamentalists to me.
J
jlw
Guest
You’re telling me?? Preaching to the chior.
Did I miss something??
J
JimO
Guest
Just to lighten things up a bit, before this thread got into more serious matters, it was one of the most entertaining exchanges that I have read on these forums. I salute all of you for the sharp, yet civil exchange of comments.
W
wabrams
Guest
Sorry, dude, I must have misread the article or something. The stress level is high right now so my comprohension is slipping!!You’re telling me?? Preaching to the chior.
Did I miss something??
S
space_ghost
Guest
…and spelling is wanting as well
W
wabrams
Guest
space ghost:
thanks…and spelling is wanting as well
Y
ybeayf
Guest
What Kermit Roosevelt Didn’t Say
By SASAN FAYAZMANESH
It is ironic that CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt, the grandson of Theodore Roosevelt, published his book on the 1953 CIA coup in Iran and the return of the shah in the same year that “his majesty’s government” was overthrown. An American friend gave a copy of the book to me shortly after its publication in 1979. I skimmed through the book and put it on my bookshelf. The CIA coup appeared irrelevant when the old and decadent institution of monarchy in Iran seemed to be finished once and for all.
More importantly, however, I, along with many other Iranians of my generation, knew the story full well and did not need Kermit to repeat it. We knew that the shah owed his throne to the likes of Kermit. But we also knew something that Kermit didn’t know, or didn’t say. We knew that we owe to the Kermits of the world our tortured past: years of being forced as students to stand in the hot sun of Tehran in lines, waving his majesty’s picture or flag as his entourage passed by in fast moving, shiny, big black cars with darkened-glass windows; years of being forced to rise and stay standing in every public event, including movie theaters, while his majesty’s national anthem was being played; years of watching a dense megalomaniac try to imitate “Cyrus the Great” by wearing ridiculous ceremonial robes in extravagant celebration of his birthdays or crowning of his queens; years of being hushed by our parents, fearful of being arrested, if we uttered a critical word about his majesty’s government or his American advisors; years of worrying about secret police (SAVAK) informants, who were smartly, but ruthlessly, trained by the best of the US’s CIA and Israeli’s Mossad; years of witnessing our friends and acquaintances being taken to jail, some never heard from again; years of passing by buildings in which, we were told, people were being tormented; years of hearing about people dying under torture or quietly executed; years of being exiled in a foreign country, which ironically was the belly of the beast, the metropolis, the center which masterminded much of our misfortune in the first place; years of spending our precious youth to free or save thousands of political prisoners by marching in the streets of the metropolis, wearing masks to hide our identities and looking bizarre to those who knew nothing about our story; and, finally, years of trying to prove to the American people that the 1953 CIA coup was not a fig-leaf of our imagination or a conspiracy theory, that it indeed happened and that they, whether they like it or not, have a certain culpability in what their government does around the world.
Most Americans, however, did not believe our story or did not care about it until the 1979 Revolution in Iran and the subsequent storming of the US Embassy in Tehran by the “students following the line of Imam.” Once 52 Americans were blindfolded and held by the students in what they called the “nest of spies,” questions began to be raised: Who lost Iran? How did we lose it? Why are the Iranians so insanely agitated? Why do they burn our flag? Why do they hate us so much? In the midst of the hysteria, of course, no intelligent answer was sought and none was given. Surely, no meaningful answer was ever offered by the US government then or in the next two decades.
It was not until the US corporations-which, as a result of the US’s economic sanctions and executive orders, were prevented from making lucrative deals with Iran-put pressure on the US government in the late 1990s that we saw the first admissions of guilt about the events of 1953. On April 12, 1999, in an offhand remark in front of the captains of industry, President Clinton said:
By SASAN FAYAZMANESH
Code:
"'I owe my throne to God, my people, my army and to you!' By 'you' he [the shah] meant me and the two countries-Great Britain and the United States-I was representing. We were all heroes."
Countercoup: The Struggle for the Control of Iran, Kermit Roosevelt, 1979More importantly, however, I, along with many other Iranians of my generation, knew the story full well and did not need Kermit to repeat it. We knew that the shah owed his throne to the likes of Kermit. But we also knew something that Kermit didn’t know, or didn’t say. We knew that we owe to the Kermits of the world our tortured past: years of being forced as students to stand in the hot sun of Tehran in lines, waving his majesty’s picture or flag as his entourage passed by in fast moving, shiny, big black cars with darkened-glass windows; years of being forced to rise and stay standing in every public event, including movie theaters, while his majesty’s national anthem was being played; years of watching a dense megalomaniac try to imitate “Cyrus the Great” by wearing ridiculous ceremonial robes in extravagant celebration of his birthdays or crowning of his queens; years of being hushed by our parents, fearful of being arrested, if we uttered a critical word about his majesty’s government or his American advisors; years of worrying about secret police (SAVAK) informants, who were smartly, but ruthlessly, trained by the best of the US’s CIA and Israeli’s Mossad; years of witnessing our friends and acquaintances being taken to jail, some never heard from again; years of passing by buildings in which, we were told, people were being tormented; years of hearing about people dying under torture or quietly executed; years of being exiled in a foreign country, which ironically was the belly of the beast, the metropolis, the center which masterminded much of our misfortune in the first place; years of spending our precious youth to free or save thousands of political prisoners by marching in the streets of the metropolis, wearing masks to hide our identities and looking bizarre to those who knew nothing about our story; and, finally, years of trying to prove to the American people that the 1953 CIA coup was not a fig-leaf of our imagination or a conspiracy theory, that it indeed happened and that they, whether they like it or not, have a certain culpability in what their government does around the world.
Most Americans, however, did not believe our story or did not care about it until the 1979 Revolution in Iran and the subsequent storming of the US Embassy in Tehran by the “students following the line of Imam.” Once 52 Americans were blindfolded and held by the students in what they called the “nest of spies,” questions began to be raised: Who lost Iran? How did we lose it? Why are the Iranians so insanely agitated? Why do they burn our flag? Why do they hate us so much? In the midst of the hysteria, of course, no intelligent answer was sought and none was given. Surely, no meaningful answer was ever offered by the US government then or in the next two decades.
It was not until the US corporations-which, as a result of the US’s economic sanctions and executive orders, were prevented from making lucrative deals with Iran-put pressure on the US government in the late 1990s that we saw the first admissions of guilt about the events of 1953. On April 12, 1999, in an offhand remark in front of the captains of industry, President Clinton said:
Code:
Iran, because of its enormous geopolitical importance over time, has been the subject of quite a lot of abuse from various Western nations. I think sometimes it's quite important to tell people, look, you have a right to be angry at something my country or my culture or others that are generally allied with us did to you 50 or 60 or 100 or 150 years ago.
(The Washington Post, May 1, 1999)
Y
ybeayf
Guest
Of course, had the President, who was now apparently “feeling our pain,” devoted some of his extracurricular activities to reading Kermit’s book, he might have given a better speech in terms of who did what to whom and when. But given his limitations, this was the best that he could do to please the corporate crowd.
But the greatest admission of guilt came from former Secretary of State Madeline Albright, who in a meeting of corporate lobbyists in March 2000 stated:
Unfortunately, this opaque confession did not console us much, since it was not a genuine expression of sorrow but merely an attempt to improve relations with the Iranian clergy in order to open the floodgates of corporate profit.
After Albright’s speech, on April 16, 2000, The New York Times broke what its writer, James Risen, called the US’s “stony silence” by devoting a number of pages to publishing parts of a still classified document on the “secret history” of the 1953 coup. The history was written by one Donald N. Wilbur, an expert in Persian architecture and one of the “leading planners” of the operation “TP-Ajax.” The report chronicled gruesome details of the events in 1953: how, by spending a meager sum of $1 million, the CIA “stirred up considerable unrest in Iran, giving Iranians a clear choice between instability and supporting the shah”; how it brought “the largest mobs” into the street; how it “began disseminating ‘gray propaganda’ passing out anti-Mossadegh cartoons in the streets and planting unflattering articles in local press”; how the CIA’s “Iranian operatives pretending to be Communists threatened Muslim leaders with ‘savage punishment if they opposed Mossadegh’”; how the “house of at least one prominent Muslim was bombed by CIA agents posing as Communists”; how the CIA tried to “orchestrate a call for a holy war against Communism”; how on August 19 “a journalist who was one of the agency’s most important Iranian agents led a crowd toward Parliament, inciting people to set fire to the offices of a newspaper owned by Dr. Mossadegh’s foreign minister”; how American agents swung “security forces to the side of the demonstrators”; how the shah’s disbanded “Imperial Guard seized trucks and drove through the street”; how by “10:15 there were pro-shah truckloads of military personnel at all main squares”; how the “pro-shah speakers went on the air, broadcasting the coups’ success and reading royal decrees”; how at the US embassy, “CIA officers were elated, and Mr. Roosevelt got General Zahedi out of hiding” and found him a tank that “drove him to the radio station, where he spoke to the nation”; and, finally, how “Dr. Mossadegh and other government officials were rounded up, while officers supporting General Zahedi placed ‘unknown supports of TP-Ajax’ in command of all units of Tehran garrison.” “It was a day that should have never ended,” Risen quotes Wilbur as saying, for “it carried with it such a sense of excitement, of satisfaction and of jubilation that it is doubtful whether any other can come up to it.”
To those who still believe in the fairytale of a righteous US government wanting to spread democracy around the world such revelations might sound shocking. But to us, whose lives were forever changed as a result of this cheap, “$1 million” coup, none of this was news. Like bedtime stories, we had heard them all a hundred times from our parents. The only difference was that where Wilbur saw a glorious day, we saw a day of infamy; where he wished the day had never ended, we wished it had never begun; and where he saw a dazzling picture of his majesty’s restoration to power, we saw grotesque pictures of a brutal dictatorship, informants, dungeons, torture, executions and 52 blindfolded Americans marching up and down the steps of the “nest of spies.” Perhaps Wilbur did not see what we saw or, perhaps, he just did not say.
But the greatest admission of guilt came from former Secretary of State Madeline Albright, who in a meeting of corporate lobbyists in March 2000 stated:
Code:
In 1953, the United States played a significant role in orchestrating the overthrow of Iran's popular prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh...the coup was clearly a set back for Iran's political development and it is easy to see why so many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America in their internal affair.
(US Department of State, March 17, 2000)After Albright’s speech, on April 16, 2000, The New York Times broke what its writer, James Risen, called the US’s “stony silence” by devoting a number of pages to publishing parts of a still classified document on the “secret history” of the 1953 coup. The history was written by one Donald N. Wilbur, an expert in Persian architecture and one of the “leading planners” of the operation “TP-Ajax.” The report chronicled gruesome details of the events in 1953: how, by spending a meager sum of $1 million, the CIA “stirred up considerable unrest in Iran, giving Iranians a clear choice between instability and supporting the shah”; how it brought “the largest mobs” into the street; how it “began disseminating ‘gray propaganda’ passing out anti-Mossadegh cartoons in the streets and planting unflattering articles in local press”; how the CIA’s “Iranian operatives pretending to be Communists threatened Muslim leaders with ‘savage punishment if they opposed Mossadegh’”; how the “house of at least one prominent Muslim was bombed by CIA agents posing as Communists”; how the CIA tried to “orchestrate a call for a holy war against Communism”; how on August 19 “a journalist who was one of the agency’s most important Iranian agents led a crowd toward Parliament, inciting people to set fire to the offices of a newspaper owned by Dr. Mossadegh’s foreign minister”; how American agents swung “security forces to the side of the demonstrators”; how the shah’s disbanded “Imperial Guard seized trucks and drove through the street”; how by “10:15 there were pro-shah truckloads of military personnel at all main squares”; how the “pro-shah speakers went on the air, broadcasting the coups’ success and reading royal decrees”; how at the US embassy, “CIA officers were elated, and Mr. Roosevelt got General Zahedi out of hiding” and found him a tank that “drove him to the radio station, where he spoke to the nation”; and, finally, how “Dr. Mossadegh and other government officials were rounded up, while officers supporting General Zahedi placed ‘unknown supports of TP-Ajax’ in command of all units of Tehran garrison.” “It was a day that should have never ended,” Risen quotes Wilbur as saying, for “it carried with it such a sense of excitement, of satisfaction and of jubilation that it is doubtful whether any other can come up to it.”
To those who still believe in the fairytale of a righteous US government wanting to spread democracy around the world such revelations might sound shocking. But to us, whose lives were forever changed as a result of this cheap, “$1 million” coup, none of this was news. Like bedtime stories, we had heard them all a hundred times from our parents. The only difference was that where Wilbur saw a glorious day, we saw a day of infamy; where he wished the day had never ended, we wished it had never begun; and where he saw a dazzling picture of his majesty’s restoration to power, we saw grotesque pictures of a brutal dictatorship, informants, dungeons, torture, executions and 52 blindfolded Americans marching up and down the steps of the “nest of spies.” Perhaps Wilbur did not see what we saw or, perhaps, he just did not say.
Y
ybeayf
Guest
It is, of course, meaningless to write an iffy history. However, one can’t help but imagine how things might have been different had it not been for the Kermits and Wilburs of the world. Would the Islamic Revolution of 1979 have taken place? Would Americans have been held hostage for 444 days in exchange for the shah and frozen assets? Would the US have helped Saddam start the Iraq-Iran war? Would over a million people have died as a result of the war? Would the US have imposed numerous unilateral sanctions against Iran for over two decades and made the captains of industry lose billions of dollars? Would Saddam have invaded Kuwait? Would the US have invaded Iraq twice and be in the mess that it is in right now? I guess a better question is this: Will the US ever learn that the Kermits and Wilburs of the world are not that clever, have no foresight, and, in the long-run, do more damage to this country than good? Or, to put it differently, will there ever be an enlightened US government in which there is no room for the likes of Kermits and Wilburs?
On August 19, 2003, I will read Kermit once again and think of what he did not say. I will reflect on my years in exile and dream of someday returning home, a home which by then will be as foreign to me as the one in which I presently reside.
Look ^^^ I can copy and paste articles too!
I never claimed that the current government of Iran was ideal, but they are a fair bit better than many of the dictators we’ve supported over the years. My main point is that we do bear culpability in the chain of events that led to the 1979 revolution.
On August 19, 2003, I will read Kermit once again and think of what he did not say. I will reflect on my years in exile and dream of someday returning home, a home which by then will be as foreign to me as the one in which I presently reside.
Look ^^^ I can copy and paste articles too!
I never claimed that the current government of Iran was ideal, but they are a fair bit better than many of the dictators we’ve supported over the years. My main point is that we do bear culpability in the chain of events that led to the 1979 revolution.
- Status