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bismi-lLahi-rRahmani-rRahiem
In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful
=== News Update ===
http://www.latimes.com/services/site/premium/access-registered.intercept
From the Los Angeles Times
U.S. history lesson: stop meddling
In the last 100 years, the U.S. has ousted the governments of at least 14
countries and forcibly intervened in dozens of others -- to what end?
By Stephen Kinzer - May 13, 2006
THE UNITED STATES is facing a major crisis in Iran, where the clerical
regime, despite its denials, is evidently embarked on an effort to develop
nuclear weapons. Because American leaders say they will not tolerate a
nuclear-armed Iran, this has led to intense speculation that the Bush
administration is preparing a military attack.
History suggests, however, that such an attack would have disastrous
long-term consequences. Iranians know as well as anyone how terribly wrong
such foreign interventions can go.
Iran was an incipient democracy in 1953, but Prime Minister Mohammed
Mossadegh chosen by an elected parliament and hugely popular among
Iranians angered the West by nationalizing his country's oil industry.
President Eisenhower sent the CIA to depose him. The coup was successful,
but it set the stage for future disaster.
The CIA placed Mohammed Reza Pahlavi back on the Peacock Throne. His
repressive rule led, 25 years later, to the Islamic Revolution. That
revolution brought to power a clique of bitterly anti-Western mullahs who
have spent the decades since working intensely, and sometimes violently, to
undermine U.S. interests around the world.
If the Eisenhower administration had refrained from direct intervention
against Iran in 1953, this religious regime probably would never have come
to power. There would be no nuclear crisis. Iran might instead have become
a thriving democracy in the heart of the Muslim Middle East.
Overthrowing a government is like releasing a wheel at the top of a hill
you have no idea exactly what will happen next. Iranians are not the only
ones who know this. In slightly more than a century, the United States has
overthrown the governments of at least 14 countries, beginning with the
Hawaiian monarchy in 1893, and forcibly intervened in dozens more. Long
before Afghanistan and Iraq, there were the Philippines, Panama, South
Vietnam and Chile, among others.
Most of these interventions not only have brought great pain to the target
countries but also, in the long run, weakened American security.
Cuba, half a world away from Iran, is a fine example. In 1898, the United
States sent troops there to help rebels overthrow Spanish colonial rule.
Once victory was secured, the U.S. reneged on its promise to allow Cuba to
become independent and turned it into a protectorate.
More than 60 years later, in his first speech as leader of the victorious
Cuban revolution, Fidel Castro recalled that episode and made a promise.
"This time," he vowed, "it will not be like 1898, when the Americans came
in and made themselves masters of the country."
Those words suggest that perhaps if the U.S. had allowed Cuba to go its own
way in 1898, the entire phenomenon of Castro communism might never have
emerged.
The U.S. deposed a visionary leader of Nicaragua, Jose Santos Zelaya, in
1909 and sent his unlucky country into a long spiral of repression and
rebellion.
Forty-five years later, still believing that "regime change" can end well,
the U.S. overthrew the left-leaning president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz,
and imposed a military regime. That regime's brutality set off a 30-year
civil war in which hundreds of thousands died.
Today, Latin America and the Middle East are the regions of the world in
the most open political rebellion against U.S. policies. It is no
coincidence that these are the regions where the U.S. has intervened most
often. Resentment over intervention festers. It passes from generation to
generation. Ultimately it produces a backlash.
Countries that have been victimized by past interventions are especially
determined to resist future ones. Iran is one of these. Over the last 200
years, the British, Russians and Americans have sought to dominate and
exploit Iran. If the U.S. intervenes there now, it will face the pent-up
anger many Iranians harbor against all outside powers.
Some in Washington evidently believe that it is worth trying to set off
upheaval in Iran because any new regime there would be an improvement.
This is a dangerous gamble, as intervention would strengthen the most
radical factions in Iran. Militants, including the bombastic President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, would use it as an excuse to crack down on dissent.
That could lead to a wave of repression, produce a regime more dangerously
anti-American than the current one and set back the cause of Iranian
democracy by another generation.
This looming crisis might be resolved by direct and unconditional
negotiations between Washington and Tehran, but American leaders refuse to
bargain with the mullahs. The trauma of the Islamic Revolution, and the
hostage crisis that followed it, left a deep scar on the American political
psyche so deep that it prevents the U.S. from engaging Iran in ways that
could have great benefits for American security.
Yet far from being doomed to conflict, these two proud nations are
potential allies. Both want to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan, assure the
free flow of Middle East oil and crush radical Sunni movements like the
Taliban and Al Qaeda. What prevents talks from materializing is the deep
resentment both sides feel over past interventions.
Iran has intervened across the Middle East, sometimes using the extreme
weapon of terror, to attack U.S. interests. For its part, the U.S.
intervened to crush Iranian democracy in 1953, imposed the shah and
supported his repressive rule for 25 years.
The cure for the effects of past intervention is not more intervention.
Given the seriousness of the nuclear crisis with Iran, American leaders
should put aside their self-defeating and increasingly dangerous refusal to
negotiate. The alternative may be violent intervention in Iran. Americans
have tried that before. The results would be no happier this time.
STEPHEN KINZER, a former foreign correspondent for the New York Times, is
the author of "All the Shah's Men," about the 1953 coup d'etat in Iran,
and, most recently, "Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from
Hawaii to Iraq."
===
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