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We
Had a Democracy Once, But You Crushed It
by
Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
August
9, 2003
In
Thursday's Washington Post, Condoleeza
Rice, the President's National
Security
Advisor, writes the following:
"Our
task is to work with those in the Middle East who seek progress toward greater democracy,
tolerance, prosperity and freedom. As President Bush said in February, ‘The
world has a clear interest in the spread of democratic values, because stable
and free nations do not breed ideologies of murder. They encourage the peaceful
pursuit of a better life.'"
Now,
if we only had a nickel for every time Bush, or Rice, or Colin Powell, or Paul
Wolfowitz or Dick Cheney or Richard Perle or Donald Rumsfeld talked about
bringing democracy to the Middle East.
Talk,
talk, talk.
Here's
something you can bet on: Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz will not hold a press
conference this month to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the U.S.-led coup
of the democratically elected leader of Iran -- Mohammed Mossadegh.
Rice
and Powell won't hold a press conference to celebrate Operation Ajax, the CIA
plot that overthrew the Mossadegh.
That
was 50 years ago this month, in August 1953.
That's
when Mossadegh was fed up with the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company -- now BP --
pumping Iran's oil and shipping the profits back home to the United Kingdom.
And
Mossadegh said -- hey, this is our oil, I think we'll keep it.
And
Winston Churchill said -- no you won't.
Mossadegh
nationalized the company -- the way the British were nationalizing their own
vital industries at the time.
But
what's good for the UK ain't good for Iran.
If
you fly out of Dulles Airport in Virginia, ever wonder what the word Dulles
means?
It
stands for the Dulles family -- Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his
brother, the CIA director, Allen Dulles.
They
were responsible for the overthrow of the democratically elected leader of
Iran.
As
was President Theodore Roosevelt's grandson, Kermit Roosevelt, the CIA agent
who traveled to Iran to pull off the coup.
Now
why should we be concerned about a coup that happened so far away almost 50
years ago this month?
New
York Times reporter Stephen Kinzer puts it this way:
"It
is not far-fetched to draw a line from Operation Ajax through the Shah's
repressive regime and the Islamic revolution to the fireballs that engulfed the
World Trade Center in New York."
Kinzer
has written a remarkable new book, All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and
the Roots of Middle East Terror (Wiley, 2003).
In
it, he documents step by step, how Roosevelt, the Dulles boys and Norman
Schwarzkopf Sr., among a host of others, took down a democratically elected
regime in Iran.
They
had freedom of the press. We shut it down.
They
had democracy. And we crushed it.
Mossadegh
was the beacon of hope for the Middle East.
If
democracy were allowed to take hold in Iran, it probably would have spread
throughout the Middle East.
We
asked Kinzer “what does the overthrow of Mossadegh say about the United States
respect for democracy abroad?”
"Imagine
today what it must sound like to Iranians to hear American leaders tell them –
‘We want you to have a democracy in Iran, we disapprove of your present
government, we wish to help you bring democracy to your country.' Naturally,
they roll their eyes and say -- "We had a democracy once, but you crushed
it,'" he said. "This shows how differently other people perceive us
from the way we perceive ourselves. We think of ourselves as paladins of
democracy. But actually, in Iran, we destroyed the last democratic regime the
country ever had and set them on a road to what has been half a century of
dictatorship."
After
ousting Mossadegh, the United States put in place a brutal Shah who destroyed
dissent and tortured the dissenters.
And
the Shah begat the Islamic revolution.
During
that Islamic revolution in 1979, Iranians held up Mossadegh's picture, telling
the world “ we want a democratic regime
that resists foreign influence and respects the will of the Iranian people as
expressed through democratic institutions.”
"They
were never able to achieve that. And this has led many Iranians to react very
poignantly to my book," Kaizer told us. "One woman sent me an e-mail
that said ‘I was in tears when I finished your book because it made me think of
all we lost and all we could have had.'"
Of
course, the overthrow of Mossadegh was only one of the first U.S. coups of
democratically elected regime. (To see one in movie form, pick up a copy of
Raoul Peck's Lumumba, now on DVD.)
Kinzer's
previous books include Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in
Guatemala.
He's
thinking of putting together a boxed set of his books on American coups.
Get
copies of Bitter Fruit and All The Shah's Men.
Read
them.
And
the next time a politician talks about spreading democracy around the globe, ask
them about Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, and Jacobo
Arbenz in Guatemala.
Russell Mokhiber is editor of
the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime Reporter, http://www.corporatecrimereporter.com.
Robert
Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor. They are
co-authors of Corporate Predators: The Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on
Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press; http://www.corporatepredators.org).
Other Recent Articles by Russell Mokhiber
and Robert Weissman
* The
Two Faces of George Bush in Africa
* Corporate
Crime Without Shame
* Gray
Panthers’ Corporate Connections
* Throwing
Precaution to the Wind
* Why
Ari Should’ve Resigned in Protest