Roosevelt/Hitler/Disney EXPOSED

[Michael Bailey]

more about Kermit Jr's coup:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2003/08/18/what-kermit-roosevelt-didn-t-say/

In Memory of August 19, 1953 What Kermit Roosevelt Didn't Say
What Kermit Roosevelt Didn’t Say
by SASAN FAYAZMANESH

    "’I owe my throne to God, my people, my army and to you!’ By ‘you’
he [the shah] meant me and the two countries-Great Britain and the
United States-I was representing. We were all heroes."

    Countercoup: The Struggle for the Control of Iran, Kermit Roosevelt, 1979

It is ironic that CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt, the grandson of Theodore
Roosevelt, published his book on the 1953 CIA coup in Iran and the
return of the shah in the same year that "his majesty’s government"
was overthrown. An American friend gave a copy of the book to me
shortly after its publication in 1979. I skimmed through the book and
put it on my bookshelf. The CIA coup appeared irrelevant when the old
and decadent institution of monarchy in Iran seemed to be finished
once and for all.

More importantly, however, I, along with many other Iranians of my
generation, knew the story full well and did not need Kermit to repeat
it. We knew that the shah owed his throne to the likes of Kermit. But
we also knew something that Kermit didn’t know, or didn’t say. We knew
that we owe to the Kermits of the world our tortured past: years of
being forced as students to stand in the hot sun of Tehran in lines,
waving his majesty’s picture or flag as his entourage passed by in
fast moving, shiny, big black cars with darkened-glass windows; years
of being forced to rise and stay standing in every public event,
including movie theaters, while his majesty’s national anthem was
being played; years of watching a dense megalomaniac try to imitate
"Cyrus the Great" by wearing ridiculous ceremonial robes in
extravagant celebration of his birthdays or crowning of his queens;
years of being hushed by our parents, fearful of being arrested, if we
uttered a critical word about his majesty’s government or his American
advisors; years of worrying about secret police (SAVAK) informants,
who were smartly, but ruthlessly, trained by the best of the US’s CIA
and Israeli’s Mossad; years of witnessing our friends and
acquaintances being taken to jail, some never heard from again; years
of passing by buildings in which, we were told, people were being
tormented; years of hearing about people dying under torture or
quietly executed; years of being exiled in a foreign country, which
ironically was the belly of the beast, the metropolis, the center
which masterminded much of our misfortune in the first place; years of
spending our precious youth to free or save thousands of political
prisoners by marching in the streets of the metropolis, wearing masks
to hide our identities and looking bizarre to those who knew nothing
about our story; and, finally, years of trying to prove to the
American people that the 1953 CIA coup was not a fig-leaf of our
imagination or a conspiracy theory, that it indeed happened and that
they, whether they like it or not, have a certain culpability in what
their government does around the world.

Most Americans, however, did not believe our story or did not care
about it until the 1979 Revolution in Iran and the subsequent storming
of the US Embassy in Tehran by the "students following the line of
Imam." Once 52 Americans were blindfolded and held by the students in
what they called the "nest of spies," questions began to be raised:
Who lost Iran? How did we lose it? Why are the Iranians so insanely
agitated? Why do they burn our flag? Why do they hate us so much? In
the midst of the hysteria, of course, no intelligent answer was sought
and none was given. Surely, no meaningful answer was ever offered by
the US government then or in the next two decades.

It was not until the US corporations-which, as a result of the US’s
economic sanctions and executive orders, were prevented from making
lucrative deals with Iran-put pressure on the US government in the
late 1990s that we saw the first admissions of guilt about the events
of 1953. On April 12, 1999, in an offhand remark in front of the
captains of industry, President Clinton said:

    Iran, because of its enormous geopolitical importance over time,
has been the subject of quite a lot of abuse from various Western
nations. I think sometimes it’s quite important to tell people, look,
you have a right to be angry at something my country or my culture or
others that are generally allied with us did to you 50 or 60 or 100 or
150 years ago.

    (The Washington Post, May 1, 1999)

Of course, had the President, who was now apparently "feeling our
pain," devoted some of his extracurricular activities to reading
Kermit’s book, he might have given a better speech in terms of who did
what to whom and when. But given his limitations, this was the best
that he could do to please the corporate crowd.

But the greatest admission of guilt came from former Secretary of
State Madeline Albright, who in a meeting of corporate lobbyists in
March 2000 stated:

    In 1953, the United States played a significant role in
orchestrating the overthrow of Iran’s popular prime minister, Mohammed
Mossadegh…the coup was clearly a set back for Iran’s political
development and it is easy to see why so many Iranians continue to
resent this intervention by America in their internal affair.

    (US Department of State, March 17, 2000)

Unfortunately, this opaque confession did not console us much, since
it was not a genuine expression of sorrow but merely an attempt to
improve relations with the Iranian clergy in order to open the
floodgates of corporate profit.

After Albright’s speech, on April 16, 2000, The New York Times broke
what its writer, James Risen, called the US’s "stony silence" by
devoting a number of pages to publishing parts of a still classified
document on the "secret history" of the 1953 coup. The history was
written by one Donald N. Wilbur, an expert in Persian architecture and
one of the "leading planners" of the operation "TP-Ajax." The report
chronicled gruesome details of the events in 1953: how, by spending a
meager sum of $1 million, the CIA "stirred up considerable unrest in
Iran, giving Iranians a clear choice between instability and
supporting the shah"; how it brought "the largest mobs" into the
street; how it "began disseminating ‘gray propaganda’ passing out
anti-Mossadegh cartoons in the streets and planting unflattering
articles in local press"; how the CIA’s "Iranian operatives pretending
to be Communists threatened Muslim leaders with ‘savage punishment if
they opposed Mossadegh’"; how the "house of at least one prominent
Muslim was bombed by CIA agents posing as Communists"; how the CIA
tried to "orchestrate a call for a holy war against Communism"; how on
August 19 "a journalist who was one of the agency’s most important
Iranian agents led a crowd toward Parliament, inciting people to set
fire to the offices of a newspaper owned by Dr. Mossadegh’s foreign
minister"; how American agents swung "security forces to the side of
the demonstrators"; how the shah’s disbanded "Imperial Guard seized
trucks and drove through the street"; how by "10:15 there were
pro-shah truckloads of military personnel at all main squares"; how
the "pro-shah speakers went on the air, broadcasting the coups’
success and reading royal decrees"; how at the US embassy, "CIA
officers were elated, and Mr. Roosevelt got General Zahedi out of
hiding" and found him a tank that "drove him to the radio station,
where he spoke to the nation"; and, finally, how "Dr. Mossadegh and
other government officials were rounded up, while officers supporting
General Zahedi placed ‘unknown supports of TP-Ajax’ in command of all
units of Tehran garrison." "It was a day that should have never
ended," Risen quotes Wilbur as saying, for "it carried with it such a
sense of excitement, of satisfaction and of jubilation that it is
doubtful whether any other can come up to it."

To those who still believe in the fairytale of a righteous US
government wanting to spread democracy around the world such
revelations might sound shocking. But to us, whose lives were forever
changed as a result of this cheap, "$1 million" coup, none of this was
news. Like bedtime stories, we had heard them all a hundred times from
our parents. The only difference was that where Wilbur saw a glorious
day, we saw a day of infamy; where he wished the day had never ended,
we wished it had never begun; and where he saw a dazzling picture of
his majesty’s restoration to power, we saw grotesque pictures of a
brutal dictatorship, informants, dungeons, torture, executions and 52
blindfolded Americans marching up and down the steps of the "nest of
spies." Perhaps Wilbur did not see what we saw or, perhaps, he just
did not say.

It is, of course, meaningless to write an iffy history. However, one
can’t help but imagine how things might have been different had it not
been for the Kermits and Wilburs of the world. Would the Islamic
Revolution of 1979 have taken place? Would Americans have been held
hostage for 444 days in exchange for the shah and frozen assets? Would
the US have helped Saddam start the Iraq-Iran war? Would over a
million people have died as a result of the war? Would the US have
imposed numerous unilateral sanctions against Iran for over two
decades and made the captains of industry lose billions of dollars?
Would Saddam have invaded Kuwait? Would the US have invaded Iraq twice
and be in the mess that it is in right now? I guess a better question
is this: Will the US ever learn that the Kermits and Wilburs of the
world are not that clever, have no foresight, and, in the long-run, do
more damage to this country than good? Or, to put it differently, will
there ever be an enlightened US government in which there is no room
for the likes of Kermits and Wilburs?

On August 19, 2003, I will read Kermit once again and think of what he
did not say. I will reflect on my years in exile and dream of someday
returning home, a home which by then will be as foreign to me as the
one in which I presently reside.

SASAN FAYAZMANESH is Associate Professor of Economics
at California State University in Fresno. He can be reached at:
sasanf at csufresno.edu