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<div class="entry-date">Weekend Edition February 21-23, 2014<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/02/21/irans-real-nuclear-revolution/">www.counterpunch.org/2014/02/21/irans-real-nuclear-revolution/</a><br>
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<div class="subheadlinestyle"><b><big><big>A Manufactured Crisis</big></big></b></div>
<h1 class="article-title">Iran’s Real Nuclear Revolution</h1>
<div class="mainauthorstyle"><big><big>by PEPE ESCOBAR</big></big></div>
<div class="main-text"><big><big> </big></big>
<p><big><big>The nuclear talks between Iran and the P5+1 (the five
permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany) are back
this Tuesday in Vienna. The stakes couldn’t be higher. It will be a
long and winding road. Hidden agendas on both sides badly want the
talks to fail – and will spare no effort towards that goal.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei could be interpreted as
a stony realist, when he said that the talks will go nowhere. It’s as
if the Supreme Leader had read <a
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1935982338/counterpunchmaga"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://www.amazon.com']);"><i>Manufactured
Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare</i></a>, a crucial
book by Martha Gellhorn Prize winner Gareth Porter, which is being
launched this week in New York. In the book, Porter thoroughly debunks
the whole narrative of the Iran nuclear dossier as sold to the world by
the George W Bush administration, assorted neo-cons and the Israeli
Likud.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>And it gets much worse, in terms of prospects for a final
deal to be reached this year. According to Porter, “the Obama
administration has introduced the subject of ‘possible military
dimensions’ into the nuclear negotiations. That means that the United
States will be demanding an explanation for ‘evidence’ that the book
shows was fabricated. That is a decision that could threaten the
conclusion of a final agreement with Iran.”</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>Meanwhile, on Tuesday last week, millions of people hit
the streets in Tehran in a massive rally celebrating the 35 years of
the Islamic revolution. How come?</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>For all its economic mismanagement, Iran’s illiteracy rate
has been reduced to near zero. Women are active, participative voters
(try even raising the issue in the House of Saud’s paradise). There has
been remarkable scientific progress, even under harsh sanctions.
Pursuing a civilian nuclear program is a matter of national consensus.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>This <a
href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/majid-rafizadeh/iranians-celebrated-the-3_b_4784146.html?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000592"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://www.huffingtonpost.com']);">piece</a>
– significantly, published by al-Arabiya, which is controlled by the
House of Saud – at least tries not to sound entirely as cheap Arab
propaganda, making a valid point about the real threat for the Islamic
revolution coming from disaffected youth across Iran.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>Yet this is not the key point. The Islamic republic won’t
disintegrate tomorrow. What’s much more crucial is to revisit the key
reasons why the revolution happened 35 years ago, and why, when it
comes to Iranian geopolitical independence, it remains somewhat popular.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>That may also shed light on why the West – and especially
the United States – still refuses to normalize its relations with Iran.
After all, what happened 35 years ago in Iran was never properly
understood in the US in the first place. In geopolitical terms, this
was the real “nuclear” revolution – one of the most far-reaching
developments of what Eric Hobsbawm defined as “the short 20th century”.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>And perhaps this is what the Supreme Leader meant about
the talks going nowhere; certainly the case as long as Washington,
especially, refuses to abandon the reductionism of Iran as a bunch of
fanatics.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big><b>That Kissinger oil shock </b></big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>As early as the presidency of Harry Truman, the US
supported the Shah of Iran’s dictatorship, no holds barred. No wonder
those days are sorely missed.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>In 1953, after the CIA coup against Mohammad Mossadegh,
the Shah – who lived mostly in the French Riviera – was “invited” to
rule as a CIA puppet (John F Kennedy had met him in wild parties in the
French Riviera and found him to be a dangerous megalomaniac). In return
for re-establishing British “rights” to Persian oil, Washington
self-attributed 55% for the concessions and the Brits got the rest.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>The CIA trained the Savak – the Shah’s secret police. It
was the best of times. The Shah not only excelled in his role of
gendarme of political/economic US interests in the Persian Gulf; as he
did not share Arab hatred of Israel, Tel Aviv had access to Persian oil
(that ended after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini seized power).</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>The Shah ruthlessly suppressed and persecuted every
political party in Iran and even massacred Kurds (Saddam Hussein was
taking notes.) He started to take his own propaganda seriously,
including believing in the myth of being a new King of Kings. He became
the number one cheerleader of the 1973 OPEC oil shock, to which he got
the green light from none other than Henry Kissinger.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>In a nutshell, this was a follow-up of the 1972 “Nixon
doctrine”, when it became clear the US defeat in Vietnam was all but a
done deal. That’s when Tricky Dicky started to promote gatekeepers all
over the “free world”. And no region was more crucial than the Persian
Gulf.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>The Shah loved it. But he was always complaining that he
didn’t have enough dough to buy all those weapons the
industrial-military complex was offering him. So Kissinger – a David
Rockefeller errand boy – squared the circle, with the rise of oil
prices by Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>With this move, Kissinger instantly inflated the profits
of US Big Oil – which at the time accounted for five of the Seven
Sisters, and crucially boasted three that were Rockefeller-owned
(Exxon, Mobil and Socal). At the same time, since Japan and then West
Germany and the rest of Western Europe depended on Persian Gulf oil
much more than the US did, Kissinger devised the perfect way to torpedo
the devastating Japanese and German industrial and trade competition.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>You won’t find any of this on Kissinger’s turgidly
ambitious tomes, or on any US corporate media files for that matter.
But that explains much of the world born out of the “oil shock”.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>Like most US puppets – talk about hubris – the Shah never
understood that he was just a puppet. His corporate multinational
economic model as applied to Iran had the predictable effects; much
like today (even in Europe and the US), a tiny minority consuming like
there’s no tomorrow and a huge majority increasingly miserable, as the
Shah bet on cash crops instead of an agrarian reform to guarantee the
subsistence of millions of peasants – many of them illiterate, pious
Shi’ites – who had been booted out of the countryside by American
agribusiness, which dismissed them as a superfluous workforce.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>These miserable masses inflated Tehran and other Iranian
big cities, turning into the mass base for Khomeini’s revolution. And
the rest is history.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big><b>Nothing is inaccessible </b></big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>Then Jimmy Carter – that hick Hamlet – when still
campaigning for the presidency against Gerald Ford in 1976, admitted in
a debate that the Shah was a torturer. Two years later, as president,
Carter now considered him “an island of stability” and “a friend”.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>During the 1970s, it was “just” for Iran to carry out a
nuclear program, among other motives to intimidate revolutionary Arab
nationalism. Yet now, under an Islamic republic, a civilian nuclear
program is an “existential threat”.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>The Shah’s banker was David Rockefeller, never tired of
extolling the “patriotism” and “tolerance” of his client, not to
mention his modernizing drive – everything duly parroted by US
corporate media even as Amnesty International and the State Department
itself had Himalayas of documents proving the Shah was one of the top
torturers of modern history. What mattered is that he brought excellent
dividends for then Chase Manhattan.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>One never lost money underestimating the cluelessness of
US corporate media. When the Islamic revolution started, US media as a
whole told the world that the Shah was undefeatable; that Khomeini and
his followers were a minority of religious fanatics; and that the real
motive for the revolution was that the Shah was a Great Modernizer (the
Rockefeller script), rejected by those same Muslim fanatics. It’s fair
to say this script is still being peddled today.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>When the Shah fled Iran, the whole US media bought the
fallacy of “going for a holiday”. When Khomeini boarded that Air France
flight from Paris and arrived in Tehran in absolute triumph, no wonder
no one in the US had a clue what was going on. US media preferred to
mock Khomeini’s “fanaticism” – which at the time paled compared with
Pope John Paul II, who considered women to be an inferior species.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>The Iranian bourgeoisie – modern, social democrat,
inheriting the political line of Mossadegh – managed to drive a lot of
support from progressives in Europe. At a time when Le Monde was still
a very good newspaper and not the sub-American trash it is today, one
just needed to read the dispatches by ace correspondent Eric Rouleau to
confirm it.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>Khomeini, for his part, had the charisma (and that
spectral voice on cassette tapes), supported by the only political
organization tolerated by the Shah, the roughly 160,000 mullahs, who
duly mobilized those wretched masses rendered useless by American
agribusiness interests.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>Yet, from the beginning, Khomeini negotiated with the
bourgeoisie – as when he named Mehdi Bazargan as prime minister and
Bani Sadr as president (a socialist and a Western-style modernizer).
Only when the Shah system was totally eradicated did Khomeini go into
overdrive to purge everyone but his religious followers – recreating,
on a smaller scale, the Shah’s inferno, but in the name of Allah. Well,
as Mao said, no revolution is a dinner party.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>As for Jimmy “Hamlet” Carter, he never officially
recognized Khomeini as the Iranian leader. Washington didn’t even try
to talk to him. A whiff of geopolitical intelligence would have the
Americans trying to share some tea when he was still exiled in Paris.
But David Rockefeller and his parrot Kissinger would scream, so a cowed
Carter retreated into his shell. After the Islamic revolution,
Washington never returned the estimated US$60 billion the Shah, family
and cronies stole from Iran.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>This catalogue of disinformation during the 1970s and
1980s is now mirrored by the disinformation of all these past few years
about the Iranian nuclear program. No wonder most Americans – and
plenty of Europeans – remain clueless.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>When Khomeini died – and I vividly remember every
newspaper in Europe on June 5, 1989, sharing the front page between
that and Deng Xiaoping ordering the Tiananmen massacre – the great
philosopher Daryush Shayegan, a former professor at the University of
Tehran, published a superb article in Liberation explaining the Big
Picture, from the Shah’s “legacy” to Khomeini.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>Shayegan wrote that both men, the Shah and the Imam,
committed the same fatal mistakes and “incarnated, each their own way,
two typically Iranian traits: cultural schizophrenia and the dream of
grandeur”. So the whole drama was about two juxtaposed Irans: Imperial
Iran and “the suffering Iran of the blood of the Martyr”. Both
expressed an impossible dream and, “like the 12th century mystical poet
Ruzbehan from Shiraz would say, the same ‘dementia of the
inaccessible’.”</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>Today, 35 years after the Islamic revolution, what
Iranians seek is hardly inaccessible: the end of Western sanctions and
the end of sections of the West perennially treating the country as a
bunch of religious “fanatics”.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big>Russia, China, Turkey, Pakistan, other Asian nations, all
Latin American nations, all African nations, all treat Iran as normal.
Beyond the clash of “heroic flexibility” against American
exceptionalism, if only the US establishment would finally get over it,
and deal – realistically – with what happened in Tehran 35 years ago.
Only then these talks in Vienna will go somewhere, and we may have a
final nuclear deal in 2014.</big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big><em><b>Pepe Escobar</b> is the author of <a
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0978813820/simpleproduction/ref=nosim"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://www.amazon.com']);">Globalistan:
How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War</a> (Nimble
Books, 2007) and <a
href="http://www.amazon.com/Red-Zone-Blues-snapshot-Baghdad/dp/0978813898"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://www.amazon.com']);">Red
Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge</a>. His new book,
just out, is <a
href="http://www.amazon.com/Obama-Does-Globalistan-Pepe-Escobar/dp/1934840831/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1233698286&sr=8-1"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://www.amazon.com']);">Obama
does Globalistan</a> (Nimble Books, 2009). </em><em>He may be reached
at <a href="mailto:pepeasia@yahoo.com">pepeasia@yahoo.com</a>. </em></big></big></p>
<big><big></big></big>
<p><big><big><i><em>This column originally appeared on <a
href="http://www.atimes.com/"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://www.atimes.com']);">Asia
Times</a>.</em></i></big></big></p>
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