Irão

Agora que sabemos que o Irão é o próximo da lista (de inimigos de Israel), e quando já temos os usuais suspeitos nacionais - Vasco Rato&Co a apoiar desde já uma acção militarista à la "humanists with a guilhotine" ou antes "with bombs", vamos lembrar um pouco a história:

"(...)Today, very few Americans have ever heard of Mohammad Mossadegh, but that wasn’t the case in 1953. At that time, Mossadegh was one of the most famous figures in the world. Here’s the way veteran New York Times correspondent Stephen Kinzer describes him in his book All the Shah’s Men:

In his time, Mohammad Mossadegh was a titanic figure. He shook an empire and changed the world. People everywhere knew his name. World leaders sought to influence him and later to depose him. No one was surprised when Time magazine chose him over Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Winston Churchill as its Man of the Year for 1951.

There were two major problems with Mossadegh, however, as far as both the British and American governments were concerned. First, as an ardent nationalist he was a driving force behind an Iranian attempt to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, a British company that had held a monopoly on the production and sale of Iranian oil since the early part of the 20th century. Second, fiercely independent, Mossadegh refused to do the bidding of the U.S. government, which by this time had become fearful that Mossadegh might align Iran with America’s World War II ally and post–World War II enemy, the Soviet Union.

As Kinzer puts it,

Historic as Mossadegh’s rise to power was for Iranians, it was at least as stunning for the British. They were used to manipulating Iranian prime ministers like chess pieces, and now, suddenly, they faced one who seemed to hate them...(...)

The 1953 CIA coup in Iran was named “Operation Ajax” and was engineered by a CIA agent named Kermit Roosevelt, the grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt. Capitalizing on the oil-nationalization showdown between Iran and Great Britain, which had thrown Iran into chaos and crisis, Kermit Roosevelt skillfully used a combination of bribery of Iranian military officials and CIA-engendered street protests to pull off the coup.

The first stage of the coup, however, was unsuccessful, and the shah, who had partnered with the CIA to oust Mossadegh from office, fled Tehran in fear of his life. However, in the second stage of the coup a few days later, the CIA achieved its goal, enabling the shah to return to Iran in triumph ... and with a subsequent 25-year, U.S.-supported dictatorship, which included one of the world’s most terrifying and torturous secret police, the Savak. (...)

It is impossible to overstate the magnitude of anger and hatred that the Iranian people had for the U.S. government in 1979, not only because their world-famous democratically elected prime minister had been ousted by the CIA but also for having had to live for the following 25 years under a brutal and torturous dictatorship, a U.S.-government-supported dictatorship that also offended many Iranians with its policies of Westernization. In fact, the reason that the Iranian students took control of the U.S. embassy after the violent ouster of the shah in 1979 was their genuine fear that the U.S. government would repeat what it had done in 1953. (...)

As historian James Bill stated (quoted in Kinzer’s book),:

[The coup] paved the way for the incubation of extremism, both of the left and of the right. This extremism became unalterably anti-American.... The fall of Mossadegh marked the end of a century of friendship between the two countries, and began a new era of U.S. intervention and growing hostility against the United States among the weakened forces of Iranian nationalism. (...)

While Iranians certainly have not forgotten the U.S. government’s support of Saddam Hussein and Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War during the 1980s, including its furnishing Saddam with weapons of mass destruction to use against the Iranian people, the root of Iranian anger lies with the anti-democracy foreign policy of the U.S. government, by which U.S. officials ousted the Iranian people’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, from office in 1953."