The following is an image from an internal CIA report on the successful 1953 coup in Iran that ousted Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq and put the Shah back on his throne. I provide it for you here because I want you to note that the CIA quite actively sought to enlist the support of the “powerfully influential clergy.”
Of course, twenty-six years later that same “powerfully influential clergy” came to power in their own right during Ayatollah Khomeini’s glorious revolution. You should keep that in mind when you are reading the alarmists who are convinced (or, at least, trying to convince you) that the Iranian clergy is completely intent on destroying Israel and America.
It’s disturbing that Jay Nordlinger is willing to detail numerous examples where Iranian clergy, military figures, or politicians have threatened Israel or America but he can’t be bothered to provide a single link or even a reliable translation for any of his sources. How are we supposed to know if he’s mischaracterizing what these people have said? How do we know that they even said it?
And if they did say these things, how seriously should we take their threats? Should we take them as seriously as presidential candidate John McCain’s joking rendition of the Beach Boys classic, “Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran”? Should we take them as seriously as Rep. Louie Gohmert’s threats that he made just this week?
Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) said he thinks it’s time to take drastic measures against Iran.
“It’s time to bomb Iran,” Gohmert said in an interview Wednesday with Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on the radio show “Washington Watch,” according to Right Wing Watch.
“We need to make clear to Iran: You can play these silly games with our president that buys into them and our secretary of state, but the American people aren’t buying it and you’re going to pay a price,” Gohmert added. “We have got to get that message across.”
Speaking of McCain, should the Iranians be afraid when he argues on the Senate floor that Israel should go rogue and bomb them even if they come to an agreement with the international community on their nuclear program?
Nordlinger doesn’t mince around; he goes Full Holocaust right out of the box.
An Iranian general said, “Israel’s destruction is non-negotiable.” Don’t you think President Obama should take note of that? Don’t you think he should say something like, “I understand why the Israelis are a teensy bit worried”?
You may remember what the survivor of Auschwitz said when asked, “What’s the biggest lesson you have learned?” He said, “When someone says he’s going to kill you, believe him.”
There’s no link for those quotes, either.
What’s clear here is that you can find people on both sides making bellicose threats that are really quite frightening if taken at face value. If you have trouble finding something scary enough for your purposes, you can always paraphrase, put the worst light on something, or simply invent the words that you imagine will advance your argument for war. Some publications won’t even demand that you provide credible citations, or any citations at all.
What these folks never do is take any personal responsibility for the series of events that have led us to this place. Nordlinger jokes that President Obama will soon be providing nursing care in the Lincoln Bedroom to Fidel Castro, and that’s really about how seriously we should take him, but these drumbeats for war are cumulative. And they send a message to Iran that is probably even more threatening to them than their threats are to us, because we have the means not just to blackmail them but, as Hillary Clinton said in 2008, to “totally obliterate them.”
“I want the Iranians to know that if I’m the president, we will attack Iran (if it attacks Israel),” Clinton said in an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
“In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them,” she said.
“That’s a terrible thing to say but those people who run Iran need to understand that because that perhaps will deter them from doing something that would be reckless, foolish and tragic,” Clinton said.
Iran doesn’t really need Hillary Clinton to tell them what our nuclear weapons can do to them. If we’re this scared at the mere prospect of Iran getting one 1940’s era nuclear weapon, imagine how they feel when such a wide swath of the American political scene routinely demonizes them and promises their destruction. This tough talk might deter them from doing something reckless, foolish and tragic, but it could also be their main incentive for pushing ahead for a bomb that will give them a measure of deterrence of their own.
I don’t want to make it “look like if the campus Left came to power” in this country, but John Lennon was on to something when he urged us to “give peace a chance.” I think it was Jesus who said, “Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.”
We don’t have to assign benign intent to the Iranian clergy or think that it would be a good idea for them to get a nuclear weapon. But we shouldn’t magnify the threat out of all proportion or give up on finding a way to resolve our differences without killing each other.
I don’t know if President Obama will be called a child of God, but I’m pretty sure those that thirst for war will not be remembered fondly.
Also, someone has to remember our history. Things have a nasty way of not turning out as planned.
Are you kidding with this crap? Iranian specific efforts killed hundreds of American personnel in Iraq with all their proxy militias and IED materiel and cross border support. And what a wonderful nation they helped engineer. You’re acting like they’re some penny-ante scrub like Cuba.
Iran, right now, is complicit in hundreds of thousands of casualties in Syria. Ethnic cleansing, sectarianism, civil war, terror. These aren’t aspersions on their character, it’s the undeniable truth. What, are we next gonna pretend Muqtada al-Sadr is Gandhi?
If this is the new hip position of the totally-not “Campus Left,” count me out. We can deal with Iran without having to make them out as poor widdle victims.
When do we take even an iota of responsibility both for what Iran became, but what they are capable of doing, or the fuckton of headaches we put at their door?
Until two minutes ago, our government was demanding that Assad go. Now we definitely don’t want to see him go anywhere unless he is replaced by a less tarnished asskicker.
You know, the shrine in Samarra was unmolested when Saddam was in charge and blasted to pieces under Viceroy Bush. Who failed to protect their holy sites?
I don’t bring these things up to absolve Iran, but to urge us to consider our actions before we begin them.
Islam is suffering through a horrible sectarian war that we created for them by thoughtlessly upsetting the balance in the region on nothing more than a whim, some greed, and a thirst to make some people Suck.On.This.
As we’re learning, Iran is not the nastiest most unsavory player in town. The creature we helped the Saudis create to fight communism is the nastiest creature in town. So, who do we want to win?
Answer: no one.
What’s the morality of furthering violence when you can’t even pick a winner?
When does it become our responsibility to tamp down the violence rather than abetting it?
Ever?
Iran, right now, is complicit in hundreds of thousands of casualties in Syria.
And Saudi Arabia isn’t responsible either? They’re probably more responsible for the current mess since they fund ISIS, among other things.
I don’t want the responses here to end with BooMan’s, valid as they are.
You’re angry about Iran’s projection of power all over the Middle East. I point out to you that the United States and our allies have been projecting hard and soft power even more ruthlessly, radically and divisively than Iran. There have been plenty of citizens in the region who have been murdered directly or indirectly by the U.S., and plenty of counterproductive meddlings in regional affairs very far away from our hemisphere and culture.
This new hip position of the “realpolitik Left” should be reconsidered. We can deal with Iran without having to make ourselves and our Middle Eastern allies out as poor widdle victims.
You seem to be forgetting who invaded whom.
And if Russians invaded Canada, would we do anything differently than the Iranians (presuming they didn’t need to go through Alaska)? How does our support for dictators & “freedom fighters” around the world compare to Iranians ‘complicity’ (weak tea) in Syria?
It’s fair to say that Iranians are our enemies, but it doesn’t make them wrong.
Along with the Kurds, the Iranians are the only ones keeping our little project in Iraq from completely collapsing. The only way we’re going to get the hardline Shi’ia politicians in Iraq to quit kicking Sunni Iraqis in the teeth and form a sane government is to also get Iran in their other ear telling them to cut the shit — which they have an incentive to do, because the last thing they need is the regional war pushing east to Baghdad.
Muqtada al-Sadr’s not Gandhi by any stretch, but he’s a he’s a hell of a lot less frightening than Abu Bakr and these other Wahhabi/Salafi nutcases.
We’re as responsible for deaths as anyone. We’re the ones who let the sectarian genie out of the bottle by overthrowing Saddam.
I think the term was ‘cheesemakers’.
The obese shall inhibit their girth.
Well, obviously it’s not meant to be taken literally; it refers to any manufacturers of dairy products.
Better keep listening. Might be a bit about ‘Blessed are the big noses.’
I was teaching Iranian history the last few days (timely!) and it’s a clear pattern that the Ulema – the clergy – are at the root of every successful “revolution” in 20th C Iran. The 1906 revolution, the 1921 coup, the 1953 coup and the 1978 revolution.
They were split in 2009, so that didn’t succeed.
There is a dominant strain in Iranian Shiism that prefers Quietism – the separation of mosque and state. Once Khamenei dies…who knows?
Iran is hardly the boogeyman unless you insist that it is always 1979.
And 1979 always sucked. I mean…really.
It so happened that I wandered over to The Corner at the National Review right before I arrived here at the Frog Pond. Man, those horse’s asses are even more full of shit than usual. Norlinger can be counted on to trot out horrible claptrap with a strong racist aftertaste, but the whole Corner is a sewer these days.
Reihan Salam and Romesh Ponnuru are supposed to be the moderate intellectuals in the bunch, the ones you bring out when you’re trying to broaden your appeals wider than the FReeper crowd. Yet today I learned from these two that a discussion of GOP policies on immigration must not mention nativism/racism, a discussion of the lower-skilled labor market must not mention the poorer educational offerings to low-income and immigrant communities, and discussions of effective Federal tax reform must include the elevation of the flat tax as good policy and the elevation of Amity Shlaes as a serious policy wonk.
The Ponnuru POS ends with this paragraph, an astonishing one to write at a time of middle-class wage stagnation and wealth hoarding by the 1% and corporations:
“Shlaes and Denhart don’t spell out the details of the flat tax they have in mind, but it seems likely to involve higher tax rates and higher tax bills for married couples with less than $75,000 a year in taxable income (especially if they have kids). Getting rid of the tax exclusion for health insurance would hit scores of millions of people, and the payoff for it would be bringing tax rates on people in the top third or so of the income distribution down. Getting rid of the mortgage-interest deduction would have a similar trade-off. All in all, that kind of plan, while it does have its merits, seems like it would generate more than its share of resentment.”
Ramesh is sentient enough to understand that there would be “resentment” over this hideous set of policies, but he fails to explain to me what “merits” this theoretical policy change brings. Guess “it gets the rich richer and the poor poorer whoopee!!” is all you need to deliver to their audience of moral and intellectual deficients.
as I recall getting rid of the mortgage deduction is another third rail- can’t belief he’d put it out front like that
Ponnuru should have lost his reasonable reform conservative badge ages ago when he affixed his name to a truly heinous book called “The Party of Death”. Just because he can dress himself in a suit and speak and write in complete sentences doesn’t make him a “sharp” or “thoughtful” conservative, as he is so often described.
His writing on health care is Republican pablum dressed up in less head-injury-stupid language.
His thoughts on foreign policy, to the extent I’ve seen or read him opine, have been neocon BS in a softer voice.
His fiscal “ideas” are warmed-over voodoonomics with the occasional shout-out to an expanded EITC to make it look like he gives a shit about the poor, which he doesn’t.
He’s only a hair better than the teabagger morons he’s supposedly trying to save his party from. Really, he’s just trying to sand off their hard edges so the GOP stays electable.
I don’t know if the Iranian clergy had a beef with Mossadeq but the CIA must have known that they definitely had no inclination to support the Shah. What a stupid analysis on the part of the CIA—it wasn’t the first time and we all know it wasn’t the last. In fact the clergy fully expressed its regard for the Shah in the 19 79 revolution, in case no one has noticed. By the way, Israel is just worried that Iran might find more favor and influence in the U.S. in the long run, which will probably happen. Then Israel might have to behave. And if anyone should behave it is Ms Clinton who needs to wash her mouth with soap for that hypocritical, incendiary statement aimed to flatter and seduce Israel and U.S. Israeli backers. It’s filthy.
A politicized traditional clergy against a secularized politically left prime minister. I’m sure that the CIA played the “Godless Communism” card for all it was worth. The regard that the clergy expressed in 1979 for the Shah was the result of 26 years of SAVAK as much as anything.
Israel remembers the Eisenhower policies in which Ike frustrated the Anglo-French attempt to take the Suez Canal and also had a more even-handed almost hands-off approach to the Israel-Palestine issue. And Israel is well aware that a denuclearized Iran means that Israel is the only country in the region with major stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction–none of them declared or under international supervision. From an international law perspective it is Israel that is the rogue state in the WMD nonproliferation regimes.
As for Clinton, it is a severe misfortune that politicians must play to the current political attitudes of concede the field to the likes of McCain and Goehmert and Cruz. That is a failure of a lot of cultural institutions including the awareness of the elites who are running the country.
The CIA must have known that playing both sides of the Iraq-Iran War would come back to bite them or that arming Islamist terrorists against one superpower would give those terrorists the illusion that they could take down the last superpower.
I think a comprehensive historical audit of the CIA would show that it has made the world more dangerous and US national security less secure. I think it would also show that the CIA has acted as a parking place for a certain type of romantic sociopath and has functioned primarily, as all its predecessor relationships have, as an errand boy for US elite individuals and large corporations.
I think an honest comprehensive audit of the results of the Truman administration’s national security architecture for the Cold War, which you must remember was quite a bit less aggressive than what the Nixon-McCarthy bunch sought, has been a huge catastrophe for US national security and the US economy.
link
Mossadeq was doing two things to upset the Ulema: He was courting the Marxist Tudeh party – officially atheist – and he was discussing land reform.
Guess who owned most of the land. Hint: It rhymes with Ulema. In much the same way Henry VIII broke with Rome over both divorce and seizing church lands, the Ulema sided with Pahlavi over atheism and the protection of church lands.
In fact, the Shah’s father wanted to be the Iranian Attaturk in 1921, but the Ulema convinced him to become Shah, because they feared a secular republic.
Both Pahlavis – father and son – then spent an inordinate amount of time and effort trying to modernize Iran. It was Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s White Revolution in the 1960s that radicalized the Ulema – especially Khomeini – against him.
Lack of economic opportunity and the brutality of the SAVAK turned the masses against him.
But the 1978 Revolution could have gone a very different way than it did. Which is sad.
Often, when Iranians speak of what is rendered in English as “the destruction of Israel,” or something similar, they aren’t talking about killing Jews, or blowing stuff up. They are talking about the political entity Israel, not its inhabitants, and what they mean is that there should be a secular state in all of Palestine. They are probably also implying a right of return for Palestinians which creates big problems over property rights. Of course the settlements would have to be abandoned but that happens to be the international consensus. This is obviously unrealistic, but let’s at least understand what we’re talking about. It’s a vast gulf but it’s not what people think it is. And as for Iran using a nuclear weapon against Israel, give me a break. Israel already has 200 nukes. Iran would be a sheet of radioactive glass. Israel also has overwhelming conventional military supremacy. Iran is no threat to Israel except for sponsoring asymmetrical warfare. That’s an issue that certainly should be addressed.
interesting. any way you would write a diary about the translation/ literal meaning of the term? have never seen it discussed
Prof Juan Cole has had numerous posts at his site Informed Comment explaining what Iranian Hardliners (like Ahmadinejad) “mean” when they have used such language in Farsi.
Yes, Cole translated Ahmadinajad’s most notorious remark as something like “erased from the map of time.” He was referring to Israel as a political entity, not the slaughter of its inhabitants.
thanks, I’ll look for it
One would think that getting Farsi translators in the US who are refugees from the Islamic Republic would sort of put a bias on the translation. I suspect that that is an unacknowledged problem with American perceptions of Iran in all sorts of institutions.
It’s like getting Tom Cotton to translate Obama’s statements on anything.
I’ve read that “death to” is a common construction in Iran, used trivially and often. “Death to this burnt toast!” It’s not really that strong a condemnation. Anyone feel free to verify and correct me if I’m wrong here.
There isn’t the same level of anti-Semitism in Iran that you typically see in Arab countries.
In fact, there is a seat in the Majles explicitly reserved for Jews. (And one for Zoroastrians and three for Christians.)
Quite amazing that no one in the corporate media can observe that elected leaders of the American right routinely utter threats to severely damage Iran and cause significant Iranian casualties whenever a discussion of Iranian threats occurs on the teevee. The most bellicose nation on earth charging others with reckless militarism (usually in their own backyard!) is always comic, the pot calling the kettle black.
But of course the American “conservative” movement does not consist of peacemakers and hasn’t since at least WWII. Indeed, Warmonger McFool is seen as a RINO, haha.
It goes without saying that the American right will never accede to any deal with demonically “crazy” Iran, having spent the last 35 years attempting to build them up to the latest Third Reich or Soviet Union. If Khomeini’s Shi’ite Superpower didn’t exist, the American right would have to manufacture it; its existence is crucial to every aspect of neo-con policy, they cannot “lose” it. Thus, the American right will never permit any reduction in confrontation, let alone even the far off hope of normalization of relations—they will not allow Iran to be diplomatically treated as we treated the Soviet Union for decades, although the parallels are obvious. After all, diplomacy might very well have a chance of success, and the American right has long set its face against American success.
Of course Iran has not sought such relations to date, but if ever there is the slightest chance of a change in Iran’s stance (such as now), the American right will ensure it is smothered in the cradle. While American public opinion (to the extent it can be known) has to date seemed to “approve” of a diplomatic arrangement to solving the “nuclear issue”, the Righwing Noise Machine is already being deployed against this announced framework to collapse those numbers which will occur over the coming months, aided and abetted by the worthless corporate media.
No attempted deal will ever satisfy the American right because for a militarist, jingoist nation, war and the threat of war with eternal existential enem(ies) must always be on the horizon. This is a foundation stone of modern “conservative” rhetoric. It even appears to be part of the “conservative” personality, reinforced 24/7 by the Coaches of Team Conservative.
Hard to see how anything can be accomplished on the peacemaker front given such a deranged national environment. And of course this is all without regard to the perpetual machinations of our dangerous “ally” Israel….Obama is basically a saint for even attempting it! This will be quite a spectacle indeed…