Iran History Revisited: Part 10

Iran History Revisited: Part 10

(See parts 1-9 below)

In January 2007, the editor-in-chief of the Kuwaiti-based Arab Times, Ahmed Al-Jarallah, reported that “A reliable source said President Bush… held a meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Robert Gates…and other assistants in the White House where they discussed the plan to attack Iran in minute detail.” Yet in 2009 President Bush’s Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, is still the U.S. Secretary of Defense.

And as Eric Margolis observed in the February 16, 2009 issue of the Khaleeq Times:

“The CIA… funds at least one extremist Pakistani Sunni group that launches raids into Iran, attacking government posts, soldiers and civilians. Further covert American aid goes to armed separatist groups among Iran’s Arab and Azeri minorities…The US Congress has repeatedly voted hundreds of millions for such covert operations.

“The US has also waged a…financial and economic war against…Iran…

“Israeli elections produced a sharp move to the right, increasing chances Israel may make good on threats to attack Iran…”

Yet most U.S. high school social studies departments, ironically, still don’t require their students to study much 20th-century Iranian history.

In December 1946 the Shah of Iran’s central government troops marched back into Iran’s northwestern Azerbaijan region, entered Tabriz on December 12, 1946 and overthrew the pro-Soviet, revolutionary left-oriented Azerbaijan autonomous government that Turkish-speaking Iranian people there had established in 1945, prior to the May 1946 foreign Soviet troop withdrawal from Iran. But between December 9 and 12, 1946, some people in Azerbaijan had resisted the Shah’s Iranian Army troops, and 1,500 Azerbaijani Iranians, including 800 Tudeh Party members, were killed by the Shah’s central government troops. Twenty-six former Iranian army officers who had helped defend the Azerbaijan autonomous government were also killed by Iranian Army firing squads after the Iranian Army occupied Iran’s Azerbaijan region.

One reason the autonomous leftist regime in Iran’s Azerbaijan region collapsed so quickly in December 1946 was that it had lost the support of the still extremely religious Azerbaijan peasantry--when the local clergy in the Azerbaijan region turned against the Azerbaijan regime after it gave Azerbaijan women in Iran the right to vote. Another reason for the quick collapse of the Azerbaijan republic in Iran was that Iranian leftists felt that continued resistance to the Shah of Iran’s central government troops there would have provoked UK government and U.S. government military intervention in that region of Iran and a bloody civil war in Iran, which they wanted to avoid. Other reasons for the quick collapse of the leftist Azerbaijan regional government in December 1946 were the unfavorable objective conditions and the abandonment by the Soviet Union of its previous policy of supporting the leftist Azerbaijan government in Iran. (end of part 10)