That Time Ronald Reagan opened Iran and Illegally sold Khomeini Weapons

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http://www.juancole.com/2015/07/illegally-khomeini-weapons.html

That Time Ronald Reagan opened Iran and Illegally sold Khomeini Weapons
By Juan Cole | Jul. 14, 2015

The Reagan administration in the 1980s was buffeted by two policy drives toward Iran. On the one hand, Reagan ally Saudi Arabia supported Iraq, which illegally launched a war on the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1980 in order to steal its oil-rich Khuzistan Province. Reagan in 1983 sent Donald Rumsfeld, then CEO of Searle pharmaceuticals, to make friends with Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

From the other side, a section of the Israeli security establishment wanted Reagan to side with Iran against Iraq and to provide Iran weaponry. Before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran had been a major supplier of petroleum to Israel, which was boycotted by the Arab League (Iran is not an Arab country). Israel feared Iraq more than it did non-Arab Iran in that decade. After the 1979 revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini began denouncing Israel and saying he hoped it would vanish from the arena of time. But Iran was at war with Iraq and had mainly American weapons systems, for which it needed spare parts. The US was boycotting Iran, but Israel had reverse-engineered US spare parts and was manufacturing them, and was happy to trade them to Iran in return for petroleum. The Ayatollahs quietly made the deal, since without spare parts their tanks and armored vehicles and F-14s were so much junk.

While these two points of view were duking it out in Washington, Reagan had two other problems in the 1980s. One was that the Israelis militarily occupied southern Lebanon from 1982. This occupation gradually angered the Lebanese Shiite Muslims who predominate in the south and east of the country and in the urban district of east Beirut. They formed radical guerrilla groups to fight the occupation. As part of this pushback against Israeli grabbiness, the radical Shiites began taking Americans in Beirut captive. The captured Americans, who came on US screens in video clips begging for their lives,

The other problem was that Reagan wanted to roll back leftist movements in Nicaragua and El Salvador. In Nicaragua the Sandinista leftists came to power. Reagan wanted to support right wing death squads known as contras. In 1982, however, the Congress enacted the Boland Amendment, which forbade Reagan to spend US government money on right wing militias in Central America.

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Read all about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair