Iran is Dangerous--Some History (by Andrew Stirling Ansley)

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=pfbid0swSLoWYZYvNvTecF6QEPYr7wTQr6LfdbUKdQzu31ZSNnGXLbDHnQfg91mLhKQ4TPl&id=717050565&mibextid=Nif5oz 

“Next time someone says that Iran is dangerous and they need to be stopped…here’s some history to share. 

————————

1901: A British businessman secures exclusive rights to Iran’s oil. Iran gets almost nothing from its own resource.

1908: Oil is struck. Anglo-Iranian Oil Company is formed. It later becomes BP. The British Royal Navy converts from coal to oil, making Iranian petroleum a strategic military asset for the British Empire.

For the next 50 years, Iran’s oil is extracted by a foreign corporation. Iran receives a fraction of the profits. Saudi Arabia negotiates a 50-50 profit split with ARAMCO. Iran asks for the same terms. Britain refuses.

————————-

1951: Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, nationalizes Iran’s oil through a unanimous vote in parliament. Completely legal. Completely constitutional. His argument was simple: this is our oil.

Britain responds with an international blockade. No negotiation. No compromise. They want their oil back.

1953: The CIA (Operation Ajax) and MI6 (Operation Boot) overthrow Mossadegh. They bribe politicians, clerics, journalists, and military officers. They fund fake protests. They run disinformation campaigns through newspapers they secretly own. MI6 operatives kidnap and murder Iran’s chief of police and dump his body in public as a warning.

They reinstall the Shah — a monarch who serves Western oil interests. The CIA officially acknowledged its role in 2013.

—————————-

After the coup, BP retains a 40% stake. American oil companies including Exxon and Mobil get significant shares. Iran’s democratic government is gone. Its oil is back under foreign control.

1953-1979: The Shah rules for 26 years as a Western-backed authoritarian. His secret police, SAVAK, is trained by the CIA and Mossad. SAVAK tortures and kills political dissidents systematically. Iran becomes one of the largest purchasers of American weapons. The Shah lives in extraordinary luxury while much of the population remains poor.

During this entire period, Israel and Iran are close allies. SAVAK and Mossad share intelligence. Israel sells weapons to Iran. Nobody in the West calls Iran a “terrorist state” because the dictator is their dictator.

1979: The Iranian people overthrow the Shah in a popular revolution. This is where your list begins — as if the revolution appeared out of nowhere, motivated by nothing but religious fanaticism.

———————————-

Now let’s talk about the US embassy that was attacked. 

The US news likes to paint the 1979 hostage crisis as an unprovoked attack on America. The revolutionaries seized the embassy because the last time there was a democratic movement in Iran, the CIA ran the coup to crush it from that same embassy. They weren’t being paranoid. They were being historically accurate.

Britannica’s own assessment: “It is generally agreed today that the 1953 coup sowed the seeds for the Islamic Revolution of 1979.”

That’s not a conspiracy theory. That’s the encyclopedia.

——————————-

Now let’s ask a couple more questions.

Why are there U.S. military bases in Iraq? Because the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003 on claims of weapons of mass destruction that turned out to be false. Over a million Iraqi civilians died. No American official was ever prosecuted.

Why is there conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon? Because Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 and occupied southern Lebanon for 18 years.

Why are Houthi rebels attacking ships? Because a U.S.-backed Saudi coalition bombed Yemen for years, creating what the UN called the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Over 150,000 dead. Famine. Cholera outbreaks.

Why does Iran pursue nuclear capability? 

Possibly because Israel has an undeclared nuclear arsenal estimated at 80-400 warheads, has never signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty, faces zero international inspections, and has never been sanctioned for it. 

Iran signed the NPT. Iran agreed to inspections. Iran signed the nuclear deal in 2015. The U.S. pulled out of that deal in 2018.

Every single item on your list is framed as Iranian aggression against “the West.” But none of them exist without the West’s 70-year campaign of overthrowing Iran’s democracy, installing a dictator, extracting its oil, arming its neighbors, invading the countries on its borders, and maintaining military bases throughout the region.

Now trace who benefits.

The 1953 coup was about oil. BP and American oil companies got the oil.

The Shah’s 26-year reign was about strategic positioning. The U.S. and Israel got a compliant ally on the Soviet border and in the Middle East.

The post-1979 framing of Iran as a “terrorist state” serves a specific function: it justifies permanent U.S. military presence in the Middle East, billions in annual arms sales to Saudi Arabia and Gulf states, and unconditional U.S. support for Israel’s regional dominance.

Every “Iranian attack” on your list occurred in a country where the U.S. had no legal right to be in the first place — Iraq, Syria, Jordan. American troops are stationed across the Middle East not because those countries asked for protection from Iran, but because the U.S. positioned itself there to control the region’s resources and protect its strategic architecture.

—————————

When someone punches you for 70 years — overthrows your government, installs a dictator, trains his secret police to torture your people, extracts your oil, invades the countries on your borders, surrounds you with military bases, and sanctions your economy into the ground — and then you punch back, the question isn’t “why are you violent?”

The question is: who threw the first punch? And who’s been profiting from the fight ever since?

 

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=pfbid0swSLoWYZYvNvTecF6QEPYr7wTQr6LfdbUKdQzu31ZSNnGXLbDHnQfg91mLhKQ4TPl&id=717050565&mibextid=Nif5oz 

That’s not a defense of the Iranian regime. The theocracy that replaced the Shah has its own record of brutality against its own people, especially women. But that regime exists because the CIA destroyed Iran’s democracy in 1953. The West created the conditions for the very thing it now claims to oppose.

——————————

The history continues.

HAMAS (October 7, 2023)

“Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” said Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, to the Wall Street Journal in 2009. 

Brigadier General Yitzhak Segev, who served as Israeli military governor in Gaza in the early 1980s, told the New York Times that he had helped finance the Palestinian Islamist movement as a “counterweight” to the PLO. “The Israeli government gave me a budget,” the retired brigadier general confessed, “and the military government gives to the mosques

Initially, Hamas was discreetly supported by Israel, as a counter-balance to the secular Palestine Liberation Organization to prevent the creation of an independent Palestinian state. 

And it didn’t stop in the 1980s. According to the New York Times, Israeli intelligence agents traveled into Gaza with a Qatari official carrying suitcases filled with cash to disperse money. 

In 2015, Bezalel Smotrich, currently the finance minister in Netanyahu’s government, summed up the strategy: “The Palestinian Authority is a burden. Hamas is an asset.” 

Netanyahu told journalist Dan Margalit that it was important to keep Hamas strong, as a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority. Having two strong rivals, including Hamas, would lessen pressure on him to negotiate toward a Palestinian state. 

Netanyahu penned a letter to Qatar in 2018 asking the Qatari leadership to continue funding Hamas. 

——————————-

HEZBOLLAH (1983 Beirut bombings, kidnappings):

Hezbollah was formed in 1982 — the same year Israel invaded Lebanon. It didn’t exist before the invasion. Israel invaded Lebanon to destroy the PLO headquarters there. The invasion killed approximately 20,000 people, mostly civilians. Hezbollah was born as a direct resistance movement to that invasion.

The 1983 Marine barracks bombing on the commenter’s list killed 241 Americans. But why were U.S. Marines in Lebanon? Because the U.S. had intervened in the Lebanese Civil War, positioning itself as a participant in the conflict rather than a neutral peacekeeper. The Marines were shelling Druze and Shia positions from naval vessels before the bombing.

——————————

IRAN’S PROXY NETWORK (Houthis, Kataib Hezbollah, militias in Iraq and Syria):

Every proxy on that list operates in a country where the U.S. or its allies intervened first.

Iraq — the U.S. invaded in 2003 on false WMD claims. Iranian-backed militias formed to resist the occupation.

Syria — the CIA ran Operation Timber Sycamore, spending billions arming Syrian rebels, many of whom were jihadists. Iran backed Assad. Both sides were proxies in someone else’s war.

Yemen — the Houthis fight against a Saudi-led coalition that the U.S. armed and supported. The Saudi bombing campaign created what the UN called the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

———————-

The United States propaganda machine goes hard. The enemy is not a republican or a democrat. 

For all of history people knew their governments were evil. Don’t forget that it’s true today. The enemy is not the one vilified by billionaire owned media dynasties”

~~~Andrew Sterling Ansley

——————————————————————-

The tragedy with most people who argue ignorantly, is that most of this information is open source intelligence and not classified information.

Iran: Under the Western Gun for Half a Century

Iran: Under the Western Gun for Half a Century

Whatever one thinks of Iran's government, with its many well known and endlessly publicized faults, imagine a government and a country that have stood up, basically alone, against the combined might of the entire Western Alliance for close to a half century! 

This is the time (around 47 years) that has elapsed since the Shah's government was ovethrown in 1979.

For much of this time, Iran has also faced, though to a lesser extent, the strong displeasure (and the adverse consequences of that displeasure) of firstly the USSR, and then of Russia and China--though these two have subsequently, perforce, become more supportive of Iran, out of dire necessity.

There was of course also the previous quarter century that had followed the British and US supported military coup against the elected government headed by Mossadegh, after he had attempted to move towards Iran getting a fairer share of its oil export revenues from the Western oil companies.

This was in 1953, resulting in 26 years of rule by the Shah and his Savak, in close alliance with the West and its regional allies, including especially Israel. 

Indonesia's government, led by Sukarno, a leader of the non-aligned movement, met a similar fate during 1965-67, again connected in part with oil and gas, and also part of the merciless drive of the Western Alliance against socialism and communism. 

The immediate toll in deaths from that Western backed military coup, led by General Suharto, was much worse in Indonesia, than the immediate consequences of the earlier military coup had been in Iran.

Around a million Indonesians were killed, mainly those who were part of workers' and peasants' organizations, and/or were socialists, communists, or ethnic Chinese. 

I strongly suspect that the government in India, headed by Indira Gandhi, was also targeted by the West for a takedown, following the Indian army's liberation, in 1971, of what became Bangladesh and consequent to Mrs. Gandhi's move towards nationalizations and her continued reliance on the USSR for political backing at the UN and for armaments.

In addition to the major Western powers, headed by the USA, plus the highly aggressive and subversive regional power, Israel, Iran has had to deal with the regional, Western-allied oil sheiks and the extremist "Islamic" militants supported by them, including those operating out of a ravaged Afghanistan to its east and later a ravaged Iraq to its west. 

These militant groups also often had direct or indirect Western backing, of course before 2001-09-11, but also, in some cases, even after that horror in the US homeland.

That atrocity had been orchrstrated by some of those who had been instrumental on wreaking such horrors (but over a much longer time period and with far more massively lethal and other adverse consequences) on the heads of ordinary Afghans and others. 

Iran also had had to deal, soon after the revolution that threw out the Western-installed Shah, with a lethal six-year war launched by Iraq's Saddam Hussein, with strong Western and other backing (using chemical and allegedly also biological weapons supplied by Germany and other Western governments).

That war alone had killed around a million Iranians and left many others maimed for life, including many who suffered through slow deaths from the effects of chemical weapons.

The extreme economic strangulation, currency manipulation, sabotage, cyber attacks, assassinations of scientists, engineers, and others, and much more have never ceased, only grown even worse over time.

All of this conbined has announted to a crushing and increasingly unbearable weight, creating further misery for Iran's population.

Yet Iran--and its government, for all its faults--had not only survived but had done so without kowtowing.

What is more, over time, the Iranian government had been reduced to the sole ally of the militant groups in West Asia that were still offering some resistance to Israeli, Western, and, for (as in Yemen, most obviously) Arab oil sheikh aggression and oppression. 

Compare this with the responses of most other governments (beginning with the regional Arab ones that were not taken out by the US and its allies, but not ending there) to Western-Alliance manipulation through bribing and bullying (to put it most mildly).

The only government and country that has been able to withthstand such extreme pressures, having done so for even longer, has been North Korea, whose popularion had gone through what can only be called a near-genocidal experience in the 1950s. 

However, North Korea did get direct help during that prolonged horror from the newly liberated People's Republic of China and, to a lesser degree, from the USSR. 

Much of what followed in North Korea, including nstitutionalized (and perhaps justified) paranoia about the intentions of the Western Alliance, extreme authoritarianism, dynastic rule,  and the development and publicization of a strong deterrent military capability (in not just its large standing army but also its missiles and nuclear weapons) can be traced to that collective, near-existential experience and trauma of the 1950s. 

2026 March 1, Sun.

Berkeley, California