Iran wasn’t always the bastion of Shiite extremism that it is today. Its leaders weren’t always called “Supreme Leader,” either. And it didn’t always view the United States as a mortal enemy.
These are the results of a historical inertia that has been in motion for decades, begun in large part, but not exclusively, by the actions of one Central Intelligence Agency.
Via Daily Mail:
While revealing new details about the CIA rescue mission that inspired the Ben Affleck film Argo, the agency has for the first time acknowledged that the 1953 coup it backed in Iran was ‘undemocratic’.
The admission came in a recent episode of the CIA’s podcast, The Langley Files, released about a month before the unprecedented Hamas attack on Israel last weekend.
The 1953 coup, backed by US and British intelligence and carried out by Iran’s military, saw the overthrow of Iran’s elected prime minister and cemented the monarchical rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
The TL;DR version of the coup was the Iranians elected through their representatives in the parliamentary system a prime minister named Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1951. He ran on what might be called an “Iran First” platform of nationalizing the oil in the country as opposed to allowing British Petroleum to export all of it.
British Petroleum was displeased with Mosaddegh for obvious reasons, and so it recruited the CIA to replace him, through covert means, with Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, otherwise known simply as the Shah, who could be relied on to play ball. Iranians understood and resented the foreign meddling in their politics, and eventually, a band of religious extremists garnered enough popular support to overthrow him in 1979, ushering in the era of the Ayatollah.
The consequences of this sequence of events from a geopolitical perspective cannot be exaggerated. Were it not for the CIA coup and the subsequent Iranian Revolution, it is possible, although not guaranteed, that Iran and Israel would not be locked in an intractable ideological battle with existential implications for the entire region, if not the planet.
Related: How Neocons Could Sleep-Walk Us Into World War III
It is also very possible that Hezbollah, and perhaps Hamas, would not exist in their current forms if not for the Iranian regime that sponsors, equips, and trains them.
Conveniently, the CIA has waited to admit its culpability in undermining the democratic process — what is purportedly a cardinal sin of the highest order, by the way, according to the corporate state when it comes to MAGA domestic terrorists and Russia — until all of the participants are dead.
The real question is: when will the top spooks get hauled in front of Congress and made to answer questions under oath about all of the other — dozens if not hundreds — of coups it has run much more recently across the globe?
I won’t hold my breath as long as the Brandon entity is in office. His handlers are the CIA, so they would never subject themselves to such scrutiny.
Incidentally, why is the CIA permitted to run a podcast called “The Langley Files” on American soil, the stated purpose of which is “to educate and connect with the general public, sharing insight into the Agency’s core mission, capabilities, and agility as an intelligence leader”? Disseminating misinformation is literally at the core of the CIA’s stated mission. Why do the American people permit themselves to be propagandized with their own money by a rogue agency with no oversight and a documented track record of lying in the furtherance of its own interests?
