Comments: Through the first half of the Cold War, the Middle East remained a sideshow.
Was the Shah's regime more brutal than the current one? The Shah was during his tenure keeping the brutal regime at bay, they were terrorists and it was their intent to make Iran what it is today. If you don't remember what Iran was like then it would be easy to swallow the picture this article presents. But in fact women looked like women not ghosts and they were educated and drove cars and had opinions. They looked like a modern Western culture. As for the "students" who over through the Shah they were jihadis doing the work of the radical Islamists. Nothing more, and certainly not the "freedom fighters that this article presents them to be. As for the famed and often quoted CIA coup; probably not. It was the reminiscence of a shadowy individual who did indeed have connections with the CIA. Did one shadowy figure do all that he claimed or others claim??? I don't know, the author doesn't know, but it makes good fodder for the rumor mill.
What really started the problem in the Middle East and with Islam internationally is simply oil money. Once these radical and non-radical Muslims had trillions of dollars they began to use that money to influence and to take over other countries. Without that money they would have to satisfy themselves with enslaving neighboring tribes, raping and stoning their women and cutting off the hands of the poor. With the oil money they can bring their 7th century beliefs to the rest of the world.
Posted by GoneWithTheWind at February 22, 2017 9:35 AM
Adding to violent political Islam was the ideology propagated by Hassan al-Banna and his followers. The combination of money, ideology, and greed for power built the active base of what's called Islamism -- world domination by Jihadis, adherents to the Koran's verses of violence. The related sacred texts furthered guidance as to how the principles were to be interpreted, unchanged, for all time until the Day of Judgement..
Just like the good old days when violent Islam dominated the territories it had conquered.
Posted by Howard Nelson at February 22, 2017 10:29 AM
What a load. No, that's NOT "how we got here".
The events in 1953 were - as most problems in the Middle East have been - instigated in large part by THE BRITISH (anyone remember the British Mandate for Palestine, and the complete clusterfuck they made of THAT plan??), who were chafing at the nationalization of the oil production infrastructure they had built in Persia during the preceding decades. Persian nationalists - like the eventually ousted Mossadegh - fomented rage at the fact that the British were actually profiting from the mutually-beneficial deal the two nations had struck.
The CIA had a tangential, practically insignificant role in that incident. In fact, their only interest in the matter was that the "democratically elected" Prime Minister Mossadegh (eh... just like Saddam Hussein was "democratically elected") had some tentative ties to Communists (the Tudeh Party), which British Intelligence promoted as tantamount to an existential threat to democracy in the Middle East in order to garner U.S. support in recovering control of their oil interests.
Ironically, The Tudehs ultimately withdrew any support of Mossadegh who, for his part, had disbanded Parliament, eliminated the secret ballot, implemented devastating collectivist economic policies and was the driving force in the creation of the conflict with Britain (notably NOT the U.S.). His own countrymen ousted him. The U.S. has since been scapegoated for this, which allows "historians" to give Mossadegh's communist policies a pass while at the same time attacking the U.S. for things that never actually happened.
It's fascinating to me how, despite the fact that problems between the West and Iran, as well as a century of animosity toward Israel in the region were BOTH products of disastrous British foreign policy. Yet somehow - today - those phenomena are blamed completely on the U.S.
Posted by AGoyAndHisBlog at February 23, 2017 8:10 AM