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The Shah Reconsidered[W:39]

Re: The Shah Reconsidered

Jack Hays said:
Lewis's article explains the cultural foundation that gives rise to such flights of fancy.
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Nothing you have said is even remotely connected to the Lewis article. You're trying to enter some nonsense about Iraq into an article that was written in 1990.

If anything, Lewis validates what the critics of American policy in the Middle East have been saying for a generation. He also says that the best thing for the US to do about it is - nothing, and let the Arabs handle it themselves. Islam he says, if anything, brings order to an otherwise chaotic society that had joined the hording crusaders of the west in the Middle Ages.

You never read the article, you can't even state the thesis of it, and as usual Jack, you have no idea what you're talking about. The only thing that is put to rest in it is the uninformed and specious myths propagated by America's ignorant right-wing.
 
Re: The Shah Reconsidered

Jack Hays said:
So . . . how could a putative US "puppet master" have allowed such a thing? Perhaps because your narrative is without foundation? As the record makes quite clear, the Shah invested the preponderance of Iran's oil wealth in national development.
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Jack most of the time our historical debates are ones based on what ifs.. but this is not a what if. The Shah as we know him due to a CIA and MI6 operation known as Operation Ajax and the reason why Operation Ajax was put into motion was because Mohammad Mosaddegh and the nationalist Government wanted to nationalize Oil, i.e. Anglo-Persian Oil Company. US overthrew a democratically elected Government to install the Shah.

Here are declassified documents on it.

Article in 2013 where the CIA admits to it.

US and UK didn't care if the Shah invest his pennies on the dollar from oil sales into development as they had the same agreement with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

End of the day the Shah and his "Government" was brutal to people. Any disagreement and you disappeared. SAVAK made Abu Ghraib and anything CIA has done look like amateur hour.
 
Re: The Shah Reconsidered

Sherman123 said:
Replacing it with an unimaginably more brutal and authoritarian sovereign. The mass graves of Khavaran cry out at the horror. Bahai, Tudeh, Zoroastrian, Homosexual, Montazeri-ite, Communist, Democrat, Dissident---all have been buried in the regimes graveyards for the crime of being undesirable.
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Oh stop with the melodrama. Seriously, if you have to pull up all that crap (most of which is pretty authoritarian in and of its own right, Communism? - you'll defend Communism in an attempt to defend the Phalavi Dynasty and downplay what it was) to muddy the waters, then your ideas are worthless.
 
Re: The Shah Reconsidered

Jack Hays, please edit the OP to include the name of the individual the topic is about.

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi

People have a right to know and research whom you are talking about.
 
Re: The Shah Reconsidered

austrianecon said:
Jack most of the time our historical debates are ones based on what ifs.. but this is not a what if. The Shah as we know him due to a CIA and MI6 operation known as Operation Ajax and the reason why Operation Ajax was put into motion was because Mohammad Mosaddegh and the nationalist Government wanted to nationalize Oil, i.e. Anglo-Persian Oil Company. US overthrew a democratically elected Government to install the Shah.

Here are declassified documents on it.

Article in 2013 where the CIA admits to it.

US and UK didn't care if the Shah invest his pennies on the dollar from oil sales into development as they had the same agreement with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

End of the day the Shah and his "Government" was brutal to people. Any disagreement and you disappeared. SAVAK made Abu Ghraib and anything CIA has done look like amateur hour.
Click to expand...

Thank you for your summary of myths. Please review the OP article.
 
Re: The Shah Reconsidered

jet57 said:
Nothing you have said is even remotely connected to the Lewis article. You're trying to enter some nonsense about Iraq into an article that was written in 1990.

If anything, Lewis validates what the critics of American policy in the Middle East have been saying for a generation. He also says that the best thing for the US to do about it is - nothing, and let the Arabs handle it themselves. Islam he says, if anything, brings order to an otherwise chaotic society that had joined the hording crusaders of the west in the Middle Ages.

You never read the article, you can't even state the thesis of it, and as usual Jack, you have no idea what you're talking about. The only thing that is put to rest in it is the uninformed and specious myths propagated by America's ignorant right-wing.
Click to expand...

If you don't understand the connection then you're not equipped for the discussion. I suggest you stop, read, and reflect before you embarrass yourself further.
 
Re: The Shah Reconsidered

austrianecon said:
Jack most of the time our historical debates are ones based on what ifs.. but this is not a what if. The Shah as we know him due to a CIA and MI6 operation known as Operation Ajax and the reason why Operation Ajax was put into motion was because Mohammad Mosaddegh and the nationalist Government wanted to nationalize Oil, i.e. Anglo-Persian Oil Company. US overthrew a democratically elected Government to install the Shah.

Here are declassified documents on it.

Article in 2013 where the CIA admits to it.

US and UK didn't care if the Shah invest his pennies on the dollar from oil sales into development as they had the same agreement with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

End of the day the Shah and his "Government" was brutal to people. Any disagreement and you disappeared. SAVAK made Abu Ghraib and anything CIA has done look like amateur hour.
Click to expand...

Pearls before swine, as it were.
 
Re: The Shah Reconsidered

Abbazorkzog said:
Oh stop with the melodrama. Seriously, if you have to pull up all that crap (most of which is pretty authoritarian in and of its own right, Communism? - you'll defend Communism in an attempt to defend the Phalavi Dynasty and downplay what it was) to muddy the waters, then your ideas are worthless.
Click to expand...

I think it's interesting that you consider the slaughter of tens of thousands of people to be melodrama. And, no, I generally don't support the mass execution of communists.
 
Re: The Shah Reconsidered

Sherman123 said:
I think it's interesting that you consider the slaughter of tens of thousands of people to be melodrama. And, no, I generally don't support the mass execution of communists.
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And how were the people who overthrew their dictator supposed to see into the future, exactly? Do you see how asinine and inconsiderate your argument is, yet? Probably not.
 
Re: The Shah Reconsidered

Jack Hays said:
Thank you for your summary of myths. Please review the OP article.
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The OP article says nothing about myths; why are you lying about it?
 
Re: The Shah Reconsidered

Jack Hays said:
If you don't understand the connection then you're not equipped for the discussion. I suggest you stop, read, and reflect before you embarrass yourself further.
Click to expand...

There is nothing there Jack that has anything to do with what you're babbling about. You're lying about the article and trying to turn it into somethin that it is not.
 
Re: The Shah Reconsidered

jet57 said:
The OP article says nothing about myths; why are you lying about it?
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jet57 said:
There is nothing there Jack that has anything to do with what you're babbling about. You're lying about the article and trying to turn it into somethin that it is not.
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Really?

. . . Cooper’s narrative describes in depth the building blocks of the movement against the shah. Most shocking perhaps were the deceptive tactics the opposition used to demonize him. Cooper claims, for example, that Abol Hassan Bani-Sadr, a nationalist-left activist who deposed the shah with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and later served as the first president, told him how they manipulated the Western media’s coverage of Iran. The revolutionaries “studied western journalists’ reporting methods, fed them story ideas, steered them toward sympathetic interviewees, and supplied them with the revolutionary movement’s facts and figures,” Cooper argues, citing Bani-Sadr. This led to the publication of grossly inflated numbers of activists jailed and executed by the shah’s secret police. The figures, Cooper says, helped provoke anti-shah sentiments and were not corrected, even after Red Cross inspectors investigated and rejected the claims. Revolutionaries themselves, the book notes, have since refuted the numbers.
To bolster the impression that the shah was bent on murdering his people, the opposition initiated violence and blamed it on the shah. In the year before the victory of the revolution, the Islamists burned hundreds of private businesses, including cinemas, Cooper writes. The most brutal attack came in August 1978, when 430 men, women and children were burned to death at Rex Cinema in the southern city of Abadan — the worst arson since World War II. The inferno was intended “to destabilize and panic Iranian society,” Cooper argues. It also successfully fanned the flames of hostility toward the shah across the country. The culprit, Cooper writes, based on evidence in the 2013 book “Days of God” by James Buchan, was Hossein Takbalizadeh, an Islamist linked to a local Khomeini underground cell who was eventually tried and convicted of murder by an Iranian court after the revolution. . . .
 
Re: The Shah Reconsidered

Abbazorkzog said:
And how were the people who overthrew their dictator supposed to see into the future, exactly? Do you see how asinine and inconsiderate your argument is, yet? Probably not.
Click to expand...

Whatever precognition they did or didn't have is irrelevant. What is relevant is that given what happened the over-throw of the Shah is clearly nothing to celebrate.
 
Re: The Shah Reconsidered

Sherman123 said:
Whatever precognition they did or didn't have is irrelevant. What is relevant is that given what happened the over-throw of the Shah is clearly nothing to celebrate.
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I'll take that as a no.
 
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