Undeclared Intentions, Military Interventions: A Family Story
    By Arlen Parsa
    t r u t h o u t | Perspective

    Sunday 08 October 2006

    It has been reported that the recent 34-day war between Israel and Hezbollah militants was not what it appeared to be. The official reason for the war, which killed more than 800 civilians, was that two Israeli soldiers had been kidnapped by Hezbollah militants, after the soldiers illegally passed into Lebanese territory. Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, of The New Yorker (best known for revealing the My Lai Massacre and Abu Ghraib torture scandal), has written that the war was planned months in advance, and that the kidnapping was merely used as a last-minute pretext. Hersh says that it was used as a tactical trial-run for a possible US war with Iran: used to test the technique of destroying targets embedded deeply within civilian populations and large cities. In this case those targets were the supposed Hezbollah strongholds in Beirut and other locations in Lebanon.

    Hersh suggests that the same tactics could be used by American forces in a targeted aerial assault on Iran's major cities, deep within which are said to be nuclear development sites. A possible regime change could then follow.

    Though the White House denies involvement with Israel's war against Hezbollah, the United States supplied much of the weaponry used, including American-made cluster bombs which were used against civilian populations - an express violation of international law. The idea that the United States could use such tactics against Iranian cities to wipe out suspected nuclear facilities in an analogous (but much larger and more extensive) bombing campaign is both a wretched and frightening thought to me personally.

    In 1945, my father was born in Gonbad-e Kavus, Iran. After the second World War drew to a close, Iran's democratically-elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh was overthrown in 1953 by the CIA. The CIA then installed a monarchist regime because the previously secular Iranian government was nationalizing the oil industry (thus cutting off a key profit opportunity for Western oil corporations). After the American-supported Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and his new prime minister, Fazlollah Zahedi (who had previously been exiled due to his Nazi sympathies), took power with the support of the White House, they scrapped nationalization plans and began to again do business with American and European oil corporations. In order to distract the Iranian public from what they were doing economically and politically, the supposedly secular Shah worked to heighten religious consciousness among ordinary people and turn public sentiment against a small peace-oriented religious minority called Baha'i's.

    My father, being Baha'i, suffered firsthand the results of the propagandistic clerical broadcasts on state radio, which encouraged discrimination and even violence against Baha'i's. The US-supported regime imprisoned and executed dozens of Iranian Baha'i's during this period, while mobs killed others independently. For his part, my father was only beaten by his classmates and teacher, but state-encouraged activities such as this were occurring all over the country. At one point, my father's family and other local Baha'i's gathered sticks and baseball bats and began patrolling the neighborhood to guard against the mobs - and the Iranian police themselves.

    As a result of a repressive US-installed regime, which lasted more than twenty-five years, Iranians eventually rebelled and overthrew the monarchist government. Unfortunately the revolution, which originally began as a secular movement, was hijacked by religious extremists, and a radical Islamic government came to power. In the span of fifty years, Iran had gone from a British-supported monarchy to democracy, to a repressive US-supported monarchy, to a radical Islamic quasi-democracy, which was more repressive still.

    Under the new regime, repression of Baha'i's (which had been encouraged by the American-supported government) only increased further. My grandfather, a prominent and respected Baha'i leader, was put on a list of people to be executed, and eventually had to flee his home and go underground.

    Despite having illegally funneled weaponry to the Islamic Republic of Iran in the 1980s, the White House has made no secret that they want the current Iranian government overthrown. Tens of millions of American tax-payers' dollars have been given to Iranians who want to overthrow the government as well. Ironically enough, many of the Iranian dissidents competing for White House funding are the same monarchists who have been in and out of power for the better part of the last century.

    Considering the American history of military intervention in Iran in the past, and the personal consequences which my father's family suffered as a result, I do not think that the White House should try to decide what is best for the people of Iran. That will have to be decided by the Iranian people themselves.

    The excuse that the CIA officially maintained when it overthrew the democratically-elected secular government of Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 was that the Soviets were going to overthrow it first - and spread communism further into the Middle East. In the end, however, it is almost universally accepted among scholars and historians that the American government's undeclared intention in authorizing a coup was to re-open access to nationalized Iranian oil for Western oil corporations (Iran just happens to have one of the top five largest oil reserves in the world).

    Iran officially maintains that its nuclear program is intended solely for peaceful purposes, and nobody knows whether or not this is true yet, though the White House would like the world to believe that there is definitive evidence that Iran is building the bomb. Regardless of whether or not the White House's suspicions are correct, I fear that nuclear weapons may ultimately serve as the communism of the 21st century.

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    Arlen Parsa is a student studying documentary film at Columbia College Chicago. In the summer of 2006, he produced a documentary about his father's struggle to escape Iran after the 1953 coup and become an American citizen. In between classes, Parsa blogs about American politics and current events at TheDailyBackground.com.