Ever since George W. Bush lost the popular vote by 500,000 souls and was selected President by a right-leaning Supreme Court, the United States has seemed to me devoted to a twisted fate of slow-motion Armageddon.
What seems to guarantee this is one of our most characteristic American traits: We don’t learn from the past; instead, we choose to officially forget embarrassing history so we can move on from our debacles without losing an ounce of glory. We all know how it goes: Sure, mistakes were made, but we need to keep our eye on the ball and move forward. The costs are paid in slow motion and out of sight.
Our leaders are either complicit in the gig or they feel compelled to pander to this weakness for forgetting history as they pump up the boilerplate myth and symbols. We’re now, of course, officially entering the silly season in America, so maybe we should not be surprised that the idea of going to war is in the air.
Torture victims of the Shah's Savak, an election office in Teheran and an Iranian guided missile test
The fear of history became clear to me back in 1992 when President George Bush Senior was pushing something called Education 2000 and decided to make a speech at Norristown High School outside Philadelphia, where my wife taught Art. The President’s advance team asked that the school’s Art Department provide a painted backdrop for the President; they wanted a large book. Being artists and, thus, by nature subversive, my dear wife and her colleagues asked themselves what was the subject matter the President of the United States would be most uncomfortable with. They chose HISTORY and painted that word on the cover of the book.
Early on the day of the speech, the White House advance party arrived and right away told the Art Department to change the book’s title from HISTORY to MATH. History, of course, was not even a part of the President’s Education 2000 program. The America of the first George Bush was forward looking. Yes, mistakes had been made in our history, but it was mathematics and cold-blooded technological advancement that had to be emphasized. We want to hear the confident hum of a machine future, not the human shrieks of horror from the past.
Official history is limited to antiseptic and patriotic narrative and anything that supports the Myth of American Exceptionalism. All other history is certainly available for those so inclined, but it’s not the stuff of American politics or our mainstream media. It’s not something to be learned from. History is written by winners, and the US is always a winner – even when it loses, as in Vietnam. Then official history focuses on scapegoats and on whom to pin the Stabbed in the Back Myth.
Only those outside the political carnival, the detached and the marginalized, are able (or interested) to see a national debacle for what it is. Consider George W. Bush’s unnecessary nine-year invasion and occupation of Iraq, something that helped put the economic squeeze on the poor and middle class of America, as it sent their sons and daughters to be mangled in a confusing war zone, as it wrecked Iraq and empowered Iran, which we’re told ad nauseam now is our worst enemy.
And of course the current Democratic President who opposed, and campaigned against, the Iraq War now follows the rules of power in America and talks like Richard Nixon about honor as he belatedly brings the troops home from the debacle he opposed. It’s guaranteed now that his Republican opponent will use the Stabbed in the Back Myth against him like a flaming tire flung around his neck. These folks would have had him re-invade Iraq, which would have been necessary for our soldiers to continue to be immune from Iraqi law.
So Iraq is history. Iran is The Big Show now.
Iran is surrounded by US bases and allies, making for a not-very-secure feeling, given US history with Iran
It’s historic fact that the United States in the 1940s and early ‘50s joined with Britain in making Iran a servile colony for the extraction of oil. Mohammad Mossadegh rose to office as a popular Prime Minister devoted to Iranian dignity and independence vis-a-vis the West. Mossadegh was so troubling to the West he was put on the cover of Time magazine twice and was even named Man Of The Year in 1951 — as in boogie-man of the year. According to the highly disrespectful story in that issue, “The fact that Iranians accept Mossadegh’s suicidal policy is a measure of the hatred of the West.” In other words, the un-modern Iranians had to be delusional to find resonance with Mossadegh’s life-long dream of independence from the West.
Mossadegh went on to nationalize the British oilfields in 1953, whereupon he was overthrown by a joint US/British coup. As we have done in many other places, we bamboozled the Iranians, wrecked things and installed a friend, in this case the notorious Shah of Iran, who cleaned the place up with a ruthless, brutal secret police force. That police force – the dreaded Savak — was organized and advised by Norman Schwarzkopf, Sr, a tough mob gangbuster in the US and father of the famed Gulf War general. (In an interesting note, in the current film J. Edgar, gangbuster Schwarzkopf is disdainful of the more dandy J. Edgar Hoover.)
Norman Schwarzkopf senior, Mohammad Mossedegh, the Shah and his wife, and Ayatollah Khomeini arriving in Teheran in 1979.
As a friend formerly married to an Iranian told me the other night, as bad as the Shah was, he greatly modernized Iran. And no doubt there is some truth to that. The same can be said for Hitler and Stalin. But a great many Iranians don’t think modernization efforts outweigh the atrocities of the Shah’s oppression. And, furthermore, as the consumer, ecological and sustainability movements have made clear, much that goes under the rubric “modernization” can be quite problematic for the Earth and the sense of community needed for a Middle Eastern society to flourish. Also, much of the benefits of that modernization ended up in the hands of westerners and the rich cronies of the Shah.
Western historians like Samuel P. Huntington and Bernard Lewis have made esteemed careers with the argument that the Middle Eastern and Arab world has failed to modernize at a pace consistent with Western standards. The trouble is the Huntington/Lewis argument comes with a history of voracious Western designs on those nations’ resources and of demands for fealty to our military might. In response, places like Iran have turned to Shia Islam for cultural strength. The same goes for the Sunni Islamic Brotherhood in Egypt and elsewhere. The Iranian government may be alien and not our cultural cup of tea, but it’s unfortunately for us a logical response to the historic hostility to independence Iran has faced from the west, including Israel.
Personally, I don’t want Iran to have nuclear weapons. It’s a terrible idea. But I also don’t want Israel to have nuclear weapons. The same goes for China, India, Pakistan, England, France, Russia, North Korea and the United States. If I have missed anyone, I would include them too.
History makes it tragically clear why Iran wants nuclear weapons. They want them for the same reason we have them, as an emblem of their power and a check on others who have historically shown very real hostility towards them.
History also suggests that if Iran were to design and manufacture a nuclear weapon, there is no evidence they would be crazy enough to use one preemptively in a world full of nations with vastly superior nuclear arsenals and delivery systems. The fact the Iranian President may spout hatred of the United States and Israel is not evidence; just listen to the identical hatred spouted here in the US and in Israel about the Iranians. Iran would seem to have a lot to live for; suicide is not a trait they exhibit.
This has certainly been the case with North Korea, another regime we pillory with charges of insanity. It has a number of nuclear weapons it could deliver to South Korea easily. Why aren’t we threatening North Korea with bombings? Why are we instead offering them shipments of food?
Because the real reason Iran is in the sights of the United States and, especially, Israel is clear. As a tax-paying American citizen who did his small part to make the unnecessary historic debacle known as the Vietnam War what it was, I submit the problem is that both the United States and Israel operate on mythic fuel that deludes their citizens into believing they are exceptional and the chosen people, respectfully. They have been hookwinked by politicos and holy men with inadequate and distorted historical thinking into believing Iran is the devil inherent intent on menacing the poor, innocent West.
This irrational, mythic bunk is how we tend to see the rest of the world, and it has gotten so out of hand these days that instead of questioning the utility of these myths our political and cultural leaders actually nurture and reinforce them, making the situation even worse. And since the mainstream media and both political parties are complicit, the smart American voter who might on his or her own see the utility of breaking this doomed cycle is presented with no political choice at all.
Sure, one of the candidates will be better than the other on something (for this reason, I always vote), but when it comes to the really big issues of Militarism and the growth of Police State Tyranny, there’s no choice at all. The American citizen is stuck on a runaway train.
Because he doesn’t play by this book, former Member of British Parliament George Galloway has the temerity to ask, “What has Iran ever done to us?” On a recent radio show Galloway debated a caller who gave the middle-brow line about the need to attack Iran. Galloway pointed out that Iranians are very capable and sophisticated and that they will take a strategic bombing campaign as a declaration of war and act accordingly by retaliating against us with bombs wherever and whenever they can.
People who think a strategic bombing attack on Iran will be like the Israeli attack on Saddam’s plant back in the 1980s or the Israeli attack on a Syrian plant a couple years ago are delusional. Galloway says it clearly: “If we bomb Iran, Iran will bomb us back.” The listener absurdly responds by saying that’s why we need to bomb them. Galloway throws up his hands: “There are people listening to this who will not know whether to laugh or cry.” The listener doesn’t grasp any of the history and is operating purely on fear and the delusion that somehow bombing Iran will lessen the danger that nation poses to the United States, Israel and the West. It’s like never having heard of the concepts of overconfidence and unforeseen consequences. I’m a member of Veterans For Peace and we like to say, “Wars are easy to start but very difficult to stop.” So the idea is to not start them and to work out problems another way.
No one in power listened to this kind of thing back in 2003 as the war drums were being beaten for the invasion of Iraq. The basic message of the antiwar movement – that invasion would lead to disaster and was not necessary to contain Saddam — was ignored and ridiculed by both the government and the mainstream media. A government that had not even been properly elected relied on delusion, secrecy and outright lies to scare the American people into passivity so it could have its invasion. The antiwar movement was like Cassandra, the Greek prophetess the gods cursed with the exasperating dilemma of speaking truth that would not be heeded.
The creeping police-state the Bush regime created still exists and continues to grow at a fearsome pace, feeding on itself and becoming more stealthy and sophisticated every year. Too many of our leaders seem to feel comfortable with this situation and with the idea of going to war with Iran.
The best thing the citizens of the United States could do for the nation’s future is find the courage to undertake a major historical reality check. It’s not that the narrative information is not out there in volume after volume of respected history. It’s that our “official story” is perennially sanitized and linked to forward-looking, blind power, which leads us to repeat the same power-hungry debacles over and over.
Humility is hard to achieve when people have been brainwashed into believing they are “exceptional” or “the chosen people” on this Earth. But that’s the kind of hard work that’s needed.