Why Iran has a problem with the US

[brycejones]

Snatch a purse 5 years in prison. Attempt to snatch the USA. Just let that slide

Sounds mighty white

 

[pmv]

Semantics. It's official US government decision either way. We are not talking unauthorized CIA operations.

A peculiar quirk is that it seems that sometimes the CIA is better-informed/less-gung-ho than the politicians or the Pentagon. I've heard that they had a better understanding of how badly things were going in Vietnam than the latter did. CIA types are often better educated, I suppose.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

Quite a remarkable contrast in the reactions to IA655 vs KAL007

Chomsky and Herman had a lot to say about sympathetic vs unsympathetic victims in their masterpiece Manufacturing Consent about the American mass media's propaganda model.

 

[HomerJS]

This country has a long list of failures to understand other countries cultures.

Example “death to America” was never about killing Americans it was about the death of their policies.

Some want to just forget we overthrew their fairly elected government and put in brutal dictator. Look at it from Irans point of view. They can clearly see the way to protect themselves is having nuclear weapons. If another country did to us what we did to them in the 50s would we react any differently?

This country has never been honest with that history so it is reasonable to bring it up. Conservatives are still spouting the propagandist lie “they hate us for our freedoms”

 

[pmv]

Look at it from Irans point of view. They can clearly see the way to protect themselves is having nuclear weapons. If another country did to us what we did to them in the 50s would we react any differently?

Same applies to North Korea (bracketing out the specific dysfunctions of that country and regime - I'm not denying it's a seriously screwed-up place). The US bombed the ever-living crap out of that country in the war, and they want to ensure nobody can ever do that to them again.

Bombing of North Korea - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

In May 1951, an international fact finding team from East Germany, West Germany, China, and the Netherlands stated, "The members, in the whole course of their journey, did not see one town that had not been destroyed, and there were very few undamaged villages."

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill privately criticized the American use of napalm, writing that it was "very cruel", as U.S. forces were "splashing it all over the civilian population", "tortur[ing] great masses of people". He conveyed these sentiments to U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Omar Bradley, who "never published the statement." Publicly, Churchill allowed Bradley "to issue a statement that confirmed UK support for U.S. napalm attacks."

In August 1951, war correspondent Tibor Meray stated that he had witnessed "a complete devastation between the Yalu River and the capital". He said that there were "no more cities in North Korea". He added, "My impression was that I am traveling on the moon because there was only devastation—every city was a collection of chimneys."

Regardless of how crazy is whichever Kim it is who currently is in charge of the place (I lose track), is it that surprising they now want a nuclear deterrent?

 

[blankslate]

1953...

I mean c'mon their Democratically Elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh had the unmitigated gall to want to have control over petroleum resources that God an obvious oversight places under Iranian territory instead of inside the UK and/or the U.S.

So we just had to help the UK overthrow the ungrateful clod and place in Iran a more reasonable leader who was happy to help correct the error made by the almighty Deity.



__________________
*e2a*
"petroleum resources that God an obvious oversight places under" should read as
petroleum resources that God in an obvious oversight placed under

 

[sdifox]

A peculiar quirk is that it seems that sometimes the CIA is better-informed/less-gung-ho than the politicians or the Pentagon. I've heard that they had a better understanding of how badly things were going in Vietnam than the latter did. CIA types are often better educated, I suppose.

And they should be better informed than elected officials. It's their job.

 

[blankslate]

By the way https://search.yahoo.com/search?ei=UTF-8&fr=crmas_sfp&p=Overthrow+by+Stephen+KInzer

Stephen Kinzer a journalist and author wrote an excellent book covering the regime change activities surreptitiously and sometimes blatantly participated in over the course of 100 plus years.

It's well worth reading and informative and leads one to be a little less credulous when presented with "well they just hate us for our freedoms" argument when it is asked "why do we have beef with this country again?"


_______________

 

[pmv]

And they should be better informed than elected officials. It's their job.

Well, yeah, but, (just from what I remember reading, I'm no expert, I just remember it striking me that for once the CIA weren't the "bad guys") at least in Vietnam, the politicians apparently didn't listen sufficiently to what the CIA guys were telling them, while the military were reporting something very different (with a delusional degree of positivity)

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Part of this discussion points out the myth behind the "deep state conspiracy". One has to study enough of the history to get at a balanced view.

Starting with the National Security Act of 1947, CIA was financed initially by Wall Street, and the top officials recruited from OSS and Yale's Skull and Bones. There arose a close relationship with Big Oil because oil figured as paramount in the national security equation. At the same time, George Kennan's white paper for the JCS defined Cold War strategy to contain Stalin's totalitarianism, and translated into communications with the public to raise public opinion against Communism as an ideology.

On the one hand, CIA was so compartmentalized in fear of counterintelligence threats from NKVD and KGB moles that it was possible for a mid-level careerist assigned in the Bay of Pigs "Operation Zapata" to mastermind the Kennedy assassination, but in Public Opinion this grew into conspiracy theories that included upper echelon such as Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, Frank Wisner, James Jesus Angleton -- and extending to GHW Bush and LBJ. The Mastermind himself understood this and backtracked his plot to implicate or frame LBJ while using Bush as an "accessory after the fact" in setting up the cover-up and the Warren Commission. LBJ was guided into establishing the Warren Commission as part of all of it.

In other words, CIA crippled itself with the compartmentalization, Angleton's clinical paranoia, and Frank Wisner's mental breakdown -- the latter having knowledge of the Mastermind's involvement in CIA's efforts to help Hollywood with Richard Condon's novel turned into the Manchurian Candidate movie. They weren't going to investigate further because it would lay bare their preparation of 2,000 US Marines for infiltration projects (sending Oswald to the Monterey Language School, for instance, and then prepping him to slip into Russia from Finland). And Congress didn't put the kibosh on the Hollywood propaganda film projects until the Church Committee hearings of the mid-1970s.

Beginning with Truman, CIA had too much influence on the White House, and Truman was an easy mark. So they could orchestrate Mossadegh's overthrow and later the election of Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam during Eisenhower's term (take a look at Graham Greene's "A Quiet American" and the 2001 film version). Eisenhower was wary about pursuing war in Vietnam -- as was JFK. LBJ came under the influence of Curtis LeMay and hawks in the JCS, still hoping to extricate us after inserting 200,000 American troops. But historians have always referred to Vietnam as "CIA's war".

There was intelligence about oil in the South China Sea, while the Brits had fought World War I partly to keep Suez open for oil shipments, and after the Balfour Declarations, this extended to the Iran initiative. Oil was Hitler's Achilles Heel on his Eastern Front: attempting to grab the Baku oil reserves while simultaneously pursuing his disastrous campaign to capture Stalingrad.

People want to blame CIA for distortions in foreign policy over oil, but they also wanted to "Get Their Kicks on Route 66" and motor to national parks for summer vacations.

In the end, a large part of the public was ignorant and naive, so they ascribed Iran's historical actions as originating with Islam and conflict with the Christian West. The American public -- for lack of historical understanding is dumber than shit, and Cold War efforts to suppress information as a concern for national security didn't help. So while there was a need to keep CIA operations in the early Cold War under wraps, it worked against public opinion informing a more rational foreign policy.

Like the inscription on the Langley VA building's wall says "The Truth Shall Set You Free."

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Well, yeah, but, (just from what I remember reading, I'm no expert, I just remember it striking me that for once the CIA weren't the "bad guys") at least in Vietnam, the politicians apparently didn't listen sufficiently to what the CIA guys were telling them, while the military were reporting something very different (with a delusional degree of positivity)

Actually, and as I already said, it was called "CIA's war", but eventually defense contracting and the attention to ideology as a threat -- with the "domino theory" -- shaped the insertion in Vietnam. Read David Corn's book "Blond Ghost". False or misleading information about the war was being passed through the CIA's Saigon station to the White House, and McNamara was conflicted between political reality and the findings of the Oct 10, 1963 McNamara-Taylor Vietnam Trip Report. Maybe that's why he named his book "The Fog of War".

But I think you're right to distinguish between what politicians heard from Westmoreland and the JCS, although the routine communications from CIA were more in line with the military palaver, while the Trip Report laid bare the real reasons showing that "Vietnamization" wasn't working. Kennedy would have had us out of Vietnam according to his National Security Action Memorandum 263, but the JCS moved LBJ to keep us in it and issue NSAM 273.

 

[hal2kilo]

A peculiar quirk is that it seems that sometimes the CIA is better-informed/less-gung-ho than the politicians or the Pentagon. I've heard that they had a better understanding of how badly things were going in Vietnam than the latter did. CIA types are often better educated, I suppose.

There has always been tensions between the outfits. Group with well rounded liberal (small l) educations vice people who know what hammers are for.

 

[amenx]

This country has a long list of failures to understand other countries cultures.

Example “death to America” was never about killing Americans it was about the death of their policies.

Some want to just forget we overthrew their fairly elected government and put in brutal dictator. Look at it from Irans point of view. They can clearly see the way to protect themselves is having nuclear weapons. If another country did to us what we did to them in the 50s would we react any differently?

This country has never been honest with that history so it is reasonable to bring it up. Conservatives are still spouting the propagandist lie “they hate us for our freedoms”

I remember when the Shah left his country for exile and cancer treatment in the US. Iranian revolutionary leaders had presumed the US would nurse him back to health and re-install him (or his son) at some future point to overthrow their revolution. The 1953 coup that overthrew Mossadegh was still fresh in their minds. This basically what precipitated the hostage crisis. Of course their POVs or suspicions would never be aired by the MSM or the 1953 coup that brought the Shah to power.