Harry Targ
(“Biden: ‘All-out war
is possible’ in the Middle East”. President Joe Biden warned
Wednesday that “all-out war is possible” in the Middle East, acknowledging the
limits of his own persistent diplomatic efforts at achieving a cease-fire deal.
(Politico, September 25, 2024)
Monday, April 15, 2024
|
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.
Tuesday, August 20, 2013
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.
HYBRID WARS AGAINST IRAN
Saturday, January 25, 2020
from https://heartlandradical.blogspot.com/2020/01/hybrid-warswhat-is-new-and-what-is-not.html
Iran has been a country of particular concern of the United States at least
since the end of World War II. The US propped up the Shah (Mohammad Reza
Pahlavi) at the outset of the war to protect US bases which were used to
transfer war materials to the former Soviet Union. After Prime Minister
Mohammed Mossadegh, elected in 1951, nationalized Iran’s valuable oil resource,
Great Britain, whose Anglo-Iranian Oil Company had “owned “ the oil, began to
urge the US to overthrow the democratically elected Prime Minister, instill
full power in the monarch, the Shah, and reprivatize Iranian oil. In 1953 the
US Central Intelligence Agency launched a coup to overthrow the Prime Minister
and to establish the Shah as Iran’s all-powerful dictator. His brutality and repression
lasted for years until a mass-based worker and religious-led movement ousted
him from power in 1979. In the aftermath of the ouster of the Shah, religious
leaders consolidated their control of the state, the Shah fled to the United
States for medical treatment, the new regime demanded his return to stand trial
for his crimes, and Iranian students took 52 US embassy personnel hostage for
444 days.
The United States responses to the transformation of the Iranian regime
included President Carter’s declaration of his “doctrine,” which proclaimed
that instabilities in the Persian Gulf region were vital to US national
security. The US began to fund Iraq in its eight-year bloody war against Iran,
which led to 500,000 Iranians killed. The United States urged Israel to invade
Lebanon, escalate attacks on Palestine, and in general tilted in opposition to
Iran and its allies in the region. The US also increased the sale of
technologically sophisticated arms to Saudi Arabia. Therefore in the 1980s, US
policy in the Persian Gulf and Middle East regions was driven by the growing
hostility of Iran to the United States (once a pillar of US support in the
Persian Gulf), the continued need of Europe and Japan for Iranian oil, and
Iran’s vital geographic location, particularly in terms of its potential
control of the flow of oil to Europe and Japan. But, in
addition, the Iranian people had violated a cardinal rule of US global
hegemony. They had risen up against rule by an American puppet. Much like Cuba
in the Western Hemisphere, Iranians declared that they no longer would abide by
a leader chosen by the United States and not them. (In fact, in the Nixon
Administration, the Shah’s regime was identified as the key “gendarme” state in
the Persian Gulf, the local US police enforcer).
Ever since the hostage crisis of 1979, the United States has imposed economic
sanctions of one sort or another on Iran. After the long years of damage to the
Iranian economy and the people at large, the Nuclear Treaty of 2015
(the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), was negotiated by Iran, the United
States, member countries of the European Union, and Security Council members,
Russia and China. Along with Iran’s promise to stop the production
of potential nuclear material, signatories agreed to end the freezing of
Iranian assets deposited in US and European banks, to eliminate various
prohibitions on Western investment in the Iranian economy, and to remove trade
restrictions.
Almost immediately after the sanctions were lifted in the aftermath of the
Nuclear Treaty, the Iranian economy grew: a 12 percent growth in GDP in 2016
and an additional but modest 3.7 percent in 2017. However, in 2018 President
Trump withdrew from the Nuclear Treaty and re-imposed crippling sanctions. As a
result, the Iranian economy contracted by 4.8 percent in 2018 and in a BBC
report projected a further decline of 9.5 percent in 2019.
Iran’s oil exports and hence production was hit particularly hard. The value of
Iranian currency declined dramatically and inflation in the country rose,
particularly for the price of food. (BBC News. “Six Charts That Show How
Hard US Sanctions Have Hit Iran,” December 2, 2019). Sanctions reduced
purchasing power, increased the cost of living for food and transportation,
reduced access of Iranian students studying abroad to financial resources, and
led to the reduction of public services.
This is the story of hybrid war against Iran: along with military threats and
attempts to isolate Iran diplomatically, make the people suffer and cause
increased outrage at the material conditions of life. The hope is that the
people will rise up and overthrow the regime in power (and, of course,
instances of corruption and repression will magnify protest responses).
The scenario has been repeated over and over: Guatemala and Iran in the early
1950s, Cuba since 1960, and now Venezuela and Iran again. And make
no mistake about it: economic sanctions are targeted against civilian
populations and constitute a strategy of war against the people, motivating
them to rise up against their governments.
Meanings of the Hybrid War Concept for the Peace Movement
We can deduce a variety of conclusions from the Law of Hybrid Wars.
First, twenty-first century imperialism is not solely or primarily about direct
military confrontation such as wars and/or covert acts of terrorism against
targeted nations.
Second, hegemonic powers, such as the United States, see coalitions of states
as a threat to global dominance. This is true in Eurasia, the countries along
the Silk Road, and in Latin America where a crippled Bolivarian Revolution
survives.
Third, policymakers do not primarily act impulsively. They see a threat, which
includes transnational cooperation and resistance. Strategists then identify
weak links in threatened coalitions. They formulate multi-dimensional,
stage-by-stage responses. And these responses involve economics, culture,
sowing seeds of division, promoting demonic narratives about target states, and
at the same time they leave “all options on the table,” which means traditional
military action.
Finally, it behooves the peace movement to be cognizant of twenty-first century
methods of imperialism. It must fashion strategies that clearly and
compellingly identify and combat economic sanctions recognizing that they,
indeed, are acts of war.
