background on
united state/iranian Relations
Saturday, March 24, 2012
MEASURING TARGETS OF
US IMPERIALISM: HISTORY, ECONOMICS, GEOPOLITICS, CULTURE AND IRAN
Harry Targ
U.S. Imperialism in the Beginning
Modern imperialism is intimately connected to the globalization of
capitalism, the quest for enhanced military capabilities, geopolitical
thinking, and ideologies of national and racial superiority. The rise of the
United States empire occurred as the industrial revolution spread to North
America after the civil war. Farmers began to produce agricultural surpluses
requiring overseas customers, factories were built to produce iron, steel,
textiles, and food products, railroads were constructed to traverse the North
American continent, and financiers created large banks, trusts, and holding
companies to parley agricultural and manufacturing profits into huge
concentrations of cash.
Perhaps the benchmark of the U.S. emergence as an imperial power was the
Spanish/Cuban/American war. The U.S. established its hegemony in the Western
Hemisphere, replacing the Spanish and challenging the British, and became an
Asian power, crushing rebellion and planting its military in the Philippines.
The empire has grown, despite resistance, to this day. While U.S. expansion
occurs wherever a vacuum of power exists, and an opportunity to formally or
informally control a regime and/or territory, particular countries have had
enduring salience for the U.S. Iran is such a country.
Scale of Significance for U.S. Imperialism
To help understand the attention U.S. policy-makers give some countries, it
is possible to reflect on what is called here the Scale of Significance for
U.S. Imperialism (SSUSI). The SSUSI has three interconnected dimensions that
relate to the relative importance policy-makers give to some countries compared
to others.
First, as an original motivation for expansion, economic interests are
primary. Historically, United States policy has been driven by the need to
secure customers for U.S. products, outlets for manufacturing investment
opportunities, opportunities for financial speculation, and vital natural
resources.
Second, geopolitics and military hegemony matter. Empires require ready
access to regions and trouble spots all around the world. When Teddy Roosevelt,
as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Vice President, and President of the United
States, articulated the first warning of the need for global power he spoke of
the development of a “two-ocean” navy. The U.S., he said, must become an Atlantic
and a Pacific power; thus prioritizing the projection of military power in the
Western Hemisphere and Asia. If the achievement of global power was dependent
upon resources drawn from everywhere, military and political hegemony in the
Persian Gulf, the Middle East, and parts of Africa also required attention.
Third, as the imperial project grows, certain political regimes and
cultures take on particular importance for policy-makers and the American
people. Foreign policy elites claim that the U.S. has a special responsibility
for them. If these roles are rejected by the targeted country, the experience
burns itself into the consciousness of the people. For example, Cuba was seen
by U.S. rulers as far back as Thomas Jefferson as soon to be part of the United
States. Cuba’s rejection of this presumption of U.S. tutelage has been a scar
on the U.S. sense of itself ever since the spread of revolutionary ferment on
the island.
The Danger of War With Iran Today
Reflecting on the SSUSI adds to the discussion about current United States
foreign policy toward Iran. 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 US 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. 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 US/Iranian
relations spanning at least 60 years, the current threats of war expressed by
both Israel and the United States are not surprising.
Returning to SSUSI and Iranian Relations
As an emerging global power, United States needs for natural resources,
customers for consumer and military products, investment opportunities, and
outlets for energy companies grew throughout the twentieth century. One of the
significant historical junctures in the transfer of economic and geopolitical
power in the world from the declining British empire and the rising U.S. empire
was the agreement to redistribute control of Iranian oil in 1954. The
Anglo-Iranian Oil Company was obliged to share Iranian oil with the then five
U.S. oil giants.
As U.S. oil needs and those of its friends in Europe increased, control of the
Persian Gulf region and access to its oil became more vital. Furthermore, since
a hostile Iran could control the Strait of Hormuz, the Iranian revolution of
1979 posed an increasing geopolitical problem for American dominance.
The impulse in 1979 to send U.S. troops to save the Shah’s regime was driven by
both economics and geopolitics. It was only because other Carter advisers
disagreed with the National Security Advisor on the possibility of saving the
Shah that a U.S. intervention stalled in 1979. But in 1980 an Iraq/Iran war
provided an opportunity, it was hoped, to weaken Iran’s potential control of
the region.
Finally, the U.S. decision-makers since 1953 saw a special relationship between
this country and Iran. The U.S. put the Shah in power, plied him with enormous
military power, encouraged and facilitated significant cultural exchanges, and
defined his regime as a junior partner in policing the region.
The rapidity of the Shah’s overthrow and the anger expressed by the Iranian
people about its historic relationship to the American people communicated to
the world declining U.S. power. Consequently, U.S. hostility to Iran in
subsequent decades using a variety of issues including processing uranium is
not surprising.
Sunday, September 16, 2012
IT IS NOT A YOU TUBE
TRAILER: IT IS IMPERIALISM
Harry Targ
It is almost unfathomable for the media to explain the protests
against the United States in seventeen countries as primarily the result of a
trailer to an obnoxious anti-Muslim You Tube video. This view is consistent
with the historic Western understanding of Islamic people, people of color, the
“other,” as ignorant, subject to manipulation, and, finally, less than human.
The reality is the peoples of the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, and Asia have
a sense of their history and the world and most Americans do not.
Just to review the U.S. role in the Middle East and the Persian
Gulf since World War II tells us much more about this week’s protests than the
You Tube video. As Michael Klare has written, President Franklin Roosevelt met
with King Abdul Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia, a week after the famous Yalta
Conference aboard the USS Quincy. The President and the King made an agreement
that the United States would provide protection for the Saudi regime in
exchange for perpetual access to its oil.
Mohammed Mossadegh the Iranian Prime Minister who negotiated
with his parliament the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company was
overthrown in a CIA engineered coup in 1953. For the next 26 years the Shah
ruled Iran as a brutal dictator, crushing secular and religious dissent.
In 1957 President Eisenhower declared that the United States was
prepared to send troops to the Middle East to protect the region from
international communism. Two years later, claiming the Eisenhower Doctrine, the
president sent thousands of marines to Lebanon on false pretenses. Throughout
the 1950s and 1960s, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson worked to undermine the
influence of secular Arab leaders, such as Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and
Syrian leaders, who were pursuing autonomy from former colonial overlords.
During the 1960s, U.S. support, financial and military, tilted dramatically
toward Israel in its war on the Palestinian people and neighboring Arab states.
In the aftermath of the Iranian revolution of 1979 the
Carter Doctrine proclaimed the right of the United States to intervene if any
attack on the Persian Gulf occurs because it would “be regarded as an
assault on the vital interests of the United States of America….” Carter
created a Rapid Deployment Force of 100,000 specially trained troops to engage
in instant responses to events such as had occurred in Iran and he created what
became the U.S. Central Command to govern all forces in the region. Carter and
then Reagan embarked on a massive covert war against the government of
Afghanistan in the 1980s, supporting fundamentalists such as Osama Bin Laden in
the war on communism.
George Herbert Walker Bush launched Gulf War One with a
coalition of nations to extricate Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Over the decade of
the 1990s, the Iraqi people were smothered by an economic embargo and regular
bombing campaign.
Then the wars on Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003) were
launched as well as attacks on military targets in Pakistan. The “war on
terrorism” included violence against Muslim populations in several countries,
including Yemen and Somalia, with hundreds of forward bases in the Middle East,
the Persian Gulf, and Asia.
Stephen Walt, Harvard political scientist, estimated that from
1988 to 2009 about 10,000 Americans died in military encounters with Muslims.
However, 288,000 Muslims died at the hands of American troops or bombs.
He wrote that Americans killed 30 Muslims for every United States citizen
who was killed and if one includes the over one million non-combat deaths from
economic sanctions (in Iraq for example) the ratio of Muslims who died in
interaction with Americans would be 100 to one.
Walt reported that Muslim deaths were the direct result of
United States foreign policy, whereas American deaths were largely at the hands
of non-state actors, i.e. terrorist groups. In addition, the United States has
funded and supports allies who also engage in the slaughter of Muslims.
He concluded: “Some degree of anti-Americanism may reflect
ideology, distorted history, or a foreign government’s attempt to shift blame
onto others (a practice that all governments indulge in), but a lot of it is
the inevitable result of policies that the American people have supported in
the past. When you kill tens of thousands of people in other countries-and
sometimes for no good reason-you shouldn’t be surprised when people in those
countries are enraged by this behavior and interested in revenge. After all,
how did we react after September 11?” (“Why They Hate Us (II): How Many Muslims
Has the U.S. Killed in the Past 30 Years?” November 30, 2009, reposted on the
blog site of Foreign Policy on September 15, 2012).
The new reliance on drone warfare, while increasing the scope of
war on Muslims, decreases the risk to U.S. troops in the short run. However,
the question for the future is whether this war will continue to cause the
violent attacks on United States targets that have been experienced over the
last week.
Tuesday, August 20, 2013
SIXTY YEARS OF
BLOWBACK: IRAN
Harry Targ
Chalmers Johnson wrote
in 2001 about “blowback” that it “is a CIA term first used in March 1954 in
a recently declassified report on the 1953 operation to overthrow the
government of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran. It is a metaphor for the unintended
consequences of the US government's international activities that have been
kept secret from the American people. The CIA's fears that there might
ultimately be some blowback from its egregious interference in the affairs of
Iran were well founded.…. This misguided ‘covert operation’ of the US
government helped convince many capable people throughout the Islamic world
that the United States was an implacable enemy.” (The Nation,
October 15, 2001).
The CIA initiated
overthrow of the regime of Mohammed Mossadegh sixty years ago on August 19,
1953 was precipitated by what Melvin Gurtov called “the politics of oil and
cold war together.” Because it was the leading oil producer in the Middle East
and the fourth largest in the world and it was geographically close to the
former Soviet Union, President Eisenhower was prevailed upon to launch the CIA
covert war on Iran long encouraged by Great Britain.
The immediate
background for the ouster of Mossadegh was Iran’s nationalization of its oil
production. Most Iranians were living in poverty in the 1940s as the Iranian
government received only ten percent of the royalties on its oil sales on the
world market. The discrepancy between Iran’s large production of oil and the
limited return it received led Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, a liberal
nationalist, to call for the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company
in 1951. Despite opposition from Iran’s small ruling class, the parliament and
masses of the Iranian people endorsed the plan to seize control of its oil.
Mossadegh became the symbol of Iranian sovereignty.
Ironically, Mossadegh
assumed the United States would support Iran’s move toward economic autonomy.
But, in Washington, the Iranian leader was viewed as a demagogue, his emerging
rival the Shah of Iran (the sitting monarch of Iran) as “more moderate.”
After the
nationalization, the British, supported by the United States, boycotted oil
produced by the Iranian Oil Company. The British lobbied Washington to launch a
military intervention but the Truman Administration feared such an action would
work to the advantage of the Iranian Communists, the Tudeh Party.
The boycott led to
economic strains in Iran, and Mossadegh compensated for the loss of revenue by
increasing taxes on the rich. This generated growing opposition from the tiny
ruling class, and they encouraged political instability. In 1953, to rally his
people, Mossadegh carried out a plebiscite, a vote on his policies. The Iranian
people overwhelmingly endorsed the nationalization of Iranian oil. In addition,
Mossadegh initiated efforts to mend political fences with the former Soviet
Union and the Tudeh Party.
As a result of the
plebiscite, and Mossadegh’s openings to the Left, the United States came around
to the British view; Mossadegh had to go. As one U.S. defense department
official put it:
“When the crisis came
on and the thing was about to collapse, we violated our normal criteria and
among other things we did, we provided the army immediately on an emergency
basis….The guns that they had in their hands, the trucks that they rode in, the
armored cars that they drove through the streets, and the radio communications
that permitted their control, were all furnished through the military defense
assistance program…. Had it not been for this program, a government unfriendly
to the United States probably would now be in power.” (Richard Barnet, Intervention and
Revolution, 1972).
The Shah, who had fled
Iran after the plebiscite, returned when Mossadegh was ousted. A new prime
minister was appointed by him who committed Iran to the defense of the “free”
world. U.S. military and economic aid was resumed, and Iran joined the CENTO
alliance (an alliance of pro-West regional states).
In August, 1954, a new
oil consortium was established. Five U.S. oil companies gained control of forty
percent of Iranian oil, equal to that of returning British firms. Iran
compensated the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company for its losses by paying $70 million,
which Iran received as aid from the United States. The Iranian ruling class was
accorded fifty percent of profits from future oil sales. President Eisenhower
declared that the events of 1953 and 1954 were ushering in a new era of
“economic progress and stability” in Iran and that it was now to be an
independent country in “the family of free nations.”
In brief, the United
States overthrew a popularly elected and overwhelmingly endorsed regime in
Iran. The payoff the United States received, with British acquiescence, was a
dramatic increase in access by U.S. oil companies to Iranian oil at the expense
of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The overthrow of Mossadegh and the backing of
the return of the Shah to full control of the regime led to U.S. support for
one of the world’s most repressive and militarized regimes. By the 1970s,
70,000 of the Shah’s opponents were in political prisons. Workers and religious
activists rose up against the Shah in 1979, leading to the rapid revolutionary
overthrow of his military state.
As Chalmers Johnson suggested many years later, the United
States role in the world is still plagued by “blowback.” Masses of people all
across the globe, particularly in the Persian Gulf, the Middle East, and East
Asia, regard the United States as the major threat to their economic and
political independence. And the covert operation against Mohammed Mossadegh in
Iran is one place where such global mistrust began.
Friday, August 7, 2015
IMPERIALISM, WAR,
AND/OR DIPLOMACY: WHERE SHOULD THE PEACE MOVEMENT STAND?
Harry Targ
Not every conflict was
averted, but the world avoided nuclear catastrophe, and we created the time and
the space to win the Cold War without firing a shot at the Soviets.
….Now, when I ran for
president eight years ago as a candidate who had opposed the decision to go to
war in Iraq, I said that America didn’t just have to end that war. We had to
end the mindset that got us there in the first place. It was a mindset
characterized by a preference for military action over diplomacy, a mindset
that put a premium on unilateral U.S. action over the painstaking work of
building international consensus, a mindset that exaggerated threats beyond
what the intelligence supported. (Barack Obama, “Full text: Obama gives a speech about the Iran
nuclear deal,” The Washington Post, August 5, 2015).
The peace movement has
often been faced with a dilemma. Should it channel its energies in opposition
to imperialism, including economic expansion and covert operations, or should
it mobilize against war, or both. The problem was reflected in President
Obama’s August 5, 2015 speech defending the anti-nuclear proliferation
agreement with Iran. On the one hand he defended diplomacy as the first
tool of a nation’s foreign policy and on the other hand his defense included
the argument that through diplomacy the United States “won” the Cold War, and thereby
defeated a bloc of states that opposed capitalist expansion. The implication of
his argument was that pursuing imperialism remained basic to United States
foreign policy but achieving it through peace was better than through war.
The speech was
presented at American University 52 years after President Kennedy called for
peaceful competition with the former Soviet Union. In June, 1963, nine months
after the Cuban Missile Crisis, which nearly led to nuclear war, and weeks
after Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s call for “peaceful coexistence,”
President Kennedy responded by urging the use of diplomacy rather than war in
the ongoing conflict with the Soviet Union.
A small but growing
number of scholars and activists at that time had begun to articulate the view
that the threat of nuclear war, growing U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia, and
repeated covert interventions in Guatemala, Iran, Cuba, and the Congo, had to
do with U.S. imperialism. The dilemma for the peace movement in 1963 then as it
is in 2015 is how to respond to United States imperialism at the same time as
supporting the use of diplomacy to forestall wars.
In the context of
political discourse in 2015, dominated by “neoconservative” and “humanitarian
interventionist” factions of the foreign policy elite, the danger of war always
exists. Therefore, any foreign policy initiative that reduces the possibility
of war and arguments about its necessity must be supported. The agreement with
Iran supported by virtually every country except Israel constitutes an effort
to satisfy the interests of Iran and the international community and without
the shedding of blood and creating the danger of escalation to global
war.
Neoconservatives,
celebrants of war, have had a long and growing presence in the machinery of
United States foreign policy. James Forrestal, the first Secretary of Defense
in the Truman Administration, was a leading advocate for developing a
militaristic response to the Soviet Union in the years after World War II. As
historian Andrew Bacevich pointed out, Forrestal was one of the Truman
administrators who sought to create a “permanent war economy.” He was, in
Bacevich’s terms, a founding member of the post-World War II “semi-warriors.”
Subsequent to the
initiation of the imperial response to the “Soviet threat”--the Marshall Plan,
NATO, wars in Korea and Vietnam, the arms race--other semi-warriors continued
the crusade. These included the Dulles brothers (John and Alan), Air Force
General Curtis LeMay, and prominent Kennedy advisors including McGeorge Bundy
and Walter Rostow, architect of the “noncommunist path to development,” in
Vietnam.
Key semi-warriors of
our own day, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Elliott Abrams, Robert Kagan, and
others who formed the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) in the 1990s,
gained their first experience in the administrations of Richard Nixon and
Ronald Reagan. The PNAC view of how the United States should participate in
world affairs is to use military superiority to achieve foreign policy goals. The
key failure of Clinton foreign policy, they claimed, was his refusal to use
force to transform the world. For starters, he should have overthrown Saddam
Hussein in Iraq.
The neoconservative
policy recommendations prevailed during the eight years of the George Walker
Bush administration. International organizations were belittled, allies were
ignored, arms control agreements with Russia were rescinded and discourse on
the future prioritized planning for the next war. And concretely the United
States launched long, bloody, immoral wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Humanitarian
interventionists, more liberals than conservatives, argued that the United
States should use force, but more selectively, to achieve various goals. These
goals included interventions that allegedly defended the quest for human
rights. Advocates of humanitarian interventionism argued that the United States
must use all means available, military and diplomatic, to maximize interests
and values. And force need not be the first or only instrument of policy.
But in the end the
humanitarian interventionists encouraged bombing Serbia, intervening in a civil
war in Libya, funding rebels perpetuating war in Syria, expanding military
training and a U.S. presence in Africa, and funding opposition elements against
the government in Venezuela. In addition, with advice from humanitarian
interventionists, the United States increased the use of drones to target
enemies of U.S. interests in East Asia, the Persian Gulf, and the Middle East.
Neoconservatives and
humanitarian interventionists (and in earlier times anti-communists) have led
the charge for war-making in the United States since World War II. Between the
end of the war and the 1990s, 10 million people died in wars in which the
United States had a presence. Hundreds of thousands of young men and women
serving in the armed forces of the United States have died or been permanently
scarred by U.S. wars. And the physical landscape of Southeast Asia, the Persian
Gulf, Central America, and the Middle East has been devastated by war. And in
the United States, foreign policy elites, politicians, and think tank experts
still advocate violence to address international problems.
Therefore, in the
context of a huge arms industry and global economic and political interests,
any presidential initiative that uses diplomacy rather than force, declares its
opposition to unilateral action, and challenges the war mindset deserves the
support of the peace movement. Given the long and painful United States war
system, the battle to secure the agreement between the P5 plus 1 nuclear
agreement with Iran is worthy of support.
