Iranian Protests: Deep State’s Unfinished Business
- Iranian Protests: Deep State’s Unfinished Business
by , https://journal-neo.org/
Protests have been reported across several cities in Iran over the last several days of December 2017. Protesters allegedly decry Iran’s economy as well as the nation’s involvement in nearby Syria.
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The Western media has attempted to cultivate two narratives – one focused on portraying the protests as widespread, spontaneous, and having focused first on “economic grievances” before becoming political – another narrative openly admitting to US involvement and praising US President Donald Trump for “standing up” to the “Iranian regime.”
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Of course, neither narrative is even remotely grounded in reality.
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US Meddling in Iran Stretches Back Decades
US regime-change operations targeting Iran stretch back decades and have continued within a singular geopolitical strategy, regardless of who has occupied the White House, including under the more recent US administrations of George Bush, Barack Obama, and now Donald Trump.
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While pro-war circles in the US claim the 1979 Iranian Revolution was an instance of Iran drawing first blood, the revolution was in fact a direct response to then already decades of US meddling in Iran stretching back as early as 1953 with the US Central Intelligence Agency’s Operation AJAX.
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Regarding Operation AJAX, in an entry on the CIA’s own website titled, “All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror,” it admits (emphasis added):
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The target was not an oppressive Soviet puppet but a democratically elected government whose populist ideology and nationalist fervor threatened Western economic and geopolitical interests. The CIA’s covert intervention—codenamed TPAJAX—preserved the Shah’s power and protected Western control of a hugely lucrative oil infrastructure. It also transformed a turbulent constitutional monarchy into an absolutist kingship and induced a succession of unintended consequences at least as far ahead as the Islamic revolution of 1979—and, Kinzer argues in his breezily written, well-researched popular history, perhaps to today.
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The article – a review by the CIA’s own history staff of a book regarding Operation AJAX – admits that US policy regarding Iran merely picked up where the British Empire left off in an effort to reassert rapidly-slipping Western control over the globe. In no way was US efforts to undermine and control the government of Iran described in terms of protecting US national security or promoting democracy – and in fact was characterized instead as undermining Iranian self-determination.
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It is this admission that reveals the core truth of today’s tensions between Iran and the United States. The West still seeks to reassert itself and its economic interests in the Middle East. Notions of “freedom,” “democracy,” as well as threats of “terrorism,” “nuclear holocaust,” and even the ongoing conflict with nearby Israel, Saudi Arabia, and other Persian Gulf States are but facades behind which this self-serving neo-imperial agenda is pursued.
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