IRAN - December 8, 2011

We have been hearing so much these days about Iran, and the danger that their nuclear program supposedly subjects us to that one might reasonably think there is no foundation for the trouble there or to the animus of so many Iranis to the US, and especially also to the UK. Actually, the trouble between the Iranis and the English goes back some 200 years at least, and the US has joined on the UK side only in the wake of WW II and the Eisenhower administration. As soon as the nascent UN had finished off the imperial pretentions of Germany and Japan, the US resumed the cold war that had started between the elites of capitalism and the USSR with Lenin’s October Revolution. It had been paused for the 4 years 1941-45 while part of the world set aside the doctrinal hatred of the sort that Europe had seen since the French Revolution in order to crush Hitler. Then the US immediately started to collect the remaining forces of the plutocrats from fear that the spectre of Communism would take away the sand pile that we call our world. The world was split between the protectorates of the West and those of the Soviet Union. In the middle, a small package of countries that wanted no part of yet another world war opted out and formed the shaggy uncommitted bloc, notably Yugoslavia, India and little Iran. Although Truman had lived easily with countries that resisted being US protectorates without joining the Warsaw Pact group, the Eisenhower administration under the leadership of John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen implicitly declared that all those that were not with us were against us, and Ike joined the UK in overthrowing the elected government of Iran, which had just then nationalized the oil under Iran. They installed the military fascist regime there, which the Iranis overthrew in 1979, dumping the dictator, and violated international precedent by taking the US keepers as hostages. For some reason, the Iranis thought they had a grievance against US. We live today with the remains of that history.