The FBI is warning Iran not to meddle in the upcoming U.S. presidential election. That’s rich given that it was the U.S. government’s meddling in an Iranian election that is the root cause of the perpetual, ongoing, never-ending animosity between the two regimes today.
While U.S. officials and U.S. interventionists love to point to the 1979 Iranian revolution as the start of the adverse relationship between Iran and the United States, that’s only because they are loathe to recognize wrongdoing on the part of their own government — and especially the part that consists of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA — that is, the national-security state part, which they look upon as their god.
The 1979 revolution in Iran was a direct consequence of U.S. meddling in the electoral process some twenty-six years before. Perhaps “meddle” is too soft a word though. Maybe a better word is “destroy.” In 1953, the U.S. national-security establishment destroyed Iran’s democratic process and laid the foundation for the 1979 Iranian revolution, which then led to the forever war of hostility by the U.S. regime toward the Iranian regime, a hostility that still goes on today.
Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossedegh
In 1951, the Iranian parliament elected Mohammad Mossadegh to be prime minister of the country. Widely respected not only in Iran and in other parts of the world, Mossadegh was named Time magazine’s “Man of the Year.”
British officials, however, were not so impressed. That’s because Mossadegh nationalized British oil interests in Iran. To protect against British intervention to recover its oil interests, Mossadegh threw British officials out of the country.
Unable to recover their oil interests, the Brits turned to the U.S. government for help. In 1953, the CIA orchestrated a coup in Iran that resulted in 300 people being killed. The coup succeeded in ousting the democratically elected Mossadegh and restoring to power the unelected Shah of Iran, who proceeded to exercise brutal, omnipotent, dictatorial powers to maintain his iron grip on power. To support him in this endeavor, the CIA helped to train the Shah’s brutal national police force called the SAVAK, which was a combination CIA, FBI, Pentagon, and NSA. The SAVAK specialized in such dark arts as arbitrary arrests, indefinite incarceration without trial, torture, and extrajudicial execution.
The Shah became a loyal, compliant puppet of the U.S. government. Moreover, the British got their oil interests back. But it’s also worth mentioning that the U.S. government also earned the deep enmity of the Iranian people, who were made to suffer for 26 years under one of the most brutal tyrannies in the world, one that was fully supported by the U.S. government.
In 1979, the Iranian people had had enough. As Thomas Jefferson observed in the Declaration of Independence, people usually will put up with a lot of tyranny before they revolt. That’s because revolutions almost always come with a massive death toll among the revolutionaries, who are usually facing a tyrant who wields a vast, powerful military-intelligence force that is prepared to follow orders. Thus, when people finally do revolt, it’s normally because the tyranny has become too much for them to bear. That’s what happened in Iran with the U.S.-supported tyranny of the Shah.
During the revolution, Iranian revolutionaries took many U.S. officials hostage in order to discourage the U.S. government from again intervening in Iran’s domestic affairs in an attempt to restore the Shah to power. Ever since the revolution, U.S. officials and U.S. interventionists have chosen to focus on that illegal act as the root cause of adverse Iran-U.S. relations, rather than focus on what the U.S. national-security state did 25 years earlier that ultimately led to the 1979 revolution.
Unfortunately for the Iranian people, the 1979 revolution did not succeed in restoring the democratic system that the U.S. government destroyed in 1953. Instead, the Iranians ended up with a theocratic government that arguably was every bit as dictatorial as the regime of the Shah.
The best thing that the U.S. government could ever do at this point, not only for the Iranian people but also for the American people, is to just leave Iran alone. Lift the sanctions, stop the threats, and bring all U.S. troops and warships home to the United States. Hasn’t the U.S. national-security establishment done enough damage already?
Unfortunately, however, neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump are wiling to do that. Therefore, it is difficult to see how Iran would have any interest in meddling in the U.S. presidential election in an effort to favor either one. More likely, we have another example of the U.S. national-security establishment stoking fear and animosity among the American people toward one of its official enemies.