Professor Ervand Abrahamian wrote an article about the 1953 CIA coup in Iran, which hasn't received the attention it deserves. In it, he stated that the "declassified" documents published by the New York Times about the coup were a sanitized version of the events. More importantly, he noted that the coup was presented in the context of Cold War as part of the effort to stop the spread of Communism, when in fact the threat of Communism was not real. "Fighting Communism" was instead simply a smokescreen for promoting another interest: allowing Britain to dominate Iran's oil resources. What as presented as a Cold War conflict was really a conflict between patriots in a developing country who were trying to regain control of their own natural assets, versus imperial powers who had dominated those assets.
Anyway, with the approach of the anniversary of the events of July 21, 1952, I thought I would mention this and link to it on the web for all to read.
Science & Society, Vol. 65, No. 2, Summer 2001, 182–215
ABSTRACT: The New York Times recently leaked a CIA report on the 1953 American–British overthrow of Mossadeq, Iran’s Prime Minister. It billed the report as a secret history of the secret coup, and treated it as an invaluable substitute for the U. S. files that remain inaccessible. But a reconstruction of the coup from other sources, especially from the archives of the British Foreign Office, indicates that this report is highly sanitized. It glosses over such sensitive issues as the crucial participation of the U. S. ambassador in the actual overthrow; the role of U. S. military advisers; the harnessing of local Nazis and Muslim terrorists; and the use of assassinations to destabilize the government. What is more, it places the coup in the context the Cold War rather than that of the Anglo-Iranian oil crisis — a classic case of nationalism clashing with imperialism in the Third World. . .
I think that a similar case can be made today, that what is presented as an effort to fight the "Spread of nuclear weapons" is actually a smokescreen to prevent Iran and other developing countries from having an independent source of nuclear energy, thus monopolizing nuclear power (the sole source of the world's energy in the near future) in the hands of the few. That's why repeated Iranian compromise offers, which would have addressed any concerns about the proliferation of WMDs, were dismissed off-hand, and instead Bush has blatantly stated that Iran should be deprived of even the knowlegde of nuclear matters.
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