The fact is, Iran has not invaded another country since the 1730s, when Nader Shah waged war on both the Ottoman and Mughal empires and established an ephemeral empire stretching from the Caucasus to the Indus Valley. In modern times Iran has been the victim of repeated attacks and encroachments on its sovereignty—by Britain, tsarist Russia, the Ottoman Empire, the Soviet Union just after the Second World War, and Iraq (with U.S. blessing and support) from September 1980 to August 1988. But it has not directly attacked any of its neighbors.
In 1953 the U.S. itself engineered a coup in Iran against a democratically elected prime minister (to prevent his plans to nationalize the oil industry). It imposed on the Iranian people the brutal, tyrannical rule of the Shah up to 1979. In the latter year, in the most genuinely mass-based revolution in Islamic history, the Shah was overthrown. Ever since then the U.S. has held Iran in the cross hairs, applying economic sanctions, freezing its U.S. bank-holdings, even providing Iraq in the eighties with military aid and satellite intelligence as Saddam Hussein waged an aggressive war against his neighbor. All to punish the Iranian people for having the audacity to (at least try to) shuffle off the shackles of imperialist hegemony.
The essay of the day by Gary Leupp.
Most Americans don't know or understand this stuff because corporate media don't reveal crucial facts about American imperialism, past or present.
The average Joe does not understand how controlled and guided by coercive power his own life is, never mind the damage such persuasion has on sovereign nations and people around the world. He has not heard of Mohammad Mosaddegh because he has ignored history, or finds it fallacious.
He has not heard of Abbas Kiarostami because he hasn't the slightest interest in the cultures of other lands.
If his leaders or the propagandists in the media who represent power tell him another nation is evil, he becomes a talking parrot without understanding that those leaders are not vested in him as a citizen, but rather to their corporate handlers.
He will bitch about taxes, but expect the roads to be smoothly paved for him.
He will scorn the poor and people of color, even as they are choked to death and gunned down by those sworn to "protect and serve."
He'll trade the social contract for a new cluster of bombs.
He will decry "liberal" education while ignoring history and science and not understanding the proper uses of "their, there, and they're."
He will look to the exceptional shield God has constructed around his fabled nation and call it good when, in too many ways to name, it is rotten to the core.
TS
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