(5) How U.S. Support for Sociopathic Dictators BACKFIRED "Blowback Iran"
This three part series will explore America’s attempts to build up and rely on sociopaths to protect U.S. strategic interests abroad. This policy assumed that the single-minded, conscienceless vigor such psychopathic dictators displayed in pursuing their own interests, would work for ours as well. But alas, that tactic backfired – big time. It precipitated the World Trade Center bombings, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now America's public embarrassment at having stifled rather than supported the push towards democracy in Egypt and other Arab countries.
(1) How U.S. Support for Sociopathic Dictators BACKFIRED
(2) How U.S. Support for Sociopathic Dictators BACKFIRED "The Root Doctrine"
(3) How U.S. Support for Sociopathic Dictators BACKFIRED "Torture & the Shah"
(4) How U.S. Support for Sociopathic Dictators BACKFIRED “CIA Personality Tests”
(5) Blowback The Shah despised religion, not merely his ancestral Islam, but any moral code that placed strictures on his behavior or how it might be perceived. The irony was that in persecuting the religious community in Iran, he was setting into motion a destiny that would pass on the reins of government to those whom he hated most.
After the 1979 revolution, most Americans were stupefied by the explosion of rage captured on nightly news footage of Iranians shouting anti-American slogans in the streets of Tehran. Such behavior seemed to make no sense. However, Baraheni, the poet who had survived two years of torture at the hands of SAVAK, offered a painfully straightforward explanation:
“The reason most of my countrymen would tell you that they carry a grudge against the United States is that the U.S. government has given its unconditional support to a monarch who has terrorized a whole nation, plundered its wealth and bought billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment which neither he nor our nation knows how to use. . . . we can be sure that it was the inhumane and irresponsible policies of the U.S. government, the excessive greed of American arms corporations and the extreme stupidity and adventurism on the part of present Iranian authorities that led to the creation of that crisis in the history of humanity.”[14]
None of what Baraheni charged had been hidden from U.S. media view, even before the Shah’s downfall. The United Nations Commission on Human Rights had implicated the Iranian government in torture. Twenty-eight Iranian notables, including former members of parliament, sent an open letter to President Jimmy Carter presenting concrete examples of human rights abuses being perpetrated in Iran. Iranian student groups picketed every event they could find bearing any association at all with the Shah’s regime. On December 11, 1978, Amnesty International issued a news release, charging that:
“. . . political prisoners in Iran were being subjected to torture and cruel treatment at the hands of the police and SAVAK agents despite frequent assurance by the Shah that the practice had been halted.” had issued a report in 1978 …[15] However none of these allegations of torture and human rights abuses were given the attention they deserved either by the White House or for that matter, the mainstream media.
The meme being fed to the American public was a straight forward if simple-minded one. “Opposition to the Shah is fuelled by his efforts to modernize a backwards, Islamic country.” But as SAVAK official, Mansur Rafizadeh, who later broke with the Shah asserted:
“They did not rise up against him because he [the Shah] was modernizing their country, but because of the invidious material and moral corruption he purveyed, particularly at the royal court.”[16]
According to one eyewitness account:
“Hundreds of wives had been forced to divorce their husbands and to become mist4resses to members of the court, including the shah’s family. Hundreds were killed outright or were addicted to drugs. The shah’s own elderly mother was well known for forcing the palace guard of her choice to become her lover for a night. Princess Ashraf, his twin sister, world worn, weary of all but sex and pornographic movies, passed her time sleeping with any man who caught her eye, and perhaps promoting him afterward.”[17]
Steven Kinzer’s All the Shah’s Men takes a more comprehensive look at what went wrong for the U.S. in Iran. He asserts: “[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 Centre in New York."[18] This nexus of events, which brought Khomeini to power, radicalized Muslim fundamentalists in the Middle East, and precipitated 9/11 is a classic case of “blowback.” a CIA-coined term for American foreign policy decisions that generate unintended, negative consequence.
Diplomatic Cowardice?
The last chapter of the Shah’s life reads like a reality-t.v.- version of the “Tale of the Flying Dutchman,” the ghost ship that could not make port and was thus doomed to sail the seas forever. In the Shah’s case, complications from non-Hodgkin lymphoma cut short the “forever” theme of the tale. He died in an Egyptian military hospital on July 27, 1980 at the age of sixty. In a vain search for asylum after his 1979 overthrow, he had been shunted from Egypt to Morocco to the Bahamas, to Panama, to Mexico. As his health deteriorated, President Jimmy Carter finally gave permission for the ex-leader of Iran to be treated first at the New York-Weill Cornell Medical Hospital and subsequently at the Lackland Air Force Base military hospital in San Antonio, Texas. This temporary medical asylum so incensed the new Iranian regime of the Ayatollah Khomeini, that it precipitated the Iranian hostage crisis, in which the U.S. Embassy in Tehran was stormed, and American diplomats kidnapped.
In a five-part series that ran in the Fall of 1980, The Washington Post laid out the moral dilemma in which the U.S. found itself by detailing many of the Shah’s acts of loyalty towards the U.S.. They included the provision of jets on short notice to the U.S. military forces in Vietnam, allowing the U.S. to set up military bases along his border with Russia so that the CIA could monitor Soviet missile programs and troop movements, helping maintain an adequate flow of oil to the U.S., and being the only Middle Eastern ruler who had supplied oil to the state of Israel.[19] There was a monetary side to the equation as well. The U.S. arms industry benefitted from the fact that no other developing country was buying more weapons or building its armed forces at a faster rate. [20]
However a shift of American public opinion had occurred after the Shah’s ouster. The former Ambassador to Iran, William H. Sullivan, declared:
“[The shah] had always been presented in this country as an enlightened and benevolent ruler, who, while autocratic, was leading his nation out of the squalor and misery of the 0past. Now he was being condemned as a despot who was ravishing the wealth of his people and crushing their political, religious, and cultural aspirations.”[21]
Calculating the Costs
Given the cascading effect, it would be difficult if not impossible to calculate how much the U.S. lost in innocent lives, prestige, strategic interests and money because of a choice a group of American officials, operating clandestinely made in far-off Tehran in the early 1950s. But there can be little dispute that America’s decision to bring down the government of the rightfully-elected President of Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh in order to install the more malleable and, Reza Pahlavi, set into motion a nexus of events that has put all Americans in danger.
However, there is more to this issue than Islamic terrorism, which targets American civilians. The Iranian revolution of 1979 weakened America’s Arab allies, precipitated in general, the explosion of Islamic fundamentalism throughout the Middle East, and more specifically, the assassination of America’s foremost ally in the region, Egyptian President Anwar Sedat. Iran’s next door neighbor, the Soviet Union, used America’s preoccupations with the regime of the Ayatollahs and the chaos it entailed, to engage in its own adventurism. It was their December 1979 invasion of Afghanistan that prompted the CIA to recruit a twenty-two year old Saudi Arabian engineer, who was given the task of setting up an anti-Soviet resistance movement of radical Muslim fighters. The young man’s name was Osama bin Laden.
RELATED POSTS:
[1][1] “Another Crisis for the Shah,” Time Magazine, November 13, 1978.
[2][2] Dr. Donald Wilber, “CIA Clandestine Service History: ‘Overthrow of Premier Mossadeq of Iran, November 1952-August 1953,” date of submission March 1954,” http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB28/#documents
(Accessed November 2010).
[3][3] Pierre Blanchet & Claire Brière, Iran, La Révolution au nom de Dieu, Seuil, Paris, 1979.
[4][4] See “The Doolittle Report, 1954,” in IC21: The Intelligence Community in the 21st Century, Staff study by the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence House of Representatives, One Hundred Fourth Congress, Appendix C. CRS Report: Proposals for Intelligence Reorganization 1949, 1996.
[5][5] Frederick H. Gareau, State Terrorism and the United States: From Counterinsurgency to the War on Terrorism, Clarity Press, 2004, p. 165.
[6][6] Baraheni, p.104.
[7][7] Dominique Lapierre, A Thousand Suns: Witness to History, Times Warner, 1960, p. 205.
[8][8] Baraheni, P. 94.
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(1) How U.S. Support for Sociopathic Dictators BACKFIRED
(2) How U.S. Support for Sociopathic Dictators BACKFIRED "The Root Doctrine"
(3) How U.S. Support for Sociopathic Dictators BACKFIRED "Torture & the Shah"
(4) How U.S. Support for Sociopathic Dictators BACKFIRED “CIA Personality Tests”
(5) Blowback The Shah despised religion, not merely his ancestral Islam, but any moral code that placed strictures on his behavior or how it might be perceived. The irony was that in persecuting the religious community in Iran, he was setting into motion a destiny that would pass on the reins of government to those whom he hated most.
After the 1979 revolution, most Americans were stupefied by the explosion of rage captured on nightly news footage of Iranians shouting anti-American slogans in the streets of Tehran. Such behavior seemed to make no sense. However, Baraheni, the poet who had survived two years of torture at the hands of SAVAK, offered a painfully straightforward explanation:
“The reason most of my countrymen would tell you that they carry a grudge against the United States is that the U.S. government has given its unconditional support to a monarch who has terrorized a whole nation, plundered its wealth and bought billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment which neither he nor our nation knows how to use. . . . we can be sure that it was the inhumane and irresponsible policies of the U.S. government, the excessive greed of American arms corporations and the extreme stupidity and adventurism on the part of present Iranian authorities that led to the creation of that crisis in the history of humanity.”[14]
None of what Baraheni charged had been hidden from U.S. media view, even before the Shah’s downfall. The United Nations Commission on Human Rights had implicated the Iranian government in torture. Twenty-eight Iranian notables, including former members of parliament, sent an open letter to President Jimmy Carter presenting concrete examples of human rights abuses being perpetrated in Iran. Iranian student groups picketed every event they could find bearing any association at all with the Shah’s regime. On December 11, 1978, Amnesty International issued a news release, charging that:
“. . . political prisoners in Iran were being subjected to torture and cruel treatment at the hands of the police and SAVAK agents despite frequent assurance by the Shah that the practice had been halted.” had issued a report in 1978 …[15] However none of these allegations of torture and human rights abuses were given the attention they deserved either by the White House or for that matter, the mainstream media.
The meme being fed to the American public was a straight forward if simple-minded one. “Opposition to the Shah is fuelled by his efforts to modernize a backwards, Islamic country.” But as SAVAK official, Mansur Rafizadeh, who later broke with the Shah asserted:
“They did not rise up against him because he [the Shah] was modernizing their country, but because of the invidious material and moral corruption he purveyed, particularly at the royal court.”[16]
According to one eyewitness account:
“Hundreds of wives had been forced to divorce their husbands and to become mist4resses to members of the court, including the shah’s family. Hundreds were killed outright or were addicted to drugs. The shah’s own elderly mother was well known for forcing the palace guard of her choice to become her lover for a night. Princess Ashraf, his twin sister, world worn, weary of all but sex and pornographic movies, passed her time sleeping with any man who caught her eye, and perhaps promoting him afterward.”[17]
Steven Kinzer’s All the Shah’s Men takes a more comprehensive look at what went wrong for the U.S. in Iran. He asserts: “[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 Centre in New York."[18] This nexus of events, which brought Khomeini to power, radicalized Muslim fundamentalists in the Middle East, and precipitated 9/11 is a classic case of “blowback.” a CIA-coined term for American foreign policy decisions that generate unintended, negative consequence.
Diplomatic Cowardice?
The last chapter of the Shah’s life reads like a reality-t.v.- version of the “Tale of the Flying Dutchman,” the ghost ship that could not make port and was thus doomed to sail the seas forever. In the Shah’s case, complications from non-Hodgkin lymphoma cut short the “forever” theme of the tale. He died in an Egyptian military hospital on July 27, 1980 at the age of sixty. In a vain search for asylum after his 1979 overthrow, he had been shunted from Egypt to Morocco to the Bahamas, to Panama, to Mexico. As his health deteriorated, President Jimmy Carter finally gave permission for the ex-leader of Iran to be treated first at the New York-Weill Cornell Medical Hospital and subsequently at the Lackland Air Force Base military hospital in San Antonio, Texas. This temporary medical asylum so incensed the new Iranian regime of the Ayatollah Khomeini, that it precipitated the Iranian hostage crisis, in which the U.S. Embassy in Tehran was stormed, and American diplomats kidnapped.
In a five-part series that ran in the Fall of 1980, The Washington Post laid out the moral dilemma in which the U.S. found itself by detailing many of the Shah’s acts of loyalty towards the U.S.. They included the provision of jets on short notice to the U.S. military forces in Vietnam, allowing the U.S. to set up military bases along his border with Russia so that the CIA could monitor Soviet missile programs and troop movements, helping maintain an adequate flow of oil to the U.S., and being the only Middle Eastern ruler who had supplied oil to the state of Israel.[19] There was a monetary side to the equation as well. The U.S. arms industry benefitted from the fact that no other developing country was buying more weapons or building its armed forces at a faster rate. [20]
However a shift of American public opinion had occurred after the Shah’s ouster. The former Ambassador to Iran, William H. Sullivan, declared:
“[The shah] had always been presented in this country as an enlightened and benevolent ruler, who, while autocratic, was leading his nation out of the squalor and misery of the 0past. Now he was being condemned as a despot who was ravishing the wealth of his people and crushing their political, religious, and cultural aspirations.”[21]
Calculating the Costs
Given the cascading effect, it would be difficult if not impossible to calculate how much the U.S. lost in innocent lives, prestige, strategic interests and money because of a choice a group of American officials, operating clandestinely made in far-off Tehran in the early 1950s. But there can be little dispute that America’s decision to bring down the government of the rightfully-elected President of Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh in order to install the more malleable and, Reza Pahlavi, set into motion a nexus of events that has put all Americans in danger.
However, there is more to this issue than Islamic terrorism, which targets American civilians. The Iranian revolution of 1979 weakened America’s Arab allies, precipitated in general, the explosion of Islamic fundamentalism throughout the Middle East, and more specifically, the assassination of America’s foremost ally in the region, Egyptian President Anwar Sedat. Iran’s next door neighbor, the Soviet Union, used America’s preoccupations with the regime of the Ayatollahs and the chaos it entailed, to engage in its own adventurism. It was their December 1979 invasion of Afghanistan that prompted the CIA to recruit a twenty-two year old Saudi Arabian engineer, who was given the task of setting up an anti-Soviet resistance movement of radical Muslim fighters. The young man’s name was Osama bin Laden.
[2][2] Dr. Donald Wilber, “CIA Clandestine Service History: ‘Overthrow of Premier Mossadeq of Iran, November 1952-August 1953,” date of submission March 1954,” http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB28/#documents
(Accessed November 2010).
[3][3] Pierre Blanchet & Claire Brière, Iran, La Révolution au nom de Dieu, Seuil, Paris, 1979.
[4][4] See “The Doolittle Report, 1954,” in IC21: The Intelligence Community in the 21st Century, Staff study by the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence House of Representatives, One Hundred Fourth Congress, Appendix C. CRS Report: Proposals for Intelligence Reorganization 1949, 1996.
[5][5] Frederick H. Gareau, State Terrorism and the United States: From Counterinsurgency to the War on Terrorism, Clarity Press, 2004, p. 165.
[6][6] Baraheni, p.104.
[7][7] Dominique Lapierre, A Thousand Suns: Witness to History, Times Warner, 1960, p. 205.
[8][8] Baraheni, P. 94.
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