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Wahoo Memories & Iranian Democracy

Paul Olson
UNL Professor Emeritus

When I was a teenager in the '40s attending Wahoo's Luther Junior College, I met my first Iranian or Persian person. His name was Hussein Zadig Zadig Osqui, I believe. He came to Luther out of nowhere, for no apparent reason, remained very quiet and devout in an Islamic way and admired the Shah fervently. He prayed without ceasing and told us that his father owned 40 villages. I was impressed. I certainly didn't know anyone else whose father owned 40 villages. Later, he went as quietly as he came.

The Shah that Hussein so admired was Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, the fellow whom the British made Shah in 1941, after they decided that his father might side with the Nazis as Rommel marched across Africa. The Shah was the sort of monarch the son of a 40-village landowner could admire. He pursued a policy lurching from autocracy to democracy until Mohammed Mossedegh, the leader of the National Front, came to power in the early '50s and established a fully democratic government that, for a time, ended Britain's domination of Iran's oil. Under Mossedegh, democracy flourished and the Shah was overshadowed by an elected government. But in 1953, years after Hussein had left Wahoo, I read to my surprise in the Omaha World-Herald that a coup had toppled Mossedegh. The Soviet Union, seeking access to Iran's oil, had been backing Mossedegh. Hence the coup. The Shah was back again, in his full monarchial glory. More than four decades would pass before Secretary of State Madeleine Albright let slip that it was in fact the CIA who had really ousted Mossedegh. The British had persuaded the Eisenhower and CIA chief John Foster Dulles that Mossedegh was a "Communist" who had to be removed to save the oil. And through a complex set of maneuvers, the U.S. engineered the overthrow of democratically elected prime minister and the reinstallation of the Shah. I can remember one of my Iranian colleagues in the English Department explaining to me, at the time of the Iran Hostage Crisis in 1979, that when the CIA brought down the Mossedegh government and reinstalled the Shah, the monarch had tried to make Iran a western power. He allowed British and other outside interests to slurp the country's oil, sought to secularize Iran's culture and to repress its local religious groups. He established the SAVAK security service whose mastery of torture came from Israeli and CIA operatives, and tapped the Agency's expertise as military planners. This was the democracy we taught Iran.

Amnesty International in 1976 observed that Iran had the "highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture which is beyond belief. No country in the world has a worse record in human rights than Iran." These were the fruits of democracy for the Iranian people.

Economic life in Iran suffered a similar fate. The bustling markets of the local bazaars were replaced with corrupt monopolies dominated by the Shah and his cronies. To appease his increasing vanity, the Shah poured the national treasury into the construction of lavish palaces and celebrations of himself, to recreate, through dressup parties at Persepolis, the grandeur of the old Persian Empire. When we overthrew Mossedegh and embraced a despot, we showed the Middle East what was really meant by democracy.

Then in the 1970s, the Ayatollah Khomeini launched his challenge to the Shah's government. He reminded the Iranians through clandestinely circulated audiotapes that British oil and the CIA were responsible for the Shah's tyranny. Encouraging the Iranian people to call for elections and use the power of the ballot box, it was the Ayatollah ironically who paved the way for democratic leaders like Medic Bazargan and Abol-hassan Banisadr. And even when the constitutional changes installing the theocracy as the final arbiters of Iranian policy came to be approved in a plebiscite, these changes still did not entirely eliminate elections or constitutional guarantees (though admittedly they were considerably curtailed). The results of the plebiscite, however, clearly showed that the Iranians had had enough of secularist rule in the style of the Shah.

The modern age of U.S./Iranian relations began with the occupation of the American embassy by Iranian students in November, 1979, and ensuing hostage crisis that dragged on for over a year. Nebraskans for Peace sent Father Darrell Rupiper with other Americans to talk with the hostages and the hostage takers, and Fr. Darrell came back with positive reports on Iran's new regime despite the hostage situation. However, it was clear from his reports that the new governmental system Iran was creating was not a traditional western-style republic. It was a republic framed by a theocracy. Over the previous quarter of a century, we'd promoted such a perverted concept of democracy that we'd fostered the creation of a theocratic state.

But at that time, we ourselves didn't have much of a traditional western-style, open form of government either. We had a republic framed by secret negotiators. The alleged negotiations between Reagan campaign operative William Casey and Khomeini representatives in Paris before the 1980 presidential election — to delay the resolution of the hostage crisis and thus prevent an "October Surprise" by President Carter — utterly undermined the democratic process. The electoral climate that fall was so superheated by the hostage situation that a rational choice was impossible, and Ronald Reagan ended up winning by a nose. That was how we taught both Iran and ourselves democracy.

Apparently not having learned a thing, but hell-bent on keeping the oil from the Mideast flowing, our government continued its twisted democratic teachings by supporting both big oil neighbors — Iran and Iraq — in their war on each other from 1980-88. We mostly supported Iraq in the eight-year war. We did so with the full knowledge (and, since we continued to support Iraq, the tacit approval) that Saddam Hussein was using weapons of mass destruction against the Kurds and Iranians — crimes for which he was subsequently hanged. Nor did we stint on the support. After Reagan Secretary of State Alexander Haig told the Senate that we could thwart the Soviets by improving our ties to Saddam, we sent five Boeing jetliners and an assistant Secretary of State to Baghdad for talks. We took Iraq off the terrorism list, even though we knew that Abu Nidal was based there, and we gave the regime a $400 million credit line. We pressured the World Bank to extend credit to the country and used our intelligence assets to support its war efforts.

However, the White House concluded Iran too merited help in the war, lest it become "Sovietized." So the administration conceived the Iran-Contra strategy to sell arms to Iran to help it fight the Iraqis, while Iran in turn paid for the weapons needed by the Nicaraguan Contras, whom Congress had refused to fund. In short, we backed both sides in an eight-year war that took nearly a million lives. That was how we taught democracy — by countermanding an act of Congress through secret deals and arming both combatants. (Some critics believe that Saddam Hussein's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, which led to the first Gulf War, derived from his need to acquire more resources to service debts he'd accumulated from buying weapons to fight the Iraq-Iran War.)

Twelve years after Gulf War I, we took our campaign to democratize the Mideast to an unprecedented level, when we attacked and destroyed this same Iraqi nation for allegedly harboring weapons for mass destruction. The Iraqi government had repeatedly insisted it had no WMD. The UN inspection teams had found no evidence of WMD. France, Germany, Russia and China all opposed military intervention over the unproven case for WMD. But we knew better. In a flagrant violation of international law, we preemptively invaded Iraq and caused the deaths of lots and lots of people. And it turned out there were no WMD. The mission of 'democratizing' the Mideast now also covers unprovoked attack, illegal occupation and civil war.

Fresh from having destroyed one Muslim nation, the Bush/Cheney Administration is readying, even as we speak, to carry its democratic crusade in the Mideast one step further… and back to where this 'democratic' movement originally began. In the last few months, the U.S. has deployed several aircraft carriers off the coast of Iran as part of a coordinated effort to force that country abandon its nuclear program. The world's only remaining superpower, boasting the most sophisticated nuclear arsenal on the face of the earth, is now threatening to preemptively attack yet another Muslim nation — possibly with nuclear weapons-to prevent that country from even developing nuclear power, for fear it might at some point make weapons of mass destruction.

There is no conclusive evidence that Iran's uranium-enrichment program is intended for anything other than the generation of energy for civilian purposes. Friends of mine who are physicists tell me that no serious nuclear bomb maker would now go for enriched uranium, anyway, as that's the element used to fuel electricity generationwhich under the terms of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (of which Iran is a signatory) is perfectly legal. No, according to my friends, the element of choice for nuclear weapons is plutonium.

That said, the Iranian leadership, has undoubtedly been carefully pondering the example of its neighbor and fellow oil-rich Muslim state, Iraq. Under international pressure, Saddam Hussein's government dutifully gave up its ambitions to develop nuclear weapons, and was summarily destroyed for its efforts. What could Iran reasonably expect from the 'democratically minded' U.S. if it were to give up its nuclear program? Probably another Shah. After decades of instruction in the ways of 'democracy,' even the most skeptical among us has to admit that the Iranians might be a little reluctant to go down that road again.

Joe Volk, who was here recently representing the Friends Committee on National Legislation and a group of religious leaders who went to Iran, spoke with President Ahmedinajad. The President told the group: (1) Iran does not gain from continuing civil war in Iraq because instability always spills beyond the borders of states in his region; (2) the Israel — Arab crisis has to be solved politically, not militarily; and (3) Iran would accept international inspections of its facilities after good faith negotiations with the international community and the U.S., i.e., no efforts to overthrow his government.

We may not like Ahmedinajad very much. We certainly do not like his Holocaustdenial tendencies, or his intemperate remarks about Israel and Zionists. But he is an elected president. His party, of late, has been suffering losses both at the ballot box and in the polls, and the democratic process may itself get rid of him soon. Were that to happen, that actually sounds a little like the way democracy, as I was taught it in Wahoo, is supposed to work.

Given the history of our two countries the last 55 years, however, I wouldn't presume to teach President Ahmedinajad about how a representative democracy is supposed to work. Here in America, we've got a hard enough time just getting our own political leaders to practice it.