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Wednesday, 21 June 2006 04:01 |
 | | Mark West |
The recent documentary ?®Why We Fight?∆ contained a number of scenes that were, to my mind, riveting.
There was a good bit of documentary footage of Dwight D. Eisenhower. I had always thought of him as the last gasp of a passing era. But, after actually seeing him speak, what I found myself thinking was how fortunate our nation was to have once had adults in charge. The 1960s through the 1980s were the era of the college kids; John Kennedy the frat boy, Richard Nixon the grunting junior who just had to be class president, Gerald Ford the sanctimonious FCA leader.
Our
era is the era of the kids; Clinton with his sheepish smile when caught
in the cookie jar, and Bush the tantrum-prone infant. By comparison,
Eisenhower was a grown-up, who had proven his adulthood through his
leadership in one of the most complex and crucial enterprises in
American history.
But what
struck me as the most important part of this film was a few minutes of
commentary by a retired CIA analyst, whose name I can??t recall. What he
did was to lay out the history of Iran and Iraq in such a way that the
whole mess made sense.
So I thought I??d do the same. Here??s my best try at explaining it all, in the same straightforward manner that he employed.
Iran was ruled by the Pahlavi family, who used the Savak, a death and
torture squad to put down dissent. The Pahlavis were tossed out by a
popular uprising, which installed a prime minister named Mossadeq.
There was considerable fear that the populist, and purportedly
left-leaning, government of Mossadeq would destabilize the oil supply
of the West; and so the CIA engineered a coup in which the Pahlavis
were returned to power in the form of Rezi Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran.
The Shah, with U.S. help, provided cheap oil; in return, the U.S.
helped him stay in power via military aid and assistance of various
sorts. Eventually, however, the Shah was forced from office during a
second popular revolution, which propelled the Ayatollah Khomeni to
power. Khomeni hated the US, blaming us for the actions of the Shah,
and had whipped up anti-US sentiment both before and after his return,
which culminated in the hostage-taking at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.
The United States needed an ally in the area who could serve as a proxy
who would keep the Iranians occupied; the message of America as the
source of all evils that Khomeni sought to spread was finding adherents
in much of the Arab world. So overtures were made, including by Donald
Rumsfeld, to Saddam Hussein. Saddam, given assistance by the U.S., made
war against Iran, and both nations incurred huge losses. In time, he
realized that he had been played for a fool by the U.S., and resolved
to recover his stature in his own nation by the bold stroke of
attacking Kuwait. Perhaps he thought that the U.S. would attempt to
find a proxy to fight him, as it had used him as a proxy to fight the
Iranians; or perhaps he thought Arab nations would offer no help to the
US because of the general resentment he believed they felt toward both
the US and the wealthy Kuwaitis.
Instead, the first Bush administration engaged in Desert Storm, and
pushed Saddam Hussein back into Iraq. Hussein, seeing his battlefield
losses, fired missiles at Israel, hoping thereby to generate support
among the Arab nations, but failed. But, after dramatic wins on the
battlefield, Bush I sagely decided to leave a seriously weakened Saddam
in power, no doubt on the theory that he would cause less trouble after
having the majority of his military might eliminated.
There were rumors of Saddam seeking nuclear and biological agents, but the CIA and other groups gave them little credence.
They thought that Saddam was trying to bluff that he had, or was getting, such weapons.
But the current
Bush administration decided that an invasion of Iraq was a good thing,
perhaps to secure the rights to oil contracts, which had, in the main,
been granted to European oil firms.
Under the cover of the 9/11 attacks on the U.S. (which were, of course,
conducted by Wahhabi terrorists, mainly Saudi, under the control of
Saudi-born Osama bin-Laden), and using the justification of the specter
of Saddam??s possession of weapons of mass destruction, the U.S. invaded
Iraq proper.
The neoconservative elements in the current Bush regime truly believed
that the advantages of a free-market system would overwhelm the facts
of history and the natural association the Iraqi people have between
the U.S. and Saddam, in the first place, and the U.S. and our
destruction of their infrastructure, in the second.
They predicted that we would be welcomed with flowers and candy, and
that the people of Iraq would quickly adopt Western democracy.
It would appear that they are wrong; but, as true believers, the
officials of the Bush administration are unwilling to change course.
Furthermore, they took a narrow victory over a wooden candidate in the
2004 elections as a general mandate to go ahead with their plans, no
matter what the cost.
Well, there??s my take on it. I may be wrong, but it??s a story that makes sense to me. If you??ve got a better one, let??s hear it.
?ÿ
Mark West is a professor of mass communications at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.
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