Bob Dreyfuss: Could Covert War With Iran Become Overt Before November 3rd?

By Dilip -

History’s a joke, right? We know that from our president who creates laughable moments of history daily -- as when, reading from a script recently, he pronounced America’s famed Yosemite National Park “Yo-Semite.” In that context, let me bring up one of his favorite countries: I-Run. Its modern history, if anybody remembered anymore, would leave us all chuckling grimly. If you’re thinking about alternate futures (and you happened to remember the past), you might wonder what that country would have been like if, in 1953, the CIA and British intelligence hadn’t overthrown an elected secular democratic government there led by Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh at the very moment when he wanted to nationalize the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (now known as BP). They then reinstalled the autocratic young Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi in power along with his terrible secret police, the Savak.

Vanessa Thorpe: MI 6, the coup in Iran that changed the Middle East, and the cover-up

What, you might wonder, would that nation have been like had it remained a secular democracy, had there been no need for masses of Iranians in revolt more than a quarter of a century later to pave the way for an exiled fundamentalist ayatollah named Khomeini to take power from the shah and turn Iran into an Islamic fundamentalist country? I mean, honestly, a democratic, secular Iran probably wouldn’t have been the country served up on a platter to Donald Trump as he came into office spouting anti-Islamic trash. And whatever it might have become, it probably wouldn’t have been the possible target for an “October surprise” either - as TomDispatch regular Bob Dreyfuss points out today - back in October 1980 or, potentially, in October 2020.

All these years since September 11, 2001, administrations in Washington have run a war on terror in response to the destruction created by 19 al-Qaeda hijackers, but we Americans so easily forget the terror we’ve visited on others in our years as a great imperial power. Think about that today, as you consider the possibility that the Iran that is, not the one that might have been, could become the target before November 3rd of far worse than the drone assassination of one of its leader...
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176739/tomgram%3A_bob_dreyfuss%2C_could_covert_war_with_iran_become_overt_before_november_3rd/


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