How on earth was Rick Santorum ever a serious Republican nominee? Anyway...
One of the favorite phrases of today's warmongering politicians (including Santorum): "They don't hate us because of our policies! They hate us because we're free!" Unfortunately, the opposite is often true. We're the ones who often fund their oppressors.
Take Iran,
for example, who may be next on our warpath. In 1953 under Operation Ajax,
our CIA and Britain's
MI6 toppled the democratically elected Mohammad Mosaddegh and replaced him with
an oppressive, pro-United States dictatorship under Shah Mohammad Reza
Pahlavi. The Shah tortured and killed thousands in order to preserve his power.
What started it? Iran had
started nationalizing the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which had
previously kept 85% of its profits in British hands. Iran's
strategic position in the Middle East compelled Western powers to use any means
necessary to keep Iran
friendly or submissive to the West, or else Iran might have started selling oil
to and supporting our “enemies” in the region.
…And how did it
all work out? Just like everything else our government tries, it didn't. The
Shah was overthrown in a popular revolution and replaced with the
"thoroughly anti-American" Ayatollah Khomeini.
The Iranian Hostage Crisis followed and
was only resolved diplomatically after a failed rescue attempt left 8 US
soldiers dead in Operation Eagle Claw. Bruce Laingen, chief United States diplomat in Iran at the time, was told by one
of the hostage-takers, "You have no right to complain, because you took
our whole country hostage in 1953." Can you really say he was wrong?
The Iran-Iraq War
in the 1980s saw
U.S.
Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush the Elder sell arms and biological weapons,
including anthrax and bubonic plague, to both
Iran
and the
United States' new
ally in
Iraq,
Saddam Hussein. The goal of our government was to manufacture a bloody truce
between
Iraq and
Iran in order to keep either country from
becoming dominant powers in the
Middle East.
The U.S.
launched Operation Praying Mantis in 1988 to pressure Iran into a ceasefire with Iraq by attacking Iran's
oil possessions and naval vessels in the Persian Gulf.
The ceasefire came after 8 years of war and 500,000 civilian and military
casualties.
Shorty after the
war the USS Vincennes (still in the Persian Gulf)
shot down an Iranian airliner carrying almost 300 innocent civilians, including
over 60 children. The U.S.
has never offered an official apology for the attack.
Iran has been under embargo by the U.S.
since 1995. The U.S. has
over 40 military bases in the countries surrounding Iran, enough nuclear weapons to
destroy the world's population twenty times over, and a military that is better
equipped, trained, and now more experienced than that of any other country in
the world. Iran
hasn't invaded another country in over 200 years, yet we've had not even a
total of 40 years of peace since 1776. Who is the real threat here?
Iran wants war! Look how close they put their country to our military bases!
According to our politicians,
Iran is a threat because they are working on
nuclear power for their citizens, the technology of which
might be converted into a nuclear bomb which
Iran might
use in self-defense
if Iran is
attacked
first. That's quite a lot of
uncertainty, and it's interesting to note that
U.S.
politicians have been saying, "
Iran
is making a nuke," since the 1970s yet our own CIA and the IAEA have admitted
that they don't think
Iran
has one, even now in 2012.
In fact, it’s highly reminiscent of the war propaganda right
before we invaded Iraq.
They drummed up all this support for the war by fear mongering that Saddam
Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction,” including nuclear weapons. However,
the only WMDs we found were the weapons we sold to Iraq
to fight Iran
back in the 1980s. Funny how that works out, but the hypocrisy in our foreign policy is not surprising.
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