The Iranian Connundrum and Islamic Jihad: An Awful American Mess

A few American writers presumed to be politically conservative, such as author Stephen Blanton, have asked the almost rhetorical question, "Can anything be done to stop Islamic violence." They have asked this seemingly unanswerable question without prefacing it with another very poignant one, probably the most salient historical interrogatory that may be imposed on the reasonable mind about this matter, one that most Americans strangely don't really want to consider answering. That is, "How, and for what reason, did 20th Century Islamic jihadist violence actually commence against the United States."

To properly address this issue, the prudent historian must correlate two conjunctive periods of time, and the facts that made them so very different in regard to the status of the Middle Eastern Muslim nations. These two conjunctive periods were: 1) the many centuries prior to 1938, and 2) the 74 years after 1938. There was one very important event that occurred in the geo-political region called the Middle East, which changed the way the Western world perceived the Persian/Iranian and Arab part of the world. This was the discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia in 1938. As the facts show, after Hitler was defeated in Germany and the world was essentially bifurcated, in 1945, between Europe/Britain/United States and the Soviet bloc/Warsaw Pact nations, Middle Eastern oil suddenly became very important to some characteristically wealthy people in the United States. Oil had already been discovered in Iran (Persia) in 1908, but it had had very little effect on the importance of Iran to the West until after the Second World War. This was because oil production in the United States was gaining great momentum during the post-World War II years, definitely showing that the major American oil companies did not need to drill for oil outside of the United States in order to maintain a plentiful supply of petroleum crude. This also remains true to-date, for there is currently, within the 21st Century, more available crude oil lying beneath the land area of North American continental limits of the United States than beneath Saudi Arabia.

Pressing onward in this essay, in 1951 the democratic State of Iran elected a prime minister, Dr. Mohammed Mosaddegh, who was eager to nationalize Iranian oil production for the benefit of the Iranian people, which he and a majority of the elected Parliament regarded as a basic Iranian national right. Yet, at that particular time, the British and the United States sought to maintain exclusive control of Iranian oil production, and sale, for the benefit of a few very wealthy people in the West, who comprised a very short list of American and British bankers and financiers. Nonetheless, Dr. Mosaddegh had been elected by the democratic Iranian Parliament with a mandate, which was to successfully lead the parliament coalition for the nationalization of Iranian oil production in order to create legislation to form the National Iranian oil Company, which was to be owned and operated by Iranians for the benefit of the Iran. The nationalization legislation was passed overwhelmingly by the Iranian Parliament, which, however, abrogated British/U.S. control, production, and sale the Iranian crude for the exclusive benefit of wealthy British and U.S. petroleum moguls.

So, what do you think happened in the months following the nationalization of Iranian oil production? The CIA and British MI6 independently got together and created a plan to spend millions of U.S. tax dollars in order organize a covert paramilitary coup that would completely destabalize the democratic government of Iran and allow the Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, to form a military, U.S.-puppet, dictatorship over the people of Iran. It took the CIA/MI6 eight months to plan the coup, but when it was presented to President Harry Truman, in 1952, he refused to allow it, calling such an operation to destroy a democratic government both illegal and immoral. Truman ordered Kermit Roosevelt, the CIA goon in charge of the coup, to stand-down and disband the operation. Roosevelt, however, refused to follow the President's orders, and with covert illegal help from the newly formed National Security Agency (NSA) kept the operation intact, on-hold, awaiting the eventual election of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. In 1953, Eisenhower was putty in the hands of the glib CIA sophists, like Kermit Roosevelt, who falsely persuaded him that the democratic government of Iran was pro-communist. Hence, in August 1953, Eisenhower approved the CIA operation, and the planned paramilitary coup d'etat was covertly implemented under the direction of senior CIA officers Allen Dulles, Kermit Roosevelt, and field operational officer Donald Wilber. This military coup cost the lives of over 400 Iranian nationalists in 1953 as the Shah assumed tyrannical power in September of that year, and wielded it for the next 26 years. Withinin that long span of time, over 400,000 Iranian nationalist dissidents were slaughtered by the Shah and his military forces.

So, is it any wonder that Iran currently has only contempt for the United States and its foreign policy? Moreover, this 1953 assault on Iran was, to most devout fundamentalist Muslims, also an assault against Islam. The death and despair that the Shah brought on Iran through foreign policy generated in Washington, DC was subsequently regarded by Islamic clerics in Iran as worthy of jihadist retaliation against U.S. interests in the Middle East. Just think about it for a moment. The United States was not regarded as a true enemy to Islam until after 1953. Though Iran was not considered by Sunni and Shiite Muslims as traditional Islamic holy land, as was Saudi Arabia, the defiling of sacred mosques and other Islamic symbols by the Shah and his henchmen during his 26 year secular reign created in most Iranians a great deal of enmity for America. Paradoxically, the United States, during those 26 years, thumbed its nose at Iranian dissidents as it pragmatically wallowed in the satisfaction derived from having the Shah as a well-oiled puppet to implement federal government/U.S. military designs on the Middle East. To the United States, which closely resembled ancient imperial Rome, power and might made profitable right, and the American-controlled NATO declared to the world that it was, either, the U.S.-way or the highway. During the time the Shah was in power, Iran was a secure base for CIA/NSA operational paramilitary activity in the Middle East. From 1953 until 1979, Iraq was progressively becoming what it would be in 1980, a virtual dictatorship under the iron-hand of Saddam Hussain. In late 1980, Ronald Reagon was elected President and pragmatically created an alliance betweeen Iraq and the U.S. in order to militarily oppose the newly created Iranian Islamic Republic. From 1980 until 1988, billions of U.S. tax dollars went to supporting Saddam Hussain's military machine in Iraq during its seven-year war against Iran. Actually, Saddam was, almost, secretly provided the devastating weapons that he used on the Iranians and his own people, especially the Kurds, by the United States, Britain, and Germany. Just as the U.S. pragmatically supported the Shah's blatant tyranny imposed on the Ianian people for 26 years, it also pragmatically supported Saddam Hussain's despotism in an effort to punish Iran for throwing-off the Shah's regime in 1979.

Are you getting the big picture about the American descecration of Islam? For centuries, Islamic jihad was not practiced on the West. Militaristic jihad against the West basically ended with the decline of the Mohammedian Empire, and the cessation of the Crusades. It wasn't until 1953, when the West indiscriminately trespassed on Islam, that the Muslims again began fighting back. Now, let's jump ahead to September 11, 1990, after Saddam Hussain invaded Kuwait in order to annex it as an Iraqi possession. Historically, Kuwait had once been a part of Iraq, and in much the same fashion that the U.S. declared that the land of New Mexico, California, and Arizona (belonging to Mexico before 1848) belonged to the United States by virture of something called Manifest Destiny, Saddam had the audicity to try to reclaim Kuwait for Iraq. As a result of Saddam's military move into Kuwait, President George H. Bush, in September 1990, lied to the American people on network television when he stated, "Within three days, 120,000 Iraqi troops with 850 tanks had poured into Kuwait and moved south to threaten Saudi Arabia. It was then that I decided to act to check that aggression." Bush followed-up, later, by saying that, "NSA satellite photos show Saddam Hussain and his Iraqi army poised on the Kuwati-Saudi border for an invasion of Saudi Arabia." It was this big lie that created the military impetus for Operation Desert Storm, and the first entry of U.S. troops onto really sacred Islamic soil, in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iraq. You see, Saddam had not moved his troops, artillery, and tanks to the Kuwati-Saudi border, but, instead, had actually retreated back to the Kuwati-Iraqi border. Journalist Jean Heller established this fact when she and her newspaper, "The St. Petersburg Times," purchased Russian satellite photos (from the Soyuz-Karta) in the week following Bush's September 1990 declaration about Iraqi intent. These photos were of the same area, at the same time, that the NSA photos had supposedly captured pictures of the Iraqi Army on the Saudi border, and they showed nothing but cold undisturbed sand.

Operation Desert Storm really ticked-off the defensive Islamic jihadists, who were already rebelling against American presence in the Middle East in the name of the Islamic Allah. Yet, these jihadists had never advocated, until after 9/11, the offensive expansion of Islamic jihad to western U.S. soil. Their bombings and attacks were only defensive against the American military and U.S. industrial interests in the Middle East, and there are currently many people who firmly believe that the offensive devastation of 9/11 was not the doing of Islamic jihadists, but, rather, the covert activities of the U.S. federal government in cooperation with the submissive Pakistani Intelligence Service in duplicitiously creating a grand delusion, that Islamic jihadists were responsible for the bombings of the WTC Towers, and Building 7, and that of the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. You see, what the federal government declared as the official cause for the collapsing of the WTC Towers and Building 7, and the bombing of the Pentagon as published in the "9/11 Commission Report," was scientifically impossible. On the day after 9/11, 95 percent of the American public actually believed the federal version of 9/11 was correct. A year later, after intense academic private-sector evaluation of the material facts and evidence that the federal had failed to disclose to the nation in its report, over 88 percent of the American public were convinced that the federal government/U.S. military/CIA had some sinister duplicitous involvement in the 9/11 debacle.

Currently, and unfortunately, there are few Americans who know the true facts about the history of American-Iranian relations, and what happened in 1953 to bring so much despair to Iran for the sake of oil. It has never been truthfully taught in high school history classes. The true history is even skewed in most American university textbooks, and by American history professors. Why is this so? It is much the same way the American Revolution was, and is still, taught at Oxford and Cambridge Universities in Great Britain. The colonists, according to them, weren't revolutionaries. They were insurrentionists and terrorists who dared challenge the authority of a great sovereign, King George III. For over 170 years the United States was refered to as "the colonies" by erudite British intellectuals in British classrooms. As the pattern of civilization has inexorably gone through the ages, a familiar scenario usually follows a nation-state's rise to super-power. The United States, in 1945, obtained original possession and use of the A-bomb. From this possession and use of nuclear energy, the U.S. became a super-power with a Romanesque military that eventually established an offensive presence in 130 countries (at last count) around the globe. Why offensive? The miltary presence of the United States in 130 countries models, and essentially shouts, the statements made by Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who said, when he had fully conquered the Germanic Tribes in 180 A.D., "Let the world take note and beware of the Roman presence, and accept that our policies and culture are not to be challenged. We are the victors and the most powerful, and to us will properly go the spoils of victory and conquest."

It was Harvard academician Samuel P. Huntington, who wrote in his 1951 book, "The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations," that, "The military is the nation-state's sword of Prometheus to be used as the extension and implementation of political policy in the hands of pragmatic politicians." Huntington's views have, over the last 60 years, become the essential basis for American foreign policy goals, and for the use of the military in achieving those goals. Is this not as Romanesque a statement, and point of view, as the one uttered by Emperor Marcus Aurelius in 180 A.D.?

So, we are back to the prevailing connundrum of how to stop Islamic violence. After having factually established that the United States government has basically brought on itself, and on its people, what may be considered an Islamic jihadist vendetta, it is not a simple matter of pushing a button, or a series of buttons, to cause the jihadists to disappear. The U.S. must, first, realize that it acted very corruptly in treating the Iranians so unjustly in the early 1950s, and humbly admit so to the world. A formal apology to Iran would, perhaps, be in order along with reparations for the 26 years of hell that the Iranian people endured under the Shah. This might be accepted by Iran as a peace offering, and go a long way in bridging the vast divide. Nonetheless, needless death and despair deliberately inflicted by a nation in its hedonistic and pragmatic drive to control the world cannot be dismissed so casually. Islamic Jishadists are not Christians and don't believe in the law of love and humble forgiveness, but, rather, an eye for an eye; and there has been enough needless death and despair in Iran and Iraq, caused by deliberate American lies and deception, to have created an elmost endless Islamic vendetta against the United States.

I suppose it's sort of like the result of the genocide that was systematically plotted by the U.S. government against the Native Americans in the late-1800s, in order to obtain all of their land. Such an appalling approach to conquest was a pragmatic mind-set that demanded that you 'kill 'em or tame 'em.' American apologists for the federal decimation of the American Indians will say, like the apologists for the Holocaust, that "there are still quite a few of those Injuns alive." Well, many decades have passed since Wounded Knee (and Kristallnacht), and most Native Americans have involuntarily assimilated into the American mainstream. Yet, if you look into the eyes of an American Indian living on a reservation, perhaps the son, daughter, or grandchild of a Native American chief, I think you'll still see the flame of resentment against the average stunned white person, who pauses to wonder, what have I done, and why it is that that stare of contempt is still quite alive. Could the same be true of the typical Iranian today, perhaps the great-grandchild of Mohammed Mosaddegh?