Coups, lies, dirty tricks: Stewart Copeland on his CIA agent father (2000)
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Really? The current regime in Iran and the fate of that country was a direct consequence of exactly what came before that. And that throughout the Middle East.
That line of thinking is, honestly, either dumb or simply ignorant. But I guess not as stated:
“My father’s view was that democracy was like two wolves and a sheep voting on what’s for dinner,” says Stewart, “and indeed in the Arab world it’s very much like that. My father wasn’t in the business of exporting democracy. He was in the business of getting the oil to the west by hook or by crook.”
So, I don't understand your objection.
It seems like a "butterfly effect" argument, where you are saying that anything done by one group of political actors is the cause of all subsequent events in that political sphere. I disagree with this; if we say that all subsequent events were caused by all preceding events, that may be true in some sense I suppose, but it needlessly blurs the definition of "causality" to the point where the word becomes altogether useless.
On the other hand, there's a little bit of a "dream deferred" tone to what you're saying -- as though delaying the downfall of the monarchy only led to a more reactionary, less goal-oriented revolution later down the road. Maybe so, as not all of the revolutionary groups belonged to the same political ideology as Khomeini...but the new government was definitely chosen by the Iranian people.
US policy continues to be a huge factor shaping Iran. That isn't "history."
Acting like that's "history" is kind of like acting like the issues that Black Americans have currently has nothing at all to do with the fact that their ancestors came to this country as slaves and we continue to have racist policies in place, many of which were intentionally and consciously racist at the time that they were created. And we keep failing to really overturn them.
(For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24059608)
Which makes no sense, of course. You might just as well answer a "you break it, you buy it" sign in a shop with the claim that whatever breakage may or may not have happened, it's well in the past now, and there's no point trying on that basis to ascribe any kind of responsibility for the current situation to anyone except the shopkeeper, who clearly sees no problem with trying to sell broken merchandise.
That doesn't strike me as an argument that would, or should, get anyone very far.
The commenter also plastered the same embargo commentary elsewhere in this post -- demonstrating its lack of specificity -- and makes no attempt to link the presence of sanctions to causality for the revolution.
So yeah...it's a non-sequitur.
> It seems like a "butterfly effect" argument
The butterfly effect describes how a minor change in the current state of a system might lead to a huge change in a future state. But here we're talking about huge changes to begin with. Why do you expect that changes with such massive impact would have anything but visible and long lasting effects on every aspect of that system, including future choices?
> The Shah was ousted by Iranians and the new regime was put into place by Iranians. The revolution was expressly anti-American
This is how manipulation works. Someone appears to make a choice because they're manipulated into making it but they do it without understanding the full consequences and implications of their choice, that they were manipulated into making it, or by whom. And when you're dealing with such outside interference all bets are off. Even if the decision was taken by the individual citizens, they are in general ill-equipped to deal with such planned large scale manipulation. And it's exactly what the manipulators are counting on. Look at the Russian interference in US elections.
If a witness provides false testimony and evidence against you to a jury, who subsequently finds you guilty, who is to blame? The jury? The witness? You? And if your imprisonment has visible and long lasting effects on your life would you consider that point a pivotal one that forever influenced your future and future choices, or one that needlessly blurs the definition of "causality"?
The question of "what is a cause" loses all meaning when every past event is treated as the cause of every future event. That's what I mean by "blurring the definition of 'causality.'" Please don't intentionally misinterpret what I'm saying (see your last sentence).
People are responsible for the outcomes of their decisions, manipulated or not. Even today, the Iranian government manipulates the superstitions and fears of the Iranian people. Still, the actors who put that government in power were millions of Iranians -- not just Western government actors.
> here we're talking about huge changes to begin with.
In the article, some historians are mentioned as advancing the idea that Western powers are to blame for everything that happened in the timeline of Iran's government, and that's simply not true. There are clear differences between the removal of Mosaddegh and the removal of Mohammad Reza Shah. The removal of Mohammad Reza Shah was, as you say, huge. It's hard to justify the blaming of such a huge action on a few Westerners, but that's precisely the stance ascribed to historians in the article.
> If a witness provides false testimony and evidence against you to a jury, who subsequently finds you guilty, who is to blame? The jury? The witness? You?
I'm not sure I understand what your point is here. Whether you blame the Iranian people or a group of cleric manipulators, the fact remains that millions of Iranians removed the Shah in a drawn-out upheaval process that was remarkably different than what happened in 1953. That's one of the points of contention mentioned in the article.
> if your imprisonment has visible and long lasting effects on your life
This kind of emotionally charged approach to evaluating history is not useful because it clouds our ability to examine what actually happened. Essentially you are saying, "the long-term outcome of the Revolution should affect our analysis of the lead-up to the Revolution." However, in the 1970s the Iranian people did not know what the future held. They only knew what they had (the Shah) and what they wanted (not the Shah).
You're looking at this as if it was a literal tug-of-war game where "a few" can't beat the many due to the laws of physics. Yet the reality we live in thoroughly contradicts you at every step. If the "few" can apply pressure at precise points and in precise ways then a lot can be achieved.
Look no further than lobbying where "a few" people have far more power than a country's worth of citizens. For example they may de-prioritize education because a population with close to total zero understanding of the world is far easier to steer whichever way the "few" want.
> This kind of emotionally charged approach
You're free to make it as emotional as you want. I gave it as an objective example that destroyed the foundation of your line of argumentation. So call it what you may but you still haven't come up with anything that can stand up to even cursory scrutiny. Personal opinions and interpretations are not that.
The '53 coup was orchestrated by a small group. The '79 revolution was the result of a groundswell of opposition to the Shah.
> You're free to make it as emotional as you want. I gave it as an objective example that destroyed the foundation of your line of argumentation. So call it what you may but you still haven't come up with anything that can stand up to even cursory scrutiny. Personal opinions and interpretations are not that.
This is nonsense. You threw forward some hypothetical sob story that is neither accurate (talk to some Iranians) nor relevant (the post-hoc sadness or non-sadness of an event doesn't change its antecedents).
The 79 coup was part of a revolution led by a minority group of religious radicals, with support from some leftist groups (which they later regretted, obviously). They were certainly not chosen by "the Iranian people".
Whom did they lead? That's the question here. You're conveniently forgetting millions of protestors and several years of political conflict.
There is no parallel between the removal of Mosaddegh in 53 and the revolution in 79, because the former was orchestrated by Western powers while the latter was pressed by a groundswell of support within the nation, especially among students.
The fact that the leaders turned out to be bad has nothing to do with the way that they came to power in the first place.
But regarding your other claim: if some random group had seized power during the Green movement and its massive protests, that would have been the decision of the Iranian people?
Don't get me wrong, I supported the Green movement, but I would never claim - if some random coup had happened during that time - that it was a democratic process.
That won't happen until free and fair elections.
The historians referenced in the article did:
> Only later does Stewart confront the geopolitical implications and talk to Middle Eastern historians who blame his father for what later unfolded in Iran: no coup against prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, no tyrannical Shah, no Islamic revolution in 1979. Stewart hotly disagrees.
The removal of Mosaddegh was a four-day affair where a bunch of politicians were paid off. The removal of Mohammad Reza Shah was a two-year affair involving millions of Iranian protesters and thousands of casualties. This stark contrast is the basis for all of my comments in this thread.
Huh? It was a coup, not an election.
Not everyone supports the current US President.
The Congo Crisis ended very poorly for Lumumba, very well for Mobutu, probably poorly for most Congolese, and probably well for Mobutu's patrons.
====
Goldstein's thesis is that Oceania has reached a static society, because no change can come from without, and no change shall come from within[1].
From http://www.gutenberg.org/files/48612/48612-h/48612-h.htm
> "... if the door is left open to voluntary conversion, so that anyone who wants to can come over to the winning side, the winning side will sooner or later convert almost everyone who is capable of making trouble. (In the language of Vilfredo Pareto, this would probably be termed "capture of the rising elite"; in the language of present-day Marxists, this would be described as "utilization of potential leadership cadres from historically superseded classes"; in the language of practical politics, it means "cut in the smart boys from the opposition, so that they can't set up a racket of their own.")"
followed by an asian postmortem. As the domino theory turns out not to have held water, the lessons Linebarger wished to offer have largely fallen on deaf ears:
> "Sir Henry Gurney, the High Commissioner of the Federation who was murdered in 1952, was a veteran of irregular warfare. He had faced the Zionist terrorists in Jerusalem and was a man without fear. His approach to the problem of confronting Communism was hopelessly sane. The Communists were offering young Chinese the intoxication of craziness, of a mad and heroic righteousness to justify the misspending of their lives. Sir Henry's answer was decency, goodness, security, prosperity, authority, liberty under law. He offered everything except glamor, terror, inspiration, and romance— Everything except the chance to join the British side.
> What kind of British side?
> A British side which, like the Communist side, would welcome the makers of the future, the builders of the next civilization, the arbiters of history.
> The Communists have presented a high bid against the U.S. and Britain as well as the other Western powers. We have not yet overbid them. The high bid is the opportunity to join, to belong, really to be equal, not just legally equal, and, above everything, to share, to struggle, and to work under conditions of heroism for a common goal."[2]
Note that the Inner Party has internalised these lessons well, operating as a colour-blind meritocracy despite Goldstein having been written several years (in a meta-fiction) earlier than Dr. Linebarger wrote (in non-fiction).
[1] Is Big Brother a surveillance philosopher-king? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24069572
[2] To what degree does Silicon Valley allow talent from all over the world to join, to belong, really to be equal, not just legally equal, and, above everything, to share, to struggle, and to work under conditions of heroism for a common goal?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Covert_United_States_...
Indonesia has turned out the best of the bunch?
I've got a hunch the up to 1 million dead might say differently.
To answer that I think you have to decide who gets to decide if a war "went well". Should some politician, historian, or descendant be allowed to weigh up the death and destruction and come to a simple answer? I think not. If a war destroyed your life then you have a right to be upset about that. The death, abuse, fear and rape of yourself or a loved one is all the qualification you need to have an opinion.
Too often the people who decide have little skin in the game. They are the survivors. They are politicians who spent the war sitting in an office. Or someone watching it on Fox News on the sofa. They can talk about the big abstract objectives whilst ignoring the individual suffering. Or they focus on suffering that signals virtue like the experience of veterans.
For most people war is something you get caught up in. Like being put in a tumble dryer full of knives. It is not really about looking to history. Millions will die hopeless, pointless deaths. That is the history that matters.
The US (and UK) replaced Mosaddegh with the Shah. Then the Shah and SAVAK (with CIA help) launched a decades long attack on the secular, parliamentary oriented forces in the country. Initially the Shah supported the ayatollahs, and in turn was himself tacitly (sometimes openly) supported by them. Eventually they turned against the dictator under the spell of a foreign power.
Also, Iran had a large communist movement, and it is obvious in 1978 and early 1979 that the US, UK and France saw the communists as the enemy, Khomeini as someone to disempower but not destroy, and the Shah as who to support as long as they could. So that stance helped Khomeini on some level. France would not have allowed communists to sit in France and work successfully to undermine a friendly power (even Indochina, although that stance loosened in the 1950s).
This is a bizarre argument. Secularism and westernization in Iran during the 20th century were almost entirely a result of Reza Shah's reforms, as well as his closeness with the British monarchy -- itself a parliamentary system.
> Iran had a large communist movement
By the time of the revolution the Tudeh party and other communist groups were quite weak. They contributed to the upheaval without having any credible chance of installing their own leadership in the country.
> Initially the Shah supported the ayatollahs
This is a rosy but false claim. Khomeini and Khamenei spent a collective 18 years in exile under the Shah, and faced house arrest while in the country. The Shah arguably gave ground away from his own power base (aristocrats) during the White Revolution, but arguably this was intended to subdue anti-monarchical sentiment and solidify his power. That doesn't mean he "supported the ayatollahs."
"Conclusive evidence", whether for Iraq or China, leads to a U.S. official dangling a vial of dried bat semen in front of the UN Security Council.
It's exacerbated with reactions to events. The most recent of which is the "bounty" issue. Officials and journalists are outraged that Russian intelligence services allegedly gave money to Taliban to target U.S. troops. Anyone with half a brain would think: isn't this the same thing the CIA did by training Taliban on U.S. soil, with Special Forces, giving them RPGs, weapons and money to kill Soviet troops? I mean, the US/Taliban/Russia is almost a Vicky Cristina Barcelona triangle.
The mere fact of these former intelligence officers and government officials being outraged is insulting.
More on relations:
Notice how Putin's speeches and interview differ from the usual U.S. diplomats and officials. U.S. officials and diplomats' speeches would piss off anyone with a functioning brain, it is the usual silly patriotism with wavy flags, exporting freedom and democracy, stars and stripes, and demagogy. No one can get away with that because the counter-examples are too many. This is bad salesmanship.
In contrast, Putin takes the approach to explain the lay of the land, underplays his role, and takes the position of the underdog: "my job is to look for the Russian people, we're not as powerful as the U.S., look at what they did with all that power", and when people look, they agree. It's a very effective selling/recruiting strategy.
on edit: instead of repeating the same thing in each response berating me for not accepting that it was a consequence I will put the additional response here
I didn't say it wasn't a consequence, but a direct consequence is generally understood as "an effect that is an immediate result of an event, incident, or occurrence."
https://itlaw.wikia.org/wiki/Direct_consequence
https://www.iadclexicon.org/direct-consequence/
although it is often used for rhetorical effect in cases where the consequence is obviously not direct, I just avoid the usage unless I believe it is direct.
Would you easily forgive a country that installed a Shah by toppling the democratically elected leader to get access to oil? Would you forget if you live day by day under a government directly installed by foreign actors? I don't think so, so I think it is a very safe bet in this case.
Of course it is all a consequence of these actions but we pretend we don’t see it.
Could Athabasca and Green River provide a way for the US to stop riding the tiger above? (I would find this hypothesis more probable only after having seen more export capacity in the Gulf.)
suggests a pretty direct line between the perception of the Shah as foreign influenced and Khomeini as the local boy.
(Being a westerner, the aims of the White Revolution looked pretty good to me. With hindsight, a Red Iran, like a Red Afghanistan, may have turned out to be a much less prickly neighbour in the twenty-first century. To this day Iran and the US do not have diplomatic relations, requiring others to serve as go-betweens. They would be geopolitical "seconds" if this were not a world that now frowns upon duelling.)
The Anglo-American legal tradition has two notions of causation: "but-for" and "proximate". The latter asks whether a consequence was foreseeable, and in practice amounts to a judgement about moral culpability for the consequence.
The establishment of an autocratic state was a foreseeable consequence of CIA intervention, and it doesn't seem fair to fault Iranians for failing to subdue their autocrats in a single generation. Such things take time.
The semantics are far less important here than the principle. What's an appropriate "immediate" term after which one can wash their hands of triggering a long chain of unfortunate events? Where does the first link end? A year? Five? Ten? 24?
If you ignore long term effects many actions seem completely harmless. A fire can be started with a few sparks, an avalanche with a few snowflakes. Lighting a fire won't make you responsible just for the "direct consequences" of a flame appearing but for all the consequences. Throwing a punch won't make you responsible just for the direct consequence of pain to the jaw but also for the person dying in the subsequent fall.
And you may argue that a fire has no "choice" but to burn, while humans have self determination. But we already know that an individual might act unpredictably but a whole population is quite predictable.
Those actions were intended to cause exactly the harm that they did, as predicted. And they should be judges as such.
IMHO this rhetoric muddies waters and to an extent absolves polititians of governance failures. It isn't clear if an issue is because of am alleged CIA sponsored coup or due to corruption and incompetence. Either way you likely to have very vocal and passionate people supporting both positions.
Yes, West African CFA is pegged to Euro, now. Earlier, it was pegged to French francs. One disadvantage: countries don't have economic freedom/flexibility to finance public debt. If a country issues its own currency (not pegged to any Western currency), it has flexibility to issue/print money to finance public projects the way the Federal reserve in the USA is doing right now, by buying corporate bonds and treasury notes, etc. The flexibility that the US Federal reserve, the ECB, the Bank of Japan have, can't be exported to African central banks by the mere fact of having own currency; there should be demand for such currency. Today, every Chinese, every African, every Indian, every Latin American (almost 75% of the world population) wants to hold assets in USD, EUR, etc, but not in Kwachas (Zambian currency), not in Turkish Lira.
If a currency is not hard pegged, if a currency is issued by a local sovereign central bank, then you can see run away inflation as you can witness in many African countries. This inflation is also bad, and that forces moneyed-locals to keep foreign currencies instead of local currency.
The solution: good governance with local currency, not hard pegged to any Western currency. Without good governance, local currency will lead to bad outcomes.
What if there's some good reasons deep underneath the surface of what happened in so many countries but because of political correctness the researches of the reasons are impossible to start so the real solutions if exists are not available in near future?
Once the independence movement is over, once the generation that got the independent dies out, don't expect any cooperation, devolving into "vote for me because the opposition party sucks".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Charter_of_1291#/media...
(Note the seals, like for a papal bull, dangling from the document to make it official. When I first heard about "truck nuts", I was reminded of these documents.)
Switzerland is a small country. An 'anomaly' to Arrow's theorem, if one insists on it. So, one has to study Switzerland's democracy.
Even if that’s true on some scientific level, human institutions, human social practice, and the human mind itself, all rely on the idea of agency and responsibility. If you’re going to talk about whose “fault” it is, then you need to speak in those terms, not the mere chains of causation that science can talk about.
No one claims that present wasn’t caused by the past. The question is who bears moral responsibility today for a regime that Iranians placed in power, that Iranians (a large enough chunk at least) continue to support, etc. Iranians are not uniquely automatons. They own their regime at least as much as anyone else, especially at this point. That US actions set a chain of events in motion does not absolve Iranians of everything they decided to do since.
You are confusing causation and fault/responsibility. The US interventions, the Shah’s personal decisions, the ayatollahs’ decisions, the rise of Islam, the Persian Empire, the first humans who left Africa, are all causes of the current situation. But to determine who is at fault, who is responsible, is a very different question. Proximity in time is only a vague heuristic.
It’s common in every day parlance to mix these concepts up. Legal systems have been confused about the distinction for thousands of years. But the distinction is very important to speaking sensibly about things.
It's sort of trivially true that responsibility for every facet of the Islamic Revolution in Iran can't be laid directly at the feet of the U.S. But, when you screw around with another country explicitly to steal their resources and exploit their people, it's silly to expect whatever violent resistance springs up to be rational and measured in every respect. They may even find it useful to heighten certain differences with the colonizing power to gain support from the people.
But we rightly lay the blame squarely at the feet of the Nazis and their supporters.
Incidentally, in 1953 when the CIA carried out its coup in Iran it was basically run and controlled by people who had made a great deal of money financing the Nazi war effort and then imported a bunch of Nazi war criminals to work for Western intelligence and the space program.
There have also been some books written specifically about Sullivan & Cromwell, which was the investment banking firm where the Dulles Brothers worked and established financial ties to the Nazis, but I haven't read any of them.
In many parts of the world, 200 km is a long way. In the US, 200 years[2] is a long time.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_the_Great
[2] When I visited עיר דוד/وادي حلوه one of the notable features was its easily defensible water supply. That's an area which has had over 6'000 years of history, with the architecture suggesting very little of it was peaceful.
As a nation we aren't learning any lesson from history, instead we're letting ourselves be manipulated by psychopathic politicians and regurgitate back what they program us with.
What will happen in the future in that middle east region is also a consequence of the same us policy (nothing has really changed) the US continue to have in the area: hunger for oil at any cost whatsoever.
Let's not blame the Romans for they don't exist anymore. The US exists and should have some accountability, at least to us the citizens. You're either blind or choose to not see, whichever you prefer.
The big difference is that the Iraq/Libya cases were partially intended to do good things which could get some support from certain voters. That's worse than CIA coups with strategical goals but turned out to have unintended consequences which will be correctly evaluated later to avoid the future mistakes.
The actions with good intentions however are more deceptive because good intentions are often disguised self spiritual satisfactions so the real ground facts were less checked correctly. That's an theory that after tens of thousands deaths of Iraq war , the bombing of Libya could happen AGAIN with little objections because voters are fine with good intention of overthrowing evils, and with values (i.e. quasi religion) people are not likely to measure the magnitude of consequences.
In terms of disaster, next version of Hitler is a human rights promoter.(Tony Blair?) Good intention is a way to circumvent "fool me once/twice" alert because politicians cheated in a such a good way not only themselves are cheated to enhance the deception but talking is so spiritually attractive that even non-religious people don't think about the history of ground truth associated with those beautiful words.
> " The West is in danger. It makes no difference whether or not their governments and intellectuals realize it or not.
> The German people, in any event, is unwilling to bow to this danger. Behind the oncoming Soviet divisions we see the Jewish liquidation commandos, and behind them terror, the specter of mass starvation and complete anarchy. ... Two thousand years of Western civilization are in danger. ... We could see our venerable part of the world collapse, and bury in its ruins the ancient inheritance of the West. That is the danger we face today.
> My second thesis: Only the German Reich and its allies are in the position to resist this danger. ... Bolshevism set ideological as well as military boundaries, which poses a danger to every nation. The world no longer has the choice between falling back into its old fragmentation or accepting a new order for Europe under Axis leadership. The only choice now is between living under Axis protection or in a Bolshevist Europe."
https://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/goeb36...
So then why don't we lay this at the feet of the British? The CIA was more or less trying to clean up a British mess when they installed the Shah. The middle east is turtles all the way down.
[1] Head of State: John Dulles. Head of CIA: Allen Dulles. As for Eleanor Dulles, she pretty much focused on european affairs, but had previously served in a wartime capacity on the "Board of Economic Warfare." (If that sounds insufficiently euphemised, recall that DoD was, in those pre-Orwellian times, simply the "War Department.")
====
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_and_the_United... it appears that the US refused to share nukes with the UK after the war, pulled Suez as the UK was attempting to independently develop megatonnage, but then relaunched the "special relationship" after Sputnik gave everyone a new appreciation for boffins.
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nations_of_Nineteen_Eighty-Fou...
2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes
3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_bombing_during_World...
"someone must've been doing similar analyses to pick allied bombing targets"
there is somewhat about that, regarding Japan, in the book by Leslie Groves.
Edit: Spoiler: they simply bombed every city that they didn't explicitly decide to spare for the bomb, in Japan. The bombs weren't too precise anyway. Most destruction was intentionally causing the fires.
Edit 2: also absolutely required read: "The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner" also about how "precise" the bombing actually was.
Jones gives an early intimation of Snowden during a CIA symposium (1993):
https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intellig...
> "A point to be made at the outset is the enormous difference between the scale on which you operate today and our own efforts in World War II..."
(As Jones is fond of Kipling, I offer one of the latter's less jingoistic moments:
Children of the yoke and goad,
Pack and harness, pad and load.
...
While the men that walk beside,
Dusty, silent, heavy-eyed,
Cannot tell why we or they
March and suffer day by day.)What I was able to glean from the preview: Groves wanted to bomb 京都, less because he knew exactly what military targets there were there, and more because it would have been "large enough in area for us to gain complete knowledge of the effects of an atomic bomb." I wonder how much this calibration wish factored into his rationalisation (p.266) for not demonstrating the bomb before dropping it on civilians?
Good guys: Stimson (p. 275) and Patterson (p. 265)
https://archive.org/details/nowitcanbetolds00grov/page/274/m...
He explicitly named it "Now It Can Be Told." Only 17 years after the bombs, the whole book. The rationales for the target selection -- yes, it's straight from the horse's mouth, and plausible because it is directly not something somebody would just write to in any way "improve" his own reputation, I'd like to believe. He also wrote there something like, if I remember correctly, that his biggest worry during the last months of the war has been that the war could had been over before he gets to drop the bomb on some city with civilians which would provide for good demonstration. It's also obvious that the existence of "military targets" was totally irrelevant, except as a good excuse to be provided to the current president. Something which sounded like that to me, at least. Maybe somebody will locate the specific words. Also Groves, before the Senate, November 1945, about the suffering of the victims of the bombs:
"As I understand it from the doctors, it is a very pleasant way to die." (1)
Also see the book from my Edit 2, before.
1) https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/survivors-hiroshima-a...
It's about storks, not cranes, but this is a hit soviet anti-war song (mid-80's, roughly contemporaneous with "Top Gun"): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oCoVXcZ59Q
Do you mean, this documentary?
There have been a number of sanctions against Iran imposed by a number of countries, especially the United States, and international entities. The first sanctions were those imposed by the United States in November 1979 after a group of radical students seized the American Embassy in Tehran and took the people inside hostage.
That was my first hit in response to a search for: "do the british still have an embargo against iran"
Everything I have ever heard indicates that the US still is applying tremendous pressure to Iran to this day and it has significant impact. There are other international entities with sanctions against Iran, but the name you hear over and over and over when this comes up in the news or in comments is that it's primarily the US that is riding Iran hard and has been for decades.
The CIA didn't install the Shah; he already was the ruler of the country. Nor did the CIA overthrow his insubordinate minister Mossadegh; the Shah's government did that.
See also the manner in which "the" Shah inherited his job from his father: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reza_Shah#World_War_II_and_for...
Yes, ruler of the country may be arguable. I note that Churchill, not Elizabeth, is held responsible for the UK's actions.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0375422307/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_OO...
And your opinion is a direct consequence of your experience and education. You still have agency, right?
I think you are the one confused. If you had some personal interest it would make some sense but it looks like you need to educate yourself on the topic a bit more. Don't take the status quo plainly, do some research, look into different sources
Anyone suggesting that all of this was organic or purely democratic is at best naive, at worst cynically manipulative.
This is not the same as, say, Latin America during the Cold War. There, the non-Western cultural antecedents came from indigenous cultures that were naturally collectivistic. Communism was a better cultural fit.
It was perhaps hip to be involved with communism as a young student in Iran. Still....how do you turn a fragmented, tribal, and superstitious country, whose population is made up of several different ethnic demographics, into a communist nation?
That was never a plausible outcome, so I doubt your theory that the US allowed the theocrats to win because it wanted to box out the communists. The US desired to maintain Iran's role as a security base and an investment hub. Neither the communists nor the followers of Khomeini would have allowed either of those two things to continue.
Even today, despite years and years of aligning with China, Russia, Venezuela, Bolivia, and other "leftist" regimes, Iran is not a communist nation. It is a resource-rich dictatorship with a resistance economy.
I think you are over-extending your speculation by saying that Khomeini was the US's horse in the race when it became clear that the Shah would lose power. This is evidenced by the fact that the US assisted Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq War shortly after the Revolution.
They were systematically killed, disrupted, and suppressed during the revolution.
https://www.npr.org/2019/01/31/690363402/how-the-cia-overthr...
Indeed, it was more of a MI6 job https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/02/mi6-the-coup-i...
I’d like to hear this, but I’m not subscribing to Audible for it.