THE DANGER OF WAR WITH IRAN TODAY: WE MUST SAY "NO"

 Harry Targ

Massachusetts Peace Action The history of U.S./Iranian relations has been long and painful. Before the dramatic United States involvement in that country, Iran’s vital oil resource had been under control of the weakening British empire. In 1901 the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now British Petroleum) consolidated control of much of the production, refining, and export of Iranian oil. Local oligarchs received only 16 percent of the oil revenue from the global sale of the oil. After World War II, with a young monarch Mohammad Reza Shah serving as the Iranian ruler and Iranian masses living in poverty, Iranian nationalists mobilized to seize control of their valuable resource. Upper class nationalist Mohammed Mossadegh became Prime Minister and asserted the power of the parliament over the monarchy. The parliament voted to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The British government enlisted the United States in 1953 to overthrow the Mossadegh regime using covert operations directed by the CIA. After Mossadegh was imprisoned and the Shah given full power to impose his will on an angry population, a new oil consortium agreement was established in 1954 which allowed five U.S. oil companies to gain a 40 percent share of Iranian oil. Anglo-Iranian would retain another 40 percent, and the rest would be given to rich Iranians. Over the years, the Shah’s regime became the bulwark of U.S. power in the increasingly vital Persian Gulf region. In the Nixon period, Iran was defined as a key “gendarme” state, which would serve as a surrogate western police power to oversee the region. Presumably Iran would protect the flow of Gulf oil to the United States, Europe, and Japan. By the 1970s, the Shah’s military was the fifth largest in the world. To the great surprise of left critics of the Shah’s dictatorship, the CIA, and the Carter administration, the Shah’s regime began to crumble in the summer of 1978 as large strikes were organized by oil workers against the regime. In January, 1979 secretly organized massive street protests led by the religious community doomed the regime. As Iranian soldiers refused to fire upon street demonstrators, President Carter’s National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, urged the president to send troops to Iran to save the U.S. regional policeman, the Shah, from overthrow. That proposal was rejected by Carter. After jockeying for power in the post-revolutionary period, religious leaders consolidated their power over the political system. To add embarrassment to loss of economic and geopolitical control over the vital Persian Gulf region, Iranian students took 52 U.S. diplomats and military attaches hostage and held them for 444 days. In 1980 Carter authorized a military rescue effort that failed. The bungled military operation further damaged the image of infallibility that American foreign policy elites, and the public, held about the nation’s power and destiny. In the 1980s, to challenge Iran’s potential for becoming the hegemonic power in the Gulf, the Reagan administration sided with Iraq in the brutal war between it and Iran. In 1988, shortly before the end of the Iraq/Iran war, U.S. planes shot down a civilian Iranian airliner killing 290 people aboard. Subsequent to the ignoble history of U.S. support for the Shah’s dictatorship, militarization, the overthrow of Mossadegh, the embarrassment of the hostage taking, funding Iraq in the brutal Gulf war of the 1980s, the United States has maintained hostility to Iran despite occasional signals from the latter of a desire to establish better relations. During the Obama administration in 2015 a nuclear treaty was negotiated between Iran, the US, and other countries, but it was abrogated by President Trump. U.S./Iranian hostilities have increased ever since, particularly since October 7, 2023. U.S. policy has included an economic embargo, efforts to create region-wide opposition to the regime, expressions of support for a large (and justifiable) internal movement for democracy and secularization in the country, and encouragement, more or less, for growing Israeli threats against Iran. Given this troubled history of U.S./Iranian relations spanning at least 60 years, the current threats of war expressed by both Israel and the United States are not surprising.

 

How to Dismantle a University

Harry Targ

 

University History

Purdue University is  a Big Ten university, a land grant institution and one of two large and well known public universities in the state of Indiana (there are several public and private universities in the state). It has been known historically for strong programs in agriculture and engineering.  To its credit and largely because of the nationwide ferment in the 1960s  the university committed itself to create vibrant programs in other disciplines, many in the College of Liberal Arts.

Among the many programs developed over the last fifty years included a nationally recognized graduate program in American Studies, important programs, both undergraduate and graduate in African American and Gender and Women’s Studies, and programs of excellence in research and teaching in English, History, Sociology, Political Science, and Psychology, just to name a few. And even students who came to study engineering, computer science, agriculture, or business appreciated and enrolled in the many liberal arts courses mentioned above. And, of course, every administration and faculty from the 1960s til quite recently recognized the inextricable connection between STEM related fields of specialization and a broad liberal arts education.

In addition, administrators, faculty, and students recognized that the history of the nation, the state, and even the university and its community had inadequately served minorities. And it was the job to make higher education accessible to students who historically had been denied such education because of their race, ethnicity, or gender. Former Purdue President Mitch Daniels said it well in a ceremony renaming residence halls to African American students of the 1940s who had been denied access to housing:

“Purdue University and its land grant sisters around the country were put here more than a century ago to start lowering and removing barriers and promote the upward mobility of free peoples and that has been our history ever since,” Daniels said. “We’ve been too slow about it in many ways and many times, but the progress has always been forward. Sometimes, it takes courageous and resolved people, like the Parker sisters, to push things further – and thank God they did.”

 https://www.purdue.edu/vpsl/news/perspectives-stories/fall-2021/parker-halls-monument-to-sisters.php

It All Changed on May 30, 2025

On this date Purdue University announced that all DEI programs would end. Offices were closed. Websites were taken down. Even the closure of DEI programs was announced at a retirement party of a DEI supervisor in the College of Technology.

In addition, It was announced that the university would no longer be cooperating with the school newspaper, The Purdue Exponent. While the Exponent was a non-university corporation the university had for years provided spaces for distribution of the paper on campus and helped distribute the paper to those locations. The university indicated also that the newspaper should take the “Purdue” name off the logo of the newspaper.

Finally, shortly thereafter, it was announced that some 40 undergraduate and/or graduate programs with low enrollments, as defined by the Indiana legislature, would be cancelled. While these programs existed across the university a majority of them were in the liberal arts, including programs addressing substantive issues involving race, gender, and class.

Among the concerns raised by members of the faculty, students, and community are the following:

1.The dismantling DEI programs

2.The justification for the unilateral, automatic, and unaccountable dismissals of workers in DEI programs. This is an issue of worker rights.

3.The lack of any input from the faculty and staff. Was the Faculty Senate consulted at all? AAUP calls the norm for consultation "shared governance."

4.A seeming refusal to discuss the decisions or provide any information about it and its consequences.

5.The unilateral ending of formal ties with the Purdue Exponent, at almost the same time that the announcement about DEI was made public.

In sum, faculty, students, staff, and members of the Greater Lafayette community and citizens of the state hope to see Purdue University return to its historic path of building a rich, diverse, educational experience for all.