Six Things You Didn’t Know the U.S. and Its Allies Did to
Iran
By Jon Schwarz
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
editorialized about “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.
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