For me, any sensible discussion of Iran must accept a number of facts. I will set these out as Set A and Set B. Both sets are true. But ideologues of the right routinely discount Set A, while ideologues of the left routinely discount Set B. That is why most debate on Iran is inane.
Set A
Iranian Islamic fundamentalism allied to fierce anti-Americanism was born from CIA intervention to topple democracy and keep in power a ruthless murdering despot for decades, in the interests of US oil and gas companies
Iranian anti-Americanism was fuelled further by US support for US friend and ally Saddam Hussein who was armed to wage a murderous war against Iran, again in the hope of US access to Iran’s oil and gas
The US committed a terrible atrocity against civilians by shooting down an Iranian passenger jet
Iran is surrounded by US military forces and has been repeatedly threatened to the extent that the desire to develop a nuclear weapon is a reflex
There is monumental hypocrisy in condemning Iran’s nuclear programme while overlooking Israel’s nuclear weapons
Set B
Iran is governed by an appalling set of vicious theocratic nutters
Iran is not any kind of democracy. It fails the first hurdle of candidates being allowed to put forward meaningful alternatives
Hanging of gays, stoning of adulterers, floggings, censorship and pervasive control are not fine because of cultural relativism. Iran’s whole legislative basis is inimical to universal ideals of human rights.
Iran really is trying to develop a nuclear weapons programme, though with some years still to go.
There are two very good articles on the current situation in Iran. One from the ever excellent Juan Cole. I would accept his judgement on the elections being rigged.
http://www.juancole.com/2009/06/class-v-culture-wars-in-iranian.html#comments
The other from Yasamine Mather, which puts it in another perspective.
http://www.hopoi.org/articles/elections%20June%202009.html
I am not optimistic about the outcome of the popular protest.
/slaps forehead and laughs at eddie.
Oh dear.
I’m not laughing.
This troll is standing up for the mainstream media view on this board.
Crying is more appropriate.
“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident” .Arthur Schopenhauer
eddie seems to be completing the circle nicely, and all in one thread. Impressive.
“I am almost certain that Craig Murray’s blog will have been a target of infiltration to manipulate public opinion at all levels in order to distract people from learning and recognising the truth.”
Damn, it didn’t work. We’ll have to get the Bilderberg man to sack Operative E and get a proper agent. We told them to send us a professional and they wouldn’t listen. Now we will insist on the best. No more amateurs!!
Oh dear, is that the best you can do?
Edo, your website is still crap. I particularly like the bit where you talk about “shit floating around in my cranium”. Your words not mine but I see your point.
Meanwhile, for all you lovers of oppression and censorship, The Guardian reports that today’s march in Tehran has been called off as the government has deployed 5,000 armed and trained plain-clothes forces to confront marchers. That is armed as in bullets that come out of the end of a gun and kill you, in case you are in any doubt. What will be the CIA’s next move I wonder?
Have I got this right? Is Eddie really saying that he supports a popular peaceful uprising of the Iranian people even if it happens to be supported by the US government?
If so, well done, Eddie (I’ll ignore his furious and aggressive tone) Surely anything else would be a bit of an insult to the peaceful millions who defied the march ban. It’d be like the Americans saying, oh just ignore the UK’s anti-war marchers; they’re sponsored by the Communists, surely.
Mouussavi appears to be pro women’s rights (good); pro corporatisation (bad); pro dialogue with Israel (good); pro “enforcing Iranian laws” (possibly bad); pro reducing the power of the “Moral Police” (good); and pro privately owned media (mmm). Not a Chavez, then. But who is? Even Lula turned out not to be.
I know very little about the current regime in Iran, except enough about its record on gay rights to make me wonder if the surgery it provides for trans sexuals, referred to by one commentator, is elective or not. Other than that, I frequently defend it – Ahmajindedad didn’t say “wiped off the map”; he wrote a nice letter to George Bush; Iran doesn’t have nuclear weapons; there are Jewish people living peacefully in Iran (though not having much fun, maybe) etc etc blah blah.
But when I see people on the streets in such committed numbers, agitating for what they see (I think) as a more liberal and humane direction, I think “yipee”. Even if I cynically predict that they will end up getting sold down the river by their corporate overlords just like the rest of us, damn.
“What will be the CIA’s next move I wonder?”
To destabilise the whole world…
http://tinyurl.com/lyeeze
and here…
tinyurl.com/knah57
Ladbrokes are currently offering odds of 100/1 for Craig to win the Norwich North By Election. I doubt those odds will last when people realise Craig has a real chance of winning here!
It is not Iran in 1953 again – but somehow I can’t but notice some similarities – consider this – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRwUZ-u6KFo
Oh dear eddie.
You deride those who claim Iran is crawling with CIA fixers yet it’s not as if the CIA aint got historic form in this arena is it?
Chile?
Central America?
Italy?
Greece?
And many more places since 1948.
What exactly do you think the CIA do eddie? This is their remit and it’s already been publicly announced by the US Govt,this year,that hundreds of millions of the intelligence budget is earmarked for the CIA to stir things up in Iran.
Do try to keep up eddie.
Further,when you’re not very rudely and childsishly changing people’s name in your posts you then have to gall to accuse others of ad hominem abuse then pepper your replies with the F and C word!
Oh dear eddie.Oh dear.
http://tinyurl.com/n9setb
Right-wing Israeli interests are engaged in an all out Twitter attack with hopes of delegitimizing the Iranian election and causing political instability within Iran.
technicolour – perhaps irony is beyond your grasp? It’s like steely, only made of iron. Other than that, your post is a voice of relative reason in a sea of sewage. Well done.
Your point about transsexual surgery is interesting. Iran appears to have a liberal policy on this but there is plenty of evidence to suggest that LGTB people are pressured into having gender re-assignment as a way of avoiding further persectuion. If it was a choice between execution and having my bollocks cut off I think I would probably choose the latter, however painful.
Latest report from The Guardian, all foreign journalists have been forbidden to leave their offices and the regime has been clearing offices around Valisar Square to fill them with armed militia.
lwtc247 – And when Ahmadinejad won for the first time, people didn’t respect the Iranian peoples choice then, still ignoring the fact that he was democratically elected, calling the country a dictatorship. A similar story can be told of Hamas and Chavez.Unlike those two cases, Iran quite objectively is a dictatorship. What else can you call it when candidates are only permitted to stand for office if they are approved by a completely unelected body?
Hm. Firefox seems to play silly buggers with the format of my post. What I was trying to say, in response to lwtc247, is that a system where you can only be electd to office after approval by an unelected body, as in Iran, *is* a dictatorship. It’s difficult to see how that can be denied.
Allegedly, Ahmadinejad worked for some time as an interrogator, torturer and executioner of political opponents in the notorious Evin Prison.
True or not, it is easy to believe that he is a very bad man indeed.
The trouble is, if I were an Iranian, would I prefer an american-backed candidate to him. Probably not.
The displaced who yearn for the good old days of the Shah might disagree.
Obama, according to the Bryzinski doctrine (he is Bryzinski’s man), does not want to attack Iran on behalf of Israel. He wants to turn Iran against Russia.
In Bryzinski’s ‘Great Game’, the serious threats to US hegemony come from Russia and China so balkanisation of these countries and any potential allies (like Pakistan or Iran) would be all to the good. To get Iran where they want it the promoters of colour revolutions (this regularly occuring caper seems to be a Soros project) they need to get their own man installed in Tehran…..or destabilise the country so that the change will occur later.
Truly horrible and wicked stuff.
The Iranian people do not deserve the horrors that have visited on Iraq.
Their politics is as grim as most but we should wish the country well and that it remains out of America’s clutches.
The American devils do not intend to serve anyone’s interests but their own.
Hearing Obama say he was ‘very disturbed’ about the violence in Iran on the news this morning was vomit-inducing.
‘violence?”disturbing?’……Tell that the the Pakistanis or the Afghans or the Iraqis…….
…………you filthy mass-murdering c*nt you.
hey, eddie…..they deserve it really though, don’t they?
Er, thanks, Eddie. No, you don’t sound ironic to me, you sound quite livid. And sometimes not a little nasty. But hey, so do lots of the others.
What does everyone who thinks that the CIA are entirely responsible for this suggest the people of Iran do, I wonder? Put up with the current regime in case any alternative turns out to be a CIA plot?
Technicolour – you are probably right, I am livid about those who support theocratic fascists.
But perhaps I am wrong, perhaps this uprising is all done with smoke and mirrors on photoshop and Iranians actually want more theocracy, more hanging of Gays, more oppression of women so that they can then expose 9/11 and the Holocaust as Jewish conspiracies. Then they can build their nuclear bomb and nuke Israel. Perhaps we are all Ahmadinejad now.
I don’t think so.
How do you seriously, I mean seriously, suggest that the CIA have brainwashed all these people into taking to the streets, dodging bullets in the process? Have they paid them? Are you seriously claiming that these people are sheep, being manipulated by “dark forces” [email protected]
Why does it bring forth the same sort of mockery every time anyone suggests that organisations such as MI5 (official title, ‘The Secret Service’) do, uh, secret things, i.e. things concealed from the majority of the public? The role of the CIA and all the rest of these bodies is precisely to conduct covert operations and these include psychological and information operations – as well as to conduct analysis, etc. Did you know that from WWII to the late 1980s, an Secret Service Officer used to sit in an ofice in the BBC HQ on Queen Margaret Drive in Glasgow, vetting all internal and external job applications. Did you know that Kay Carmichael, partner of Neal Ascherson, was refused a job becasue she was considered suspect on some ridiculous premise. She was one of many. Did you know that successive BBC director-generals denied the existence of this SS officer? It was admitted to only in the early 1990s. Now, they don’t need a person sitting in an office.
Of course, manipulation of opinion doesn’t convince everyone – but it doesn’t have to, it simply has to sow doubt and discord, flood the media with misinformation and create the orthodoxy that anyone who points to its mechanisms must be deluded.
Do you know what the CIA have DONE over the past 60 years – covertly, yes, that means in secret! Did you know that they had the biggest base outside Langley on the road between Islamabad and Rawalpindi in Pakistan throughout the 1980s? Unmarked, but everyone knew where it was an what it was. Do you know why? What do you think they were doing?
Did you know that the majority of Fleet Street’s Industrial Correspondents during the 1950s-70s were on the SS payroll?
This is not ‘conspiracy theory’. This is documented evidence, admitted to by the SS themselves and boasted of by the CIA! In 1953, the democratically-elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh was declared clinically insane by the UK Press and heinous stories were spread about him. 1956, Nasser: same thing – he was ‘Hitler’. Saddam Hussein, remember him? Remember the ‘babies flung out of incubators’ story? Completely false. He had, what was it now, ‘nuclear, biological and chemical weapons ready to attack London in 45 minutes’. Right. Fantasy – but it was swallowed by the media, lock, stock and long-gun barrel. In 1928, Lawrence ‘of Arabia’ manufactured photographs of the Queen of Afghanistan’s face on top of the body of naked woman as part of a (successful) disinformation campaign to bring down King Amanullah Khan who was attempting to advance his country – the UK wanted a weak buffer-state rather than a strong nation-state. There’s much more. Now, it’s the blogosphere and we are the ‘natives’. The point is to be clever natives rather than stupid ones.
JIVES
I though you had more sense than that.
Watch this video from The Guardian and then tell me a) that these demonstrators are CIA stooges and b) that you don’t support them.
You should be ashamed of yourself, supporting these fascists.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBp2p3MGJqw
How about both of these are true:
a) The CIA have actively tried to destabilise Iran, and are justifying their existence and budgets by claiming to have succeeded
b) The majority of Iranians want the regime out.
Which brings us back to Mr Murray’s post.
I do think it’s insulting to assume Iraqis would need special coaching in how to use Twitter. Or that the opposition couldn’t have come up with the idea of a green symbol all by themselves.
And I wonder how good the CIA actually are – some people here seem to think they’re omnipotent. Paradoxically, I also wonder how the people of Burma would feel if the CIA tried to ‘destablilise’ their dictatorship by pouring money and resources into the democratic opposition. Not that bad, I imagine.
Of course meddling never really mends. I think it will be a disgrace and a shame if Iran ends up with an American stooge at its head, sewn into the IMF’s golden straitjacket, pumped full of GM crops and with oil multinationals continuing to corrupt their economy and their politics. But what do people here suggest the Iranians do, apart from put up with Ahmajinedad?
Also, I am pretty sure, this way they know the US won’t be bombing them? Poor Iranian people.
“According to then CIA officer Richard Cottam, ‘that mob that came into north Tehran and was decisive in the overthrow was a mercenary mob. It had no ideology. That mob was paid for by American dollars.'”…
http://tinyurl.com/lrm4lj
Suhayl: “Do you know what the CIA have DONE over the past 60 years – covertly, yes, that means in secret! Did you know that they had the biggest base outside Langley on the road between Islamabad and Rawalpindi in Pakistan throughout the 1980s? Unmarked, but everyone knew where it was an what it was”
Doesn’t sound very secret to me 😉
I’ve noticed the BBC’s apparent inability to find one voice in favour of Ahmajinedad, however (perhaps I’ve missed them).
I’d love to take part in this debate, but @eddie, if you persist in coming here, swearing and using various ad hominem attacks make you look like a nutter and/or a stooge. Of this thread in particular, my guess is you are here to be disruptive, though I hope I am wrong.
Personally I support any genuine opposition to the Iranian regime. I don’t think the people on the Iranian streets are all CIA collaborators. But I deplore any external influence that does not have the views of the Iranian people at heart, which as history teaches would likely include US/UK tinkering. After the lies over Iraq, the West is quite morally bankrupt, and its involvement (if any) should be viewed with deep suspicion.
@Suhayl Saadi – thanks for your calm and measured posts, which are refreshing here!
George Dutton: Yes, well he would say that, wouldn’t he?
@eddie,
Give your other orifices a chance!
You have been systematically spamming this board with the same lines of asinine bile.
I am sick of the lines of arguments about Gays in ………. , a minority whose sexual proclivities are best left to themselves, and not paraded around as a badge of honour, or a must live life style. Furthermore what sex has to do with it? Every single post of yours winds up going on about sex, that is about the unusual kind of sex, what are you a pervert, or are you a closet homosexual?
So far as your pontifications goes about fascism, you have no idea what the words mean, you are living in a fascist state mate. However the ignorant moron that you are, whilst busy regurgitating bilge, you cannot see where you live, and how idiotic your posts appear. You are on record attributing trains running on time to Hitler!
Be advised it was Duce who is suppose to have had the trains ran on time, or for you to understand Mussolini the very good friend of Sydney Harmsworth, that is Lord Rothermere to you, the Jewish owner of the Daily Mail and mentor to il Duce, whom coined that rumour. In fact Trains were never on time whilst il Duce was around.
So far as your mendacious persistence for spamming the board with “fascism” goes, Fascio is the one that pays and sends you to spam this board. Fascisti are the criminals in US/UK/Israel whose cynical world view has brought humanity nothing but misery. Your monkey trap is only good enough for your kind of hairless apes, stop talking about morality, you have none, and your posts manifestly proves it.
You are asserting that a bunch of irate yuppies in Tehran, in search of more thrills forming the Gucci Crowds filmed runing amok are the representative of the aspirations of Iranians for “freedom”!!!!!! What kind of scum bag are you? To spin the expression of the freedom of action, on display in the streets of Tehran as oppression?
Eddie: why (how?) do you link Iran’s oppression of women to Iran’s wanting to bomb Israel? It doesn’t follow. You are presenting the country as armed and dangerous. It is not armed and dangerous. Ahmajindedad’s tone towards the West has, if anything, been conciliatory. Whatever your problems with Iran’s internal human rights record, and however pure your support for its liberal, peaceful people, you do not need to be hysterical about the place, OK?
VamanosBandidos. Can you stop screaming insults in a manner which would get you sent out of any respectable classroom – it makes it hard to hear your point. Are you saying that all those millions of people were “Gucci” types? Iran must be incredibly rich.
EDDIE.
At what point in my post simply detailing acknowledged CIA methods did i offer any support to any particular regime?
And I’m certainly no supporter of fascists or theocrats-believe me.
Kindly read my psots more fully before levelling such baseless accusations against me.
Thanks.
eddieTroll(TM) opens his bowels again on this blog, brandishing the word fascism around while slamming others for using it in an equal or more valid sense.
eddieTroll(TM) curses, spittle flying, falsely insulting and labeling people with derogatory terms and complains people insult him.
eddieTroll(TM) blinkers himself to the crimes of his Blair Bush blow-up dolls, and believes he has some cosmic right to interfere in other countries, yet this right doesn’t apply to others.
eddieTroll(TM) lives in a country that has nuclear power and nuclear weapons yet believes he is endowed once more with that cosmic force to decide who can have it and who cannot.
eddieTroll(TM) doesn’t appreciate that the country tat inspired the star spangled underpants he never removes is the only country evil enough and insane enough to have used nuclear weapons, twice!, and ever the bully boy, threatened to end the human race in the 1960’s.
eddieTroll(TM)’s indented consciousness lives in a country that has been to war numberous times over the past century yet would love to see the fall of a country that has been on the receiving end of war over that same century.
eddieTroll(TM)’s grand imperialist illusions are the stuff of nightmare that have apoliges it’s sorry little ass off for the deaths of countless millions – the kind of death-trash we so long to put behind us.
@Suhayl: “MI5 (official title, ‘The Secret Service’)”
A little history for you. The body that was formed in 1909 to carry out surveillance on Germans suspected of spying was the “Secret Service Bureau”. Subsequently the domestic branch became known as the “Security Service”, while the foreign branch became the “Secret Intelligence Service”. The terms MI5 and MI6 stem from the first Word War, and have stuck after they ceased to be official.
@Suhayl: “MI5 (official title, ‘The Secret Service’)”
A little history for you. The body that was formed in 1909 to carry out surveillance on Germans suspected of spying was the “Secret Service Bureau”. Subsequently the domestic branch became known as the “Security Service”, while the foreign branch became the “Secret Intelligence Service”. The terms MI5 and MI6 stem from the first World War, and have stuck after they ceased to be official.