My job is to communicate to the American people that the Muslim world is filled with extraordinary people who simply want to live their lives and see their children live better lives… My job to the Muslim world is to communicate that the Americans are not your enemy.

The facts of both the coups I addressed in this post, Iran in ’53 and Guatemala in ’54, indicate that the decisions by US officials to promulgate those coups had everything to do with economics and virtually nothing to do with fighting communism. Winston Churchill did not ask President Truman, and then President Eisenhower, for CIA support to overthrow Mossadegh becuase he was a communist. He asked because his British oil company (which would later become British Petroleum or BP) stood to lose its Iranian oil fields and revenue.

As Iranians burn pictures of President Obama, it is important for us as citizens of the United States to understand the roots of that hatred. Were we (the United States) right to overthrow the Iranian government Kinzer argues was the most democratic to date in the history of Persia, so we could support the oil interests of Great Britain and one of it’s wealthy oil corporations? I don’t think so. But whether or not we agree or disagree on that point, I hope we can agree that we need to do the two main things I argued in my post:

1- Make it a national priority to end our dependency on foreign oil, making a short term shift to natural gas and a long term shift to alternative energy sources which do not utilize any type of fossil fuel at all. We need to shift to electrical vehicles and hydrogen energy. The Pickens Plan is the most realistic proposal I’ve heard to date for moving in this direction.

2- We need to grapple with the “values of the West” which we export as a nation, and strive through intercultural exchanges to demonstrate that “The Great Satan” is not the United States. Human rights, including the right of self-determination, are not U.S.-created rights and are ideals which we should support and promote.

If Kinzer is way off base in his analysis, I’d like to read more about it. As a student of Middle Eastern history during college I did not learn about these chapters of history, and I’m glad to have an opportunity to do so now. As a nation we need to find a constructive way forward to improve our relations with the people of Iran. Our leaders need to stop demonizing Iran and Iranians. Terrorists are the enemies of civilized people everywhere. It requires multilateral action as well as understanding to defeat terrorism, because nation states cannot merely kill terrorists to end terrorism, we have to address terrorism’s root causes. Studying and understanding the roots of anger and anti-American sentiments in Iran require that we study these recent chapters in US/Iranian relations, and why Mossadegh is an important hero in Iran. If I was an Iranian, I’d be mad that the United States overthrew Mossadegh and had him put in prison until he died as well. We can’t change the facts today of what happened to Mossadegh in the past, but we certainly can strive to better understand that history so we do not repeat those mistakes again.

I still get from your post and comment that you don’t think the Communist threat of the Cold War era was a serious threat and that the Presidents of the time, Republican and Democrat, also believed this.

The phrase today seems to be “terror is the new communism.” Hundreds of millions of people died under the USSR and China which leads me to believe that the Cold War fear of Communism was justified.

Your post makes it seem like our Presidents and government were more interested in lining their pockets than fighting a true evil. The same has been said by others about Bush/Cheney/Iraq.

I’m hoping the best from our new President. But if history is any indicator, he’ll soon realize that we are facing a true evil. The Iranians are already burning pictures of Obama in the streets. He’ll realize that our defense doesn’t just come from the “justness of our cause.” That sometimes, sadly, fighting is needed.

I was glad to see that finally, a Democratic President validated the Vietnam War as he did in his Inaugural speech, placing the Battle of Khe Sanh along side Concord, Gettysburg, and Normandy.

I know their are millions of people who believe Obama will be able to fight or deal with Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups like Hamas through “humility and restraint,” but I don’t see how that will happen.

But you know what? I hope you’re right.

The blog post you linked also references U.S.-led/supported assassinations of Trujillo in the Dominican Republican (1961) and Diem in South Vietnam (1963). In both of those cases, regular US military forces were also deployed to those countries to stabilize the nations following the overthrows. I know the Church Committee looked into these issues at length in the mid-1970s following Watergate. I think some of their hearings are still classified, but I’m not sure about that. I certainly reject the legitimacy, morality, and acceptability of the United States using political assassinations as a foreign policy strategy. Certainly that has been done in the past, in these instances cited here and in others. One of my main points is that the values of self-determination, human rights, and long-term political as well as economic stability are not supported by actions such as these, and we should not revere or applaud leaders who supported these actions.

Eisenhower’s administration certainly used fear of “the Soviet threat” to justify the coups in Iran and Guatemala. We’ve recently seen the Bush administration use fear of “global terrorism” to justify horrendous and ridiculous foreign policy as well as domestic policy actions and laws. I think those types of decisions and actions were what President Obama was referencing in his inaugural when he said “we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals” and “Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expediences sake.”

In terms of rewriting history, what I am meaning is that we can’t change the facts of what happened in the past. We can unwrap different aspects of that past, amplify different voices who shed new light on those events, etc. I definitely support this process of more fully and (hopefully) accurately representing and understanding the past.

In the post you linked by John Gizzi, he wrote:

A strong case can be made that Mossadegh was not a Communist although he was apparently not hostile to Communist elements within Iran. He was also a committed nationalist who remains a lionized figure in his country today. It is also inarguable that, with its strategic location along the Russian border and as the fourth-largest supplier of oil in the world, Iran was a major Soviet target in the post-war years

The point I made and you may be overlooking (along with others) is that economic considerations were most paramount in the case of the Iran and Guatemala coups, much more than actual anti-communist concerns or rhetoric. Anti-communism provided an easily understood and digestible cover story for these coups, which fundamentally served the interests of BP in Iran and the United Fruit Corporation in Guatemala.

I would like to read Kinzer’s book myself as well as follow up further on these issues. They are complex and multi-faceted, and very important to understand in our present foreign policy context in the Middle East as well as other places.

Thanks both for you comment and link to John Gizzi’s post.

You say we “cannot rewrite the pages of history.” But that’s done all the time to promote one person’s viewpoint over another. In essences, that’s what this article comes out as, a re-writting of history when you take out the context of the communist threat and what the 1950s point of view on that was. Cannot judge Ike totally by today’s standard.

I agree we should be wary to not have our expectations set too high for our new President, he is going to be limited by many factors in terms of what he can do. Still, there are lots of reasons to have higher hopes than we have in the past, I think. Similar to our U.S. wars in Indochina which started in the late 1950s and continued through the 1970s, however, I don’t think we’re going to have or at this point even want a “fast way” out. It sounds like troop deployments to Afghanistan are going to actually go up sooner, rather than later. The drawdown from Iraq seems imminent. We’re in a difficult spot in both situations, however, and I dearly wish Colin Powell was our Secretary of State and had ensured that The Powell Doctrine was actually followed when he was SecDef. President Obama has been given some incredibly difficult situations to work with both economically and in terms of foreign policy. With all of that on his plate, I’m not excessively optimistic that he’ll put forward a constructive change agenda for education anytime soon. We might be surprised, however. I will continue to hope as well.