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The Shah Reconsidered[W:39]

Re: The Shah Reconsidered

Cardinal said:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAVAK
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". . . 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. . . ."
 
Re: The Shah Reconsidered

cabse5 said:
Jack, I'd like you to respond to the bolded. And it was the riches of oil revenues that transformed Iran in those 4 decades under the Shah.
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Saddam Hussein was never a puppet of the US. He was merely an opponent of Iran.
 
Re: The Shah Reconsidered

Jack Hays said:
Saddam Hussein was never a puppet of the US. He was merely an opponent of Iran.
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Well, the US asked Iraq (Hussein) to fight Iran in the 1980s. Iran was leaning and being courted by the USSR. The US didn't want all of Iran's oil to fall in Moscow's hands. I suppose Iraq being mainly Sunni and Iran being mainly Shia also had something to do with the animosity between the 2 countries. That would be like the relationship Catholics (traditional Christian religion like Sunni traditional Islam) and Protestants (non traditional Christian religion like Shia non-traditional Islam) have had over the centuries.

Sidenote: Boy, was Hussein pizzed when he found out the US was also selling armaments to Iran about that time with the Iran-Contra operation...
 
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Re: The Shah Reconsidered

cabse5 said:
Well, the US asked Iraq (Hussein) to fight Iran in the 1980s. Iran was leaning and being courted by the USSR. The US didn't want all of Iran's oil to fall in Moscow's hands. I suppose Iraq being mainly Sunni and Iran being mainly Shia also had something to do with the animosity between the 2 countries. That would be like the relationship Catholics (traditional Christian religion like Sunni traditional Islam) and Protestants (non traditional Christian religion like Shia non-traditional Islam) have had over the centuries.

Sidenote: Boy, was Hussein pizzed when he found out the US was also selling armaments to Iran about that time with the Iran-Contra operation...
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US intelligence was vastly more valuable to Iraq than any Iran-Contra weapons ever were to Iran.
 
Re: The Shah Reconsidered

Jack Hays said:
US intelligence was vastly more valuable to Iraq than any Iran-Contra weapons ever were to Iran.
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Despots, like Hussein, the US try to 'steer' are sometimes hot-headed and vain.
 
Re: The Shah Reconsidered

shrubnose said:
If you want to waste all of your time crying about a past that you can't change,get after it.

:lol:

I'm going to stay focused on the present and the future.
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So we shouldn't ever try and figure out why things are the way they are?
 
Re: The Shah Reconsidered

Jack Hays said:
It has for some time been possible to argue that a remarkably revolutionary, modernizing figure in the Middle East in the 20th century was the late Shah of Iran. That argument has now been made in an excellent new book.

A softer portrait of Iran’s enigmatic shahBy Nazila Fathi

. . . 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. . . .
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The Shaw of Iran ran a secret police force and was hand picked by the US in the '53 overthrow. This was at a time when Ho Chi Minh was overthrowing the French, so the Shaw was just another cog in the takeover over of the Middle East, and that overthrow is largely responsible for the troubles we have in the Middle East today. The Iran hostage thing and the Ayatollah came just 26 years later and right on the heels of our loss in Vietnam: so the Shaw was no great leader; he just another puppet punk.
 
Re: The Shah Reconsidered

England and the U.S. did not like the elected leader the Iranian people had chosen in the 1950's so the conspired to get rid of him and succeeded in doing it, replacing him with the Shah would has a puppet.
 
Re: The Shah Reconsidered

shrubnose said:
Everything is the way that it is now because someone didn't like the way that it was and they changed it.

:lol:
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What a detailed analysis. Clearly, this is the way of the future, amarite?

Also, could you be any more vague?
 
Re: The Shah Reconsidered

Moderator's Warning:
Please stop the one-liner back and forth and be productive in the thread.
 
Re: The Shah Reconsidered

jet57 said:
The Shaw of Iran ran a secret police force and was hand picked by the US in the '53 overthrow. This was at a time when Ho Chi Minh was overthrowing the French, so the Shaw was just another cog in the takeover over of the Middle East, and that overthrow is largely responsible for the troubles we have in the Middle East today. The Iran hostage thing and the Ayatollah came just 26 years later and right on the heels of our loss in Vietnam: so the Shaw was no great leader; he just another puppet punk.
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Master PO said:
England and the U.S. did not like the elected leader the Iranian people had chosen in the 1950's so the conspired to get rid of him and succeeded in doing it, replacing him with the Shah would has a puppet.
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Certainly a gripping narrative . . . if only it were true.

[h=3]The Myth of an American Coup - Council on Foreign Relations[/h]www.cfr.org › Iran


Council on Foreign Relations


Jun 10, 2013 - Ray Takeyh debunks the myth that the CIA was responsible for ... The key to the plot was to gain the cooperation of the shah, who had the legal ...


[h=3]Six Myths about the Coup against Iran's Mossadegh | The National ...[/h]nationalinterest.org/.../six-myths-about-the-coup-against-irans-m...


The National Interest


Sep 2, 2014 - ... to Stephen Kinzer's highly popular “All the Shah's Men” and the most recent revisionist histories of Dariush Bayandor and Ray Takeyh.

 
Re: The Shah Reconsidered

Jack Hays said:
Certainly a gripping narrative . . . if only it were true.

[h=3]The Myth of an American Coup - Council on Foreign Relations[/h]www.cfr.org › Iran


Council on Foreign Relations


Jun 10, 2013 - Ray Takeyh debunks the myth that the CIA was responsible for ... The key to the plot was to gain the cooperation of the shah, who had the legal ...


[h=3]Six Myths about the Coup against Iran's Mossadegh | The National ...[/h]nationalinterest.org/.../six-myths-about-the-coup-against-irans-m...


The National Interest


Sep 2, 2014 - ... to Stephen Kinzer's highly popular “All the Shah's Men” and the most recent revisionist histories of Dariush Bayandor and Ray Takeyh.
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it is true!
 
Re: The Shah Reconsidered

Jack Hays said:
The historical record says otherwise.
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the national interest - founded by Irving Kristol was an American columnist, journalist, and writer who was dubbed the "godfather of neo-conservatism

counsel on foreigns relations - :doh.
 
Re: The Shah Reconsidered

Master PO said:
the national interest - founded by Irving Kristol was an American columnist, journalist, and writer who was dubbed the "godfather of neo-conservatism

counsel on foreigns relations - :doh.
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To which the appropriate response is: so what?

Irving Kristol - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_Kristol

Wikipedia


Irving Kristol (January 22, 1920 – September 18, 2009) was an American columnist, journalist, and writer who was dubbed the "godfather of neo-conservatism.‎Background · ‎Ideas · ‎Articles · ‎Books

. . . In 1973, Michael Harrington coined the term "neo-conservatism" to describe those liberal intellectuals and political philosophers who were disaffected with the political and cultural attitudes dominating the Democratic Party and were moving toward a new form of conservatism.[SUP][11][/SUP] Intended by Harrington as a pejorative term, it was accepted by Kristol as an apt description of the ideas and policies exemplified by The Public Interest. Unlike liberals, for example, neo-conservatives rejected most of the Great Society programs sponsored by Lyndon Johnson; and unlike traditional conservatives, they supported the more limited welfare state instituted by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
In February 1979, Kristol was featured on the cover of Esquire. The caption identified him as "the godfather of the most powerful new political force in America – Neo-conservatism".[SUP][12][/SUP] That year also saw the publication of the book The Neo-conservatives: The Men Who Are Changing America's Politics. Like Harrington, the author, Peter Steinfels, was critical of neo-conservatism, but he was impressed by its growing political and intellectual influence. Kristol's response appeared under the title "Confessions of a True, Self-Confessed – Perhaps the Only – 'Neo-conservative'".[SUP][13][/SUP]
Neo-conservatism, Kristol maintains, is not an ideology but a "persuasion," a way of thinking about politics rather than a compendium of principles and axioms.[SUP][14][/SUP] It is classical rather than romantic in temperament, and practical and anti-Utopian in policy. One of Kristol's most celebrated quips defines a neo-conservative as "a liberal who has been mugged by reality." These concepts lie at the core of neo-conservative philosophy to this day.[SUP][15]. . . [/SUP]

 
Re: The Shah Reconsidered

Jack Hays said:
To which the appropriate response is: so what?

Irving Kristol - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_Kristol

Wikipedia


Irving Kristol (January 22, 1920 – September 18, 2009) was an American columnist, journalist, and writer who was dubbed the "godfather of neo-conservatism.‎Background · ‎Ideas · ‎Articles · ‎Books

. . . In 1973, Michael Harrington coined the term "neo-conservatism" to describe those liberal intellectuals and political philosophers who were disaffected with the political and cultural attitudes dominating the Democratic Party and were moving toward a new form of conservatism.[SUP][11][/SUP] Intended by Harrington as a pejorative term, it was accepted by Kristol as an apt description of the ideas and policies exemplified by The Public Interest. Unlike liberals, for example, neo-conservatives rejected most of the Great Society programs sponsored by Lyndon Johnson; and unlike traditional conservatives, they supported the more limited welfare state instituted by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
In February 1979, Kristol was featured on the cover of Esquire. The caption identified him as "the godfather of the most powerful new political force in America – Neo-conservatism".[SUP][12][/SUP] That year also saw the publication of the book The Neo-conservatives: The Men Who Are Changing America's Politics. Like Harrington, the author, Peter Steinfels, was critical of neo-conservatism, but he was impressed by its growing political and intellectual influence. Kristol's response appeared under the title "Confessions of a True, Self-Confessed – Perhaps the Only – 'Neo-conservative'".[SUP][13][/SUP]
Neo-conservatism, Kristol maintains, is not an ideology but a "persuasion," a way of thinking about politics rather than a compendium of principles and axioms.[SUP][14][/SUP] It is classical rather than romantic in temperament, and practical and anti-Utopian in policy. One of Kristol's most celebrated quips defines a neo-conservative as "a liberal who has been mugged by reality." These concepts lie at the core of neo-conservative philosophy to this day.[SUP][15]. . . [/SUP]
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neoconservatism, is about being involved in the affairs of other nations, something the founders did not want.
 
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Re: The Shah Reconsidered

Master PO said:
neoconservatism, is about being involved in the affairs of other nations, something the founders did not want.
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I'd dispute that but there's no need. The important point is that it has absolutely nothing to do with the topic being discussed.
 
Re: The Shah Reconsidered

Jack Hays said:
I'd dispute that but there's no need. The important point is that it has absolutely nothing to do with the topic being discussed.
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really?... you dispute it!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservatism
Neoconservatism (commonly shortened to neocon) is a political movement born in the United States during the 1960s among Democrats who became disenchanted with the party's domestic and especially foreign policy. Many of its adherents became politically famous during the Republican presidential administrations of the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. Neoconservatives peaked in influence during the administrations of George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, when they played a major role in promoting and planning the 2003 invasion of Iraq.[1] Prominent neoconservatives in the George W. Bush administration included Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Elliott Abrams, Richard Perle and Paul Bremer. Senior officials Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, while not identifying as neoconservatives, listened closely to neoconservative advisers regarding foreign policy, especially the defense of Israel and the promotion of democracy in the Middle East. Neoconservatives continue to have influence in the Obama administration and neoconservative ideology has continued as a factor in American foreign policy.[2][3]

The term "neoconservative" refers to those who made the ideological journey from the anti-Stalinist Left to the camp of American conservatism.[4] Neoconservatives typically advocate the promotion of democracy and promotion of American national interest in international affairs, including by means of military force and are known for espousing disdain for communism and for political radicalism.[5][6] The movement had its intellectual roots in the Jewish monthly review magazine Commentary, published by the American Jewish Committee.[7][8] They spoke out against the New Left and in that way helped define the movement.[9][10] C. Bradley Thompson, a professor at Clemson University, claims that most influential neoconservatives refer explicitly to the theoretical ideas in the philosophy of Leo Strauss (1899–1973),[11] though in doing so they may draw upon meaning that Strauss himself did not endorse.

What the Heck Is a 'Neocon'? - Council on Foreign Relations
Neoconservatism Unmasked | Cato Unbound

https://www.britannica.com/topic/neoconservatism
 
Re: The Shah Reconsidered

Master PO said:
really?... you dispute it!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservatism
Neoconservatism (commonly shortened to neocon) is a political movement born in the United States during the 1960s among Democrats who became disenchanted with the party's domestic and especially foreign policy. Many of its adherents became politically famous during the Republican presidential administrations of the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. Neoconservatives peaked in influence during the administrations of George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, when they played a major role in promoting and planning the 2003 invasion of Iraq.[1] Prominent neoconservatives in the George W. Bush administration included Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Elliott Abrams, Richard Perle and Paul Bremer. Senior officials Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, while not identifying as neoconservatives, listened closely to neoconservative advisers regarding foreign policy, especially the defense of Israel and the promotion of democracy in the Middle East. Neoconservatives continue to have influence in the Obama administration and neoconservative ideology has continued as a factor in American foreign policy.[2][3]

The term "neoconservative" refers to those who made the ideological journey from the anti-Stalinist Left to the camp of American conservatism.[4] Neoconservatives typically advocate the promotion of democracy and promotion of American national interest in international affairs, including by means of military force and are known for espousing disdain for communism and for political radicalism.[5][6] The movement had its intellectual roots in the Jewish monthly review magazine Commentary, published by the American Jewish Committee.[7][8] They spoke out against the New Left and in that way helped define the movement.[9][10] C. Bradley Thompson, a professor at Clemson University, claims that most influential neoconservatives refer explicitly to the theoretical ideas in the philosophy of Leo Strauss (1899–1973),[11] though in doing so they may draw upon meaning that Strauss himself did not endorse.

What the Heck Is a 'Neocon'? - Council on Foreign Relations
Neoconservatism Unmasked | Cato Unbound

https://www.britannica.com/topic/neoconservatism
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Neoconservatism is about much more than just foreign/defense policy, and the founders were of mixed views on foreign involvement. I believe you'll find Hillary Clinton's foreign policy views quite close to the neoconservative views you've cited.
 
Re: The Shah Reconsidered

Jack Hays said:
Neoconservatism is about much more than just foreign/defense policy, and the founders were of mixed views on foreign involvement. I believe you'll find Hillary Clinton's foreign policy views quite close to the neoconservative views you've cited.
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yes it is, however we are only discussing the foreign policy part.

please show the founders saying america should be involved in the affairs of other nations.
 
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