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Accusing Ahmadinejad |
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by GARY LEUPP Counter Punch Entered into the database on Wednesday, July 13th, 2005 @ 10:05:01 MST |
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Accusations are swirling around Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's new president.
Almost immediately after the Iranian election results were confirmed on June
27, the U.S. press started circulating a 1979 AP photo showing a blindfolded
American hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Teheran commandeered by Iranian Muslim
students in that year. He's flanked by several captors, one bearing some resemblance
to the young Mahmoud. Five of the U.S. hostages held during that incident have
claimed that Ahmadinejad was one of their captors and alleged tormentors. At
least on former hostage, CIA agent William J. Dougherty, expresses what may
likely become the official U.S. position: "Well,
now the leader of Iran is a terrorist." The neocon press jumped at the story. Fox News aired an interview with Dougherty
June 30 designed to leave no doubt in the viewer's mind that that the CIA agent
had seen Ahmadinejad "four,
five, or six times" in November 1979. The ex-hostages' claim was immediately
treated as fact by David Horowitz's neocon-aligned FrontPage
Magazine. But Iranian officials have stated matter-of-factly that Ahmadinejad
opposed the embassy takeover, and was not one of the organizers. The man in
the photo, states an intelligence official in Iran who is not a political ally
of Ahmadinejad, is someone else: Taqi
Mohammadi, a militant who died in prison after becoming a dissident. It looks like U.S. intelligence will agree with this assessment; The Los Angeles
Times reports July 2 that "U.S. investigators have concluded that Iranian
president-elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is not the glowering Islamic militant seen
escorting an American hostage in a 1979 photograph that was widely publicized
this week" This is based on scientific analysis of the shape of the ears
and jaw of the photographed student and Iranian president. Of course, the intelligence
professionals have been humiliated and silenced before when they made a call
at variance with official disinformation campaigns. But the Dick Cheneys, Douglas
Feiths, and John Boltons have been so exposed and discredited that I doubt they'd
seriously at this point try to link the Iranian president to the "Hostage
Crisis" without internationally credible evidence. So Stephen Hadley, Condi
Rice's successor (himself complicit in the Niger uranium lie), hesitates to
affirm an embassy-Ahmadinejad link. Suggestions that the Iranian leader was
involved in the situation "are allegations at the present time," he
declares. "We
need to get the facts." Even so, it serves the Bushites' interests that my morning paper, the Boston
Globe, which has relegated the Downing Street memos to its back pages, put the
photo in question on page A1 July 1, with the tendentious caption: IRAN ELECTION
SPURS QUESTIONS ABOUT 1979. I don't expect another front-page piece any time
soon entitled: QUESTION ANSWERED: IRANIAN PRESIDENT NOT INVOLVED IN EMBASSY
SEIZURE. Rather, I see a three-sentence AP item in the Globe this morning (July
5) concluding: "Ahmadinejad, who won a landslide presidential election
victory, has been accused of taking American hostages in 1979 when radical students
seized the US Embassy in Tehran." He has been accused. I suspect many will
read that to mean "He did it" and this will pass for truth in pub
conversations all over Boston. So the Iranian leader isn't off the hook. Abholhassan Bani-Sadr, the secular
"leftist" who served as Iranian president for a time in 1980 and is
now in exile in Paris, says Ahmadinejad "wasn't among the decision-makers
but he was among those inside the Embassy." That strikes me as plausible.
He may have been among the multitudes that visited the site during the long
"crisis." This alone would link him, and these neocon disinformation
master-propagandists are all about finding, inventing and using links no matter
how tenuous. It will suffice them and their credulous base that the man checked
out the situation at the compound and reported back to his spiritual leader
Ayatollah Khomeini about what was going on. That alone could tar him with the
"hostage-taker" brush. More damning, if one wants to build a case
against the newly elected president, is the charge of bloody murder, or complicity
in such, in Austria in 1989. More on that suddenly publicized accusation below. But first let's revisit
the central historical issue: the much-maligned Iranian Revolution that so enraged
U.S. officials, and threw their regional plans into disarray, a generation ago.
One of the big lies hovering in the background of the whole Bush plan for the
"Greater Middle East" is that the revolution of 1978-9 was something
other than a mass-based popular insurrection against a fascist regime created
and cultivated by Washington. The fall of the Shah was an enormous setback to
U.S. imperialism in Southwest Asia, including the Gulf, and the imperialists
have never forgiven the Iranian people for their rebellion, nor given up on
efforts to reassert control over the country. So they need to misrepresent the
revolution, exaggerate the role of the reactionary clergy in it, minimize the
role of the secular and leftist forces, downplay the viciousness and unpopularity
of the Shah, and generally depict the upheaval as a terrible setback to U.S.-sponsored
"progress" in Iran. These days they repeatedly declare that the Iranian people love the U.S., by
which they really mean that the majority of Iranians are too young to remember
the Shah's rule, most chafe at the religious rules imposed by the mullahs, and
many are attracted to elements of American popular culture. Tens of thousands
have either lived in the U.S. and have positive feelings about the people, or
have parents with such feelings. But the neocons want to depict the absence
of visceral hatred against American citizens among Iran's well-educated people
as a longing for U.S. action to topple their regime. (Notice how when foreigners
hate the U.S. government, the government tells the people: "They hate us."
And when foreigners love the American people, they say: "They love us."
They cannot say, "They distinguish between those of us in government, making
policy, and you, the American people. They hate us but actually have no problem
with all you folks." That'd be tantamount to saying the U.S. government
doesn't represent the people, or that "our troops" in various places
aren't fighting for us but for them and their system.) In fact, there's much evidence that the Iranian masses do not eagerly await
U.S. or Israeli strikes on their nation's nuclear facilities, or an Iraq-based
assault by the Mujahadeen-Khalq (an unusual organization with a leftist veneer
now more or less aligned with the neocons), or an invasion from Azerbaijan,
or CIA-organized street demonstrations à la 1953 against the regime.
I vividly recall the response to the revolution among my Iranian friends a
quarter century ago. They were students, from affluent backgrounds, benefiting
from the Shah's policy of encouraging huge numbers of Iranians to study in the
U.S. and acquire skills needed for their country's "modernization."
Iranians were the largest group of foreign students in the U.S. But their impressive
organization, the Iranian Students Association, was bitterly opposed to the
Shah and the students I knew uniformly hated the man. He was a brute, brought
to power in 1953 by the CIA, overturning a democratic regime bent upon a moderate
program of nationalization of the country's oilfields. His SAVAK security apparatus,
created by the CIA, savagely suppressed dissent. His "White Revolution"
of the early 1960s redistributed land but left millions of cultivators with
too little to live on, while alienating the Muslim clergy. Teheran featured
the world's largest U.S. embassy (a compound since rivaled only by the U.S.'s
stronghold in Baghdad) but no public sewer system. The Shah obscenely squandered
wealth on spectacles celebrating Persian history, and on military expansion,
serving as the U.S. gendarme in the Gulf while neglecting to invest in basic
infrastructure and ruling through terror. I recall hearing from the ISA about the Abadan theater fire on August 19, 1978,
soon after the event. 400 people, watching a film indirectly critical of the
regime, were burned alive in the Rex Theater after thugs barred the doors. This
was blamed at the time on SAVAK, although some have recently pinned blame on
religious fanatics. (If I were a psy-war specialist inclined to promote a revisionist
view of the revolution decades later, I'd start with a reassessment of this
episode, flip the whole thing around and say it was the Khomeini people, not
the Shah guys, who triggered mass outrage by their actions at that time.) Public
revulsion in any case fueled an intensifying antigovernment movement, rooted
in the Shiite clergy, religious youth groups, leftist Muslim groups such as
the Mujahadeen and Fedayeen, the pro-Soviet Tudeh Party, and the Maoist Sarbedaran.
The movement was vast and diverse, with the more left and secular forces initially
more influential. The regime responded with massive force, attacking demonstrators with tanks
and helicopter gunships in September, killing hundreds, and even hundreds daily
in early December. Undeterred, over two million amassed in Teheran on December
12; the Shah's army rebelled; soldiers shot their officers and took over military
bases, and the next month the Shah fled for his life to Egypt. His fall was
one result of the most genuinely popular mass-based revolution to ever occur
in a Muslim country. My Iranian friends were overjoyed. In October 1979, the Shah was admitted to the U.S. for medical care. The new
regime in Iran, then headed by the liberal Mehdi Bazargan requested his extradition
to stand trial in Iran. The U.S. and Iran had an extradition agreement and the
U.S. had been willing enough in former years to send home anti-Shah student
activists at Teheran's request to likely torture in their homeland. But there
was no question that President "Human Rights" Carter was going to
hand over such a long time asset as the Shah. In that context, on November 4,
hundreds of Muslim students took over the U.S. embassy and held 52 of its staff
hostage for 444 days. (20 women and African-Americans were released in November.)
They were released after prolonged negotiations, and one spectacular failure
of a rescue attempt, on the day of Ronald Reagan's inauguration as president
in 1981. In return for the hostages, released unharmed having been treated fairly
well, the U.S. unfroze $ 8 billion in Iranian assets. The "Hostage Crisis" was the biggest news story I could recall. It
was in your face, every day, endlessly. Walter Cronkite began his 6:30 CBS news
program by counting the days from the outset of what Americans were supposed
to believe was an insufferable national humiliation. "November 13, Day
10 America Held Hostage in Iran." ABC's Nightline program was originally
called America Held Hostage and devoted entirely to national humiliation news.
"The brilliance of this!" I thought at the time. Defeated in Vietnam,
stricken with the Vietnam Syndrome, the American public was being remilitarized,
prepared for future wars not against reds but Muslims. (Indeed, attacks on Libya,
intervention in Lebanon, and actions against Iran in the Persian Gulf characterized
the 1980s.) Overnight after the embassy seizure the flags were out, the yellow
ribbons, patriotic lapel pins, the "Rape and Iranian Woman" bumper
stickers. Dealers in rugs from Iran began to advertise carpets from "Persia"
after peddlers of Iranian rugs of any nationality were targeted for racist attack
in the time-honored American redneck tradition. Not as stunning a manifestation
of butt-headed nationalism as we've seen since 9-11, but a dress rehearsal for
it. Some of us found this Iran-bashing revolting, and could even empathize with
the students in the embassy. I was so pleased when a visiting relative suggested
intelligently: "Why don't we just send the Shah back?" It was comforting
anyway to know I wasn't the only one in the clan unsympathetic to the Shah in
exile. Not that I was quite willing to embrace the slogan appearing on a leaflet
distributed on my campus, "Hostage-Taking Right On! It's Not Our Embassy!"
I felt opposed in general to hostage taking, but I did agree that the embassy
didn't represent me and had been up to no good. But back to President Ahmadinejad. Let's say he had some involvement in an
action overwhelmingly popular in Iran in the immediate chaotic aftermath of
the revolution, an action driven by rage very understandable to anyone considering
the history. No one's saying the students who took the embassy subjected their
hostages to torture. They didn't chain hostages naked to the wall, or force
them to masturbate or simulate sex acts with one another, or threaten them with
attack dogs, or leave them to wallow in their own excrement, or photograph them
while doing such things. What some are suggesting is that because Ahmadinejad's
a fundamentalist Shiite Muslim (more so than his rival Rafsanjani, not that
the U.S. government has had much good to say about Rafsanjani), and because
he like any other Iranian leader is going to be generally supportive of the
Palestinian resistance and Lebanon's Hizbollah, and because he will probably
defend the right of all nations to enrich uranium as specified by international
law, he's Mr. Terrorism. This is a stupid viewpoint, but we are now by my calculation
in Day 1,361 of America Held Hostage to Stupidity. I can imagine the rhetoric already, perhaps minutes after Ahmadinejad confirms
that Iran will indeed proceed with uranium enrichment plans. "America cannot
afford to allow a state headed by a terrorist to produce the world's most terrible
weapons! Here's a man who has terrorized Americans before. We must not let him
do it again, this time with nuclear weapons!" And: "We stand with
the Iranian people in rejecting this farcical election based on terror!"
As the major land-based campaign to capture Teheran gets underway in Azerbaijan,
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0620-31.htm and the Mujahadeen Khalq having
made their devil's bargain execute their campaign of attacks in Iran, the focus
may shift to "spreading democracy." In which case, one should say,
"Look. The U.S. not only supported the highly antidemocratic Shah, but
later turned over to the mullahs the names of Iranian leftists who were summarily
executed. (These included members of the Iranian Students Association who had
became members of Sarbedaran.) The mullahs and the U.S. government cooperated
in businesslike fashion to smash the communist movement. The U.S. preferred a religious dictatorship to a secular left-leading one,
and sought to cozy up to Khomeini for a time. Didn't the U.S. sell the mullahs
missiles during the Reagan-era "Iran-Contra" scandal, precisely in
order to attack democratic forces in collusion with right-wing death squads
in Central America? Isn't the U.S. cultivating ties with dictators in Uzbekistan
and Azerbaijan specifically in order to orchestrate regime change in Iran? The
attack on Iran will have nothing to do with real democracy and everything to
do with reestablishing geopolitical control, if with some 'democratic' window-dressing
as in occupied Afghanistan and Iraq. Anyway look for the administration to exploit
the "America Held Hostage" theme, and to reapply that theme to America
today, claiming that we are still victims of Iran, held hostage to evil Iranians
who still don't appreciate all we once did for their country. We are held hostage
by their program to develop nuclear power! Actually, one should mention one small detail about that last bit. That nuclear
program that Rumsfeld says Iran with its oil riches simply doesn't need? It
was once promoted by General Electric and other U.S. corporations with the firm
backing of U.S. administrations. So long as the Shah was in power, U.S. administrations
weren't moaning and groaning about Iranian nuclear enrichment, because they
knew that their client wasn't going to pose a challenge to Israel. Now Israel
(armed by all accounts with nuclear weapons) demands of its patron that it prevent
Iran from even perfecting a peaceful nuclear power program. It insists that
its definition of an "existential threat" to itself should drive U.S.
foreign policy. Congress embraced this stance, urged on by AIPAC and the religious
right. So yes, they will apply the strategy Bush did with Iraq, well documented by
the Dowining Street memos. They'll link weapons of mass destruction with "terror
ties" and raise the specter of terrorists using WMDs, and while they're
already positing Iranian nukes in the hands of "terrorist" Hamas and
Hizbollah they'll declare the Iranian president himself a terrorist aspiring
to produce a mushroom cloud over New York. If the embassy hostage-taking charge
won't stick on Ahmadinejad, they may have a back-up terror accusation: murder
in Vienna. * * * * Reading the reports on this murder charge in the last few days, I've thought,
"Why haven't I heard about any of this before?" The new president
was the mayor of Teheran, and the electoral process in Iran was quite prolonged,
so you'd think suppose the uniformly anti-Iranian mainstream press would have
raised it earlier. But no, only after Ahmadinejad's elected to we get the interesting
news that he may have personally killed the dissident Iranian Kurdish leader
Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou in Austria in 1989. Associated Press in a story by William J. Kole July 2 cites the Austrian daily
Der Standard which quotes a politician who says Ahmadinejab is "under strong
suspicion of having been involved" in the killing. An unidentified Iranian
journalist in France told this politician that Ahmadinejad had (on orders from
Iranian President Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani) visited Vienna to deliver weapons
to Iranian operatives who broke into Ghassemlou's Vienna apartment July 13,
1989 and killed three people. Kole mentions what I'd noticed before reading
the AP piece: the
Der Standard article relied on the Czech newspaper Pravo, which had alleged
the Ahmadinejad murder link July 1. (Call me cynical, but I just had to recall
how total disinformation pertaining to the Iraq-al Qaeda link was originally
attributed to a Czech source.) So this Czech paper, an Austrian politician who
says he wants a warrant issued for the Iranian president's arrest, and an unnamed
Iranian exile in France are all contributing in their own ways to the neocon
case for attacking Iran. Great timing. I have no doubt that Ahmadinejad is a religious fanatic comfortable with the
brutal suppression of dissent and actively complicit in it. But there are people
like him in many places, including the U.S. There are also more secular brutes,
often as not doing the U.S. bidding. Leaving the Shah and dozens of other especially
grotesque U.S. satraps aside, the example of Ayad Allawi, briefly puppet prime
minister of Iraq, is illustrative. His organization planted bombs in Iraq in
the 1990s and blew up a school bus, according
to former CIA officer Robert Baer, killing children. This was after Allawi had defected from Saddam's apparatus to the U.S. intelligence
community. Where do those sponsoring such scumbags get off, waving their fingers
in judgment on Mr. Ahmadinejad, who actually seems to have some support among
the poor who think he's on their side? My point is not that the antiwar movement in the U.S. should defend this man.
We should merely watch carefully as the Bush administration perseveres in its
empire-building project, in which the reconquest of Iran is the exquisite centerpiece.
We should keep in mind the fact that Bush's people blithely lie as they vilify
their foes to manipulate public opinion to obtain their imperial ends. However
the Iranian masses might really feel about Ahmadinejad, and the electoral process
that brought him to power, we help them more by challenging the incipient vilification
campaign than passing it by in silence. * * *
Of course the demonization of Ahmadinejad is accompanied by depiction of the
Iranian electoral process as illegitimate. Before the poll none other than George
W. Bush declared that "Power [in Iran] is in the hands of an unelected
few who have retained power through an electoral process that ignores the basic
requirements of democracy." Some Iranians must surely find humor in that,
given the recent history of America's electoral process and the processes it
has imposed elsewhere. Yes, the Iranians have a system that vets candidates---in
their case, through a religious body. We don't have a council of religious leaders
here who have the constitutional right to prune candidate lists. All we have
is well-funded reactionary religious groups who apply pressure on the two official
parties (who share one ideology) and who help ensure that any presidential candidate
of those two parties professes belief in God and in capitalism. Any candidate
with a shot at the presidency needs money to get his (yes, we can be gender-specific
here) face in front of the masses. He needs corporate backing, advertising campaigns
that sell him like a commodity handled by the same Madison Ave. firms that market
other products. He needs a friendly relationship with a media controlled by
half a dozen corporations, whose CEOs should they wish can destroy his candidacy
in minutes (as John Dean learned). It's a different vetting process than the
Iranian one, but is it any more likely to bring into power the person best able
to lead the country to greater freedom and happiness? How does one convey in Farsi the colloquial American English expression, "Look
who's talking"? I hope that Iranian youth, however much they may oppose
the power structure in their country, and the recent skewed election, will respond
to Bush's effort to exploit them and their anger with that pithy comment. And
hopefully while considering the source of criticism objectively study recent
world history. That should persuade them that imperialists as a rule do not
liberate people. They just bring in new Shahs, and praise them as democrats.
They buy everything in sight, including people, and posture as God's agents.
Then when the people rebel, as they tend historically to do, they proclaim them
misled, deluded by radicals, desperately in need of such reforms as only they,
God's imperial messengers, can deliver. If they regain the upper hand, the process
starts again. Should that happen to Iran---should it become the next Afghanistan
or Iraq---it would not spell progress but a step backwards or sideways for that
great nation. |