Iran History Revisited: Part 17

(See parts 1-16 below)

In an article, titled “Iran—Ready To Attack,” that appeared in the February 19, 2007 issue of New Statesman magazine, Dan Plesch observed that “American preparations for invading Iran are complete.” The New Statesman also reported that “what was done to Serbia and Lebanon can be done overnight to the whole of Iran,” but “we, and probably the Iranians, would not know about it until after the bombs fell.”

And on April 14, 2009, the World Jewish Congress’s website noted that “Israeli president Shimon Peres has warned that military action against Iran would still be needed if U.S. president Barack Obama’s new diplomatic initiative fails” and “warned that if talks do not soften Ahmadnejad’s approach, ` we will strike him.’…”

Yet much of the hidden history of Iran since the CIA helped the Shah of Iran set up a police state in Iran prior to the 1979 Iranian Revolution still remains unknown to many U.S. voters in 2009.

A CIA employee named Robert Lessard apparently “trained the Shah’s secret police in the techniques of subversion and torture, after the CIA’s overthrow of Mossadegh in 1953,” according to the 1985 book Washington’s Secret War Against Afghanistan by Phillip Bonosky.

Four different underground political tendencies, however, still emerged in Iran to oppose the Shah of Iran’s dictatorial regime following the 1953 CIA coup: the traditional Islamic groups; the constitutionalist and liberal groups; the independent left groups; and the Tudeh Party.

The constitutionalist and liberal groups drew their support mainly from Iran’s secular middle-class and Iranian government employees. Although anti-communist, the Iranian constitutionalist and liberal groups were anti-imperialist in their politics and advocated semi-socialist economic democratization reforms and the democratic political secularization of Iranian society. Together with the independent left groups and the Tudeh Party, the constitutionalist and liberal groups formed a new underground National Front in the late 1950s.

The traditional Islamic groups that opposed the Shah of Iran’s dictatorial regime were led by Iranian politicians from the religious Iranian Bazaar merchant class and the Iranian clerical hierarchy. Although they were opposed to the Shah of Iran’s regime and advocated Islamic unity against Anglo-American imperialism in the Middle East, the Islamic religious politicians were strongly anti-communist in their politics and generally hostile to the secular Tudeh Party. In addition to establishing an Iranian government which would more effectively protect Iranian businesspeople from the economic competition of foreign corporations in Iran, the leaders of the traditional Islamic groups in Iran also wanted to create a society in Iran that was governed by the principles of the Islamic religion. (end of part 17)