http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FI15Ak03.html
Nothing new in the world
By Renato Redentor Constantino
"Memory says, 'I did that'," Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote. "Pride replies, 'I
could not have done that'. Eventually, memory yields."
Three years ago in the United States, on September 11, airplanes fell from the
sky and thousands died. Countless numbers mourned the mass murder. Countless mourn
still. On the same day 31 years ago, the sky fell in Chile when the democratically
elected Allende government was overthrown in a bloody coup staged by the US
government. Who mourns the Chilean sky?
Remembering is a political act, wrote Boston Globe columnist James Carroll.
"Forgetfulness is the handmaiden of tyranny."
In 1953, the US engineered a coup in Iran that ousted the government of prime
minister Mohammad Mossadegh - an Iranian colossus who happened to live in a frail old
man's body. The Iranian giant's commitment to social reform was unrivaled in his
country's history, while his towering presence in the international arena as a voice
of poor countries presaged the era of giants such as Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah,
Indonesia's Sukarno and the Congo's Patrice Lumumba.
During Mossadegh's time, Iranian peasants were freed from forced labor in their
landlords' estates, factory owners were ordered to pay benefits to sick and injured
workers, and unemployment compensation was established. The giant caused 20% of the
money landlords received in rent to be placed in a fund to pay for development
projects such as pest control, rural housing and public baths.
The giant supported women's rights and defended religious freedom and allowed
courts and universities to function freely. In addition, the colossus was known even
by his enemies as scrupulously honest and impervious to the corruption that pervaded
Iranian politics.
But above all, the giant was independent. Too independent. Mossadegh had thrown
out the British, nationalized the Iranian oil industry in order that Iranians might
benefit first from their own resources, and was intent on implementing further
sweeping social reforms. And so one day in 1953 - when the US still enjoyed the
affections of the Iranian people - the US government decided that Mossadegh should not
rule for long. And it schemed and schemed and schemed.
Code-named Operation Ajax and designed, hatched and led by Kermit Roosevelt, a
key Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operative and a grandson of president Theodore
Roosevelt, the US-orchestrated coup toppled Mossadegh and forever "reshaped the
history of Iran, the Middle East and the world. [The coup] restored Mohammad Reza Shah
to the Peacock Throne", allowing the monarch to impose a murderous 25-year tyranny
that claimed the lives of thousands of Iranians.
The US agents who had assembled in their embassy compound in Tehran as soon as
the success of the coup was ensured were "full of jubilation, celebration, and
occasional whacks on the back as one or the other of us was suddenly overcome with
enthusiasm", recalled Kermit Roosevelt in his book Countercoup: The Struggle for the
Control of Iran - a book that came out ironically in 1979, the year of the US hostage
crisis in Iran, soon after the Islamic Revolution had swept the Shah out of power.
Jubilation and celebration. Maybe it's all about perspective. Maybe not.
Where the US government "saw a glorious day", exiled Iranian intellectual Sasan
Fayazmanesh would write 50 years later, "we saw a day of infamy". Where US officials
"wished the day had never ended, we wished it had never begun". Where the US "saw a
dazzling picture of his majesty's restoration to power, we saw grotesque pictures of a
brutal dictatorship, informants, dungeons, torture, executions".
"My only crime," Mossadegh would recall after his ouster, "is that I
nationalized the Iranian oil industry and removed from this land the network of
colonialism and the political and economic influence of the greatest empire on Earth"
- referring to Iran's former tormentor, Britain. But Mossadegh had also committed
another "crime" - one with far graver consequences: he took no notice of the fact that
the US had already overtaken Britain in the global imperial race - a US ruled by a
government that despised his independence even as it coveted his country's oil.
But what goes around comes around. There is always a day of reckoning.
"It is a reasonable argument," suggested a US foreign-policy journal, "that but
for the coup, Iran would be a mature democracy. So traumatic was the coup's legacy
that when the Shah finally departed in 1979, many Iranians feared a repetition of
1953, which was one of the motivations for the student seizure of the US Embassy."
Hostages were taken by panic-stricken Iranians who feared that the Shah would be
reinstalled by the US.
"In the back of everybody's mind hung the suspicion that, with the admission of
the Shah to the United States, the countdown for another coup d'etat had begun," one
of the hostage-takers would recall years after the incident. "Such was to be our fate
again, we were convinced, and it would be irreversible. We now had to reverse the
irreversible."
The hostage crisis, asserts New York Times correspondent Stephen Kinzer in his
book All the Shah's Men - a brilliant reconstruction of the US coup - precipitated the
Iraqi invasion of Iran and helped consolidate the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein
"while the [Islamic] revolution itself played a part in the Soviet decision to invade
Afghanistan. A lot of history, in short, flowed from a single week in Tehran ... Can
anybody say the Islamic Revolution of 1979 was inevitable? Or did it only become so
once the aspirations of the Iranian people were temporarily expunged in 1953?
"It is not far-fetched," states Kinzer, "to draw a line from Operation Ajax
through the Shah's oppressive regime and the Islamic Revolution to the fireballs that
engulfed the World Trade Center in New York."
Outrageous? Not entirely, so long as pride yields to memory.
"There is nothing new in the world," said Harry Truman, "except the history you
do not know."
Renato Redentor Constantino is a writer and painter based in the Philippines. He
writes a weekly column for the Philippine national daily Today (whose online partner
is abs-cbnnews.com). Constantino currently works on climate and energy concerns with
Greenpeace China. He can be reached at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
(Copyright 2004 Renato Redentor Constantino. Used by permission of Tomdispatch.)
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