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Iran was being raped for the oil and the Shah brutally ruled for 25 years with increasing repression on the people ... but the people finally got tired of that dictator and took him out in the 1979 revolt.
How much were we paying for the oil?
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And now the government that took over following that revolution are executing gay men:
Britain was the first country steal Iran's oil in the early 1900's but then in 1952 the Iranians (Mosaddegh) kicked BP out and took back their oil. Then Churchill got Eisenhower to topple the last Iranian democratically elected government and install a puppet government leader (King Mohammad Reza Pahlavi) ... The Shah if Iran
You are pretty much correct. It was a grave mistake.
But...(there is always a but....) the thing is, when Mosaddegh was toppled, the crowd that is now running Iran was cheering from the sidelines.
Mosaddegh was simply a Nationalist, not some wacked-out Mullah measuring how much light one can see between couples dancing together.
And you feel that "responsibility" includes overthrowing other governments so that we can install puppet governments that serve OUR interests instead of their own citizens?
As a Pakistani immigrant I support US putting secular puppets in place over Islamist like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.
Drop a few bombs on the Taliban, MB, Boko Haram or any other Islamist group that wants to enslave women and kill apostates, homosexuals and blasphemers.
Overthrowing their elected government and then installing the Shah as our puppet in the '50s led to the revolution in 1979, which led to the government in Iran right now.
That's debateable. The economic situation in Iran in the late 1970's was quite bad. Further, the Shaw was becoming increasingly undemocratic. The revolt began in October 1977, mostly led by religious leaders as a general revolt against Western norms and Capitalism. These religious leaders succeeded because the economy and the government effort to correct it was hitting the poor especially hard. There was also a lot of internal political turmoil at this time. In other words, there were a lot of intertwined, complex internal factors that led to the revolution. The overthrow in 1953 was occasionally invoked as a convenient political excuse but that certainly wasn't the prime mover. The rise of radical Shia Islam as a response to deteriorating internal affairs played a much more important roll.
Should we have helped orchestrate a coup in 1953? That's a tough question. At the time, given increasing Soviet influence in the context of a total Cold War with the Soviets, maybe. And keep in mind the coup was really at the behest of the British. There was also plenty of Iranian cooperation. We didn't just go in there and steamroll the country. But there was some public resentment as well. It was a very complicated situation and we have no way of knowing what would have become of Iran had we not gotten involved.
Why, to distract from the fact that the Iranian post-revolutionary government has a terrible record of human rights abuses against it's own people?
If you'd like to start a thread about why Saudi Arabia sucks, I'd be more than happy to go there and discuss that.
For now, let's stick with Iran.
Do you approve of their human rights violations and their treatment of gay people?
First of all the information you hear is from our government and the mainstream media. Our media routinely spread lies and propaganda about our own economy and political scandals. They have also been caught spreading lies and propaganda to demonized governments that were toppled under Arab Spring regime change operations and Ukraine. Why would I believe anything they say now about any other country they want to topple?
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