> Blaming the victims
>
>
> < j.freedland at guardian.co.uk >
> Jonathan Freedland
> Wednesday September 19, 2001
> The Guardian
>
<blah/><blah/><blah/>
>
> Take the first two charges on the anti-American rap sheet: the
> decade-long US war on Iraq and the US military presence in Saudi
> Arabia. They sound like convincing provocations until one remembers
> that America was branded the Great Satan long before either
> development: the stars and stripes were burned and US embassy
> officials taken hostage in Tehran 22 years ago.
This is just silly. Of course militant Islamic fundamentalism is a complex phenomenon that cannot be explained simply in terms of who did what to whom, but neither can we just leave U.S. imperialism out of the picture. This goes especially for the case of Iran:
-------------------------------- And what of the Iranian people? What did being saved from communism do for them? For the preponderance of the population, life under the Shah was a grim tableau of grinding poverty, police terror, and torture. Thousands were executed in the name of fighting communism. Dissent was crushed from the outset of the new regime with American assistance. Kennett Love wrote that he believed that CIA officer George Carroll, whom he knew personally, worked with General Farhat Dadsetan, the new military governor of Teheran, "on preparations for the very efficient smothering of a potentially dangerous dissident movement emanating from the bazaar area and the Tudeh in the first two weeks of November, 1953".
The notorious Iranian secret police, SAVAK, created under the guidance of the CIA and Israel, spread its tentacles all over the world to punish Iranian dissidents. According to a former CIA analyst on Iran, SAVAK was instructed in torture techniques by the Agency. Amnesty International summed up the situation in 1976 by noting that Iran had the "highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture which is beyond belief. No country in the world has a worse record in human rights than Iran."
When to this is added a level of corruption that "startled even the most hardened observers of Middle Eastern thievery", it is understandable that the Shah needed his huge military and police force, maintained by unusually large US aid and training programs, to keep the lid down for as long as he did. Said Senator Hubert Humphrey, apparently with some surprise:
"Do you know what the head of the Iranian Army told one of our people? He said the Army was in good shape, thanks to U.S. aid-it was now capable of coping with the civilian population. That Army isn't going to fight the Russians. It's planning to fight the Iranian people."
"Iran 1953" from "Killing Hope", William Blum excerpt at http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/Iran_KH.html --------------------------------
regaining my composure, David