Two seemingly unrelated stories in the New York Times yesterday serve as
potent reminders of the deadly and disastrous consequences of U.S.
interventionism in the Middle East. The stories involve Iran and Libya.
Referring to Donald Trump's campaign vow to tear up the nuclear agreement
entered into last year between the United States and Iran, Iran's president,
Hassan Rouhani, told an audience at Tehran University, ''America cannot
influence our determination, this nation's resistance and its struggle.
America is our enemy; we have no doubt about this. The Americans want to put
as much pressure on us as they can.'' During the talk, the student audience
chanted, ''Death to America.''
Rouhani is especially chagrined at what he perceives to be a double cross by
U.S. officials, who have continued their regime of brutal sanctions against
Iran notwithstanding Iran's signing of the nuclear agreement.
What's important to realize, however, is that the bad relations between the
United States and Iran are rooted in U.S. interventionism, specifically the
CIA's violent coup in 1953, which succeeded in destroying Iran's experiment
with democracy.
The Iranian parliament had elected a prime minister named Mohammad Mossadegh,
who was later selected as Time magazine's Man of the Year. Mossadegh,
believing that Iran's oil belonged to the Iranian people and not to British or
other foreign firms, proceeded to nationalize the country's oil industry.
British officials prevailed on the CIA to oust Mossadegh in a coup, which the
CIA proceeded to do, replacing him with the Shah of Iran, who then restored
British oil rights.
In order to fortify the Shah's hold on power, the CIA proceeded to train his
secret national police-intelligence force in the arts of indefinite detention,
torture, and surveillance. Under the tutelage and with the full support of the
CIA, the Shah's regime, which was always unelected, became one of the most
tyrannical regimes in the world.
That's what brought about the 1979 Iranian revolution. That's what people who
are suffering under extreme tyranny sometimes do — they revolt, violently.
Needless to say, many Iranians were angry not just at the Shah, but also by
his enabler and supporter, the U.S. government.
Unfortunately, the Iranian people were unable to restore the democratic system
that the CIA had destroyed 20 years before. The result of the 1979 revolution
was another tyrannical regime, one based on religion.
Relations between Iran and the United States have been horrible ever since.
What is important to recognize is that those bad relations are rooted in the
1953 intervention and that it is the U.S. government that is ultimately
responsible for what its coup ended up bringing in Iran.
The other New York Times article was about Libya. It stated that Libyan
fighters are celebrating their recent victory over the Islamic State in Libya,
following, of course, lots of fierce fighting and after much death and
destruction.
According to the article, ''Analysts warned that the Islamic State could still
regroup in other parts of Libya by exploiting the economic ruin and political
vacuum that has dogged the country since the ouster of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi
in 2011.''
In the interests of accuracy, that sentence should have stated more
specifically, ''….since the U.S. government's ouster of Col. Muammar
el-Qaddafi in 2011.''
Like Mossadegh, Qaddafi was made a target of a U.S. regime-change operation,
one designed to replace him with a U.S.-approved ruler. But like with the
Iranian intervention, things didn't turn out as planned. Instead, Libya was
thrown into a violent and vicious civil war involving multiple factions,
including the Islamic State.
And it's not like the U.S. national-security establishment was unaware that a
violent regime change operation can result in a civil war. In 1954, the CIA,
in a violent military operation, ousted the democratically elected president
of Guatemala, replacing him with a brutal, unelected military dictatorship
whose tyrannical regime would be very similar to that of the Shah's. That
regime-change operation threw the country into a violent civil war that lasted
some 30 years and resulted in the deaths of more than a million people.
And let's not forget why the Islamic State exists. It exists as a direct
result of the U.S. regime-change operation in Iraq in 2003 — the one in which
U.S. officials used bogus WMD scares to garner support for what was really an
illegal and unconstitutional war of aggression against a country that had
never attacked the United States.
Among the ironies of the Iraq regime-change operation was the fact that in the
1980s the U.S. government had partnered with Iraq's leader, Saddam Hussein, in
his war of aggression against Iran.
Why did the U.S. government help Saddam kill Iranians?
That question returns us to the first part of this article. It was because the
Iranian people had ousted the CIA's man in Iran, the Shah, from power, which
angered U.S. officials. To retaliate against the Iranian people, U.S.
officials decided to help Saddam Hussein in his quest to kill Iranians as part
of his war of aggression against Iran.
Let's also not forget other consequences of U.S. interventionism in the Middle
East — the ongoing threat of terrorist retaliation, which has generated the
so-called war on terrorism and the anti-Muslim crusade, along with the
destruction of American liberty and privacy at the hands of the
national-security establishment. Also worth mentioning is the massive refugee
crisis in Europe, which almost certainly would never would have occurred but
for U.S. interventionism in the Middle East.
Question: Why would any American continue to support U.S. foreign
interventionism, including interventionism that purports to fix the problems
of previous interventions?
Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom
Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in
economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the
University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He
also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught
law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become
director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. He has
advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the
country as well as on Fox News' Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows and
he appeared as a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano's show
Freedom Watch. View these interviews at LewRockwell.com and from Full
Context.
Add Comments