Roosevelt/Hitler/Disney EXPOSED

[Michael Bailey]

first person account by Iranian who grew up surrounded by the effects
of Kermit's coup - not a perspective I'd encountered before, even if
not rich in new facts.  sorry if too pedestrian...

 rich wrote:
> in future pls provide us with info we dont already know.  counterpunch
> seems to think we're all idiots. respect yr audience, folks
>
> teasing out the foibles of government is as easy as laughing at fox news
>
> the glen greenwald types. sheer torture
>
> respectfully
> roy bland
>
> On Wed, Jan 30, 2013 at 10:01 AM, Michael Bailey
> <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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



-- 
"I am a whiz with pudding in large quantities.  But I don't foretell
the future." - Miles Blundell