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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (86636)	3/26/2003 5:01:32 PM
From: Thomas M.	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

The only arming of Iran's military was the in the Iran Contra scheme. This was not "from the moment the Ayatollah took power". Wrong. <<< The major elements of the Iran/contra story were well known long before the 1986 exposures, apart from one fact: that the sale of arms to Iran via Israel and the illegal contra war run out of Ollie North's White House office were connected. The shipment of arms to Iran through Israel didn't begin in 1985, when the congressional inquiry and the special prosecutor pick up the story. It began almost immediately after the fall of the Shah in 1979. By 1982, it was public knowledge that Israel was providing a large part of the arms for Iran -- you could read it on the front page of the New York Times. In February 1982, the main Israeli figures whose names later appeared in the Iran/contra hearings appeared on BBC television and described how they had helped organize an arms flow to the Khomeini regime. In October 1982, the Israeli ambassador to the US stated publicly that Israel was sending arms to the Khomeini regime "with the cooperation of the United States...at almost the highest level." The high Israeli officials involved also gave the reasons: to establish links with elements of the military in Iran who might overthrow the regime, restoring the arrangements that prevailed under the Shah -- standard operating procedure. >>> zmag.org Tom

To: TimF who wrote (86636)	3/26/2003 5:26:45 PM
From: Thomas M.	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

The military police force we were trying to restore to power: <<< 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." thirdworldtraveler.com Tom