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Politics : DON'T START THE WAR -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Machaon who wrote (6710)	2/8/2003 9:43:17 PM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 25898

If my daughter is an adult, I can't lock her up, or kill her, in order to make her choose my path (nor would I want to, since that would defeat the purpose- getting her to learn to make good choices on her own). Part of learning is making mistakes. Wisdom often comes from making the wrong decision, and learning from it. Sometimes that process takes a while- and there are no short cuts.

To: Machaon who wrote (6710)	2/9/2003 8:00:41 AM
From: Mao II	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 25898

Your paternalism is matched only by your seeming ignorance of US involvement in Iran. The US and Britain -- is this a familiar duopoly? -- ousted the democratically elected government of Iran in 1953, following Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh's vow to nationalize the British and American-controled oil industry. Mossadegh was replaced by US-picked General Fazlollah Zahedi, a Nazi collaborator. (Kermit Roosevelt was the CIA's man in Tehran, but it is often forgotten that Norman Shwarzkoff pere was on the spot as well.) The Shah was then reinstalled in power and oil flowed to Britain and the US. It was hatred of the Shah's vicious regime and the US involvement with it that set the stage for the Islamic revolution there. (As a side note and while we're on the subject of direct US meddling, General Abdel Karim Qassem, the ruler of Iraq, was labeled a Communist by CIA director Allen Dulles after Qassem vowed to nationalize oil. Despite that, Dulles said he believed Qassem could be dealt with. This encouraged Ba'ath party members, and a team led by -- surprise! -- Saddam Hussein tried to assassinate Qassem. There have been reports of direct CIA involvement in this plot, but no evidence. This assassination attempt failed, but it focused Hussein's mind on the ultimate goal, which, as we all now know, he achieved.) Your reference to "backward" and childlike people in Iran is typical colonialist and imperialist rhetoric. The fact is the coup in Iran and its long unraveling were the seminal events in this part of the world, setting the stage for the fundamentalist revolution in 1979 and igniting fundamentalist dreams throughout the region. Beyond that, the 1953 Tehren coup encouraged similar schemes and illicit US activities all over the region. These are still playing out in Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and elsewhere. US "support" for the Shah translated into two things in the views of Iranians and their neighbors: support for foreign oil interests and support for SAVAK, whose brutality matched anything Hussein has come up with. None of the US activity in Iran has anything to do with democracy or freedom or humanitarian impulses. It's pure geopolitical and economic power politics and needs to be understood in that context. M2