History lesson: Iran Had a Democracy Before We Took It Away

[Swagman]

By Chris Hedges
Posted on Jun 22, 2009
Iranians do not need or want us to teach them about liberty and representative government. They have long embodied this struggle. It is we who need to be taught. It was Washington that orchestrated the 1953 coup to topple Iran’s democratically elected government, the first in the Middle East, and install the compliant shah in power. It was Washington that forced Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, a man who cared as much for his country as he did for the rule of law and democracy, to spend of his life under house arrest. We gave to the Iranian people the corrupt regime of the shah and his savage secret police and the primitive clerics that rose out of the swamp of the dictator’s Iran. Iranians know they once had a democracy until we took it away.

The fundamental problem in the Middle East is not a degenerate and corrupt Islam. The fundamental problem is a degenerate and corrupt Christendom. We have not brought freedom and democracy and enlightenment to the Muslim world. We have brought the opposite. We have used the iron fist of the American military to implant our oil companies in Iraq, occupy Afghanistan and ensure that the region is submissive and cowed. We have supported a government in Israel that has carried out egregious war crimes in Lebanon and Gaza and is daily stealing ever greater portions of Palestinian land. We have established a network of military bases, some the size of small cities, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Kuwait, and we have secured basing rights in the Gulf states of Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates. We have expanded our military operations to Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Egypt, Algeria and Yemen. And no one naively believes, except perhaps us, that we have any intention of leaving.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090622_iran_had_a_democracy_before_we_took_it_away

[Uncle Joe]

1. Kicking and recommending with one caveat, Al Gore's cause was far greater

than his own life, personal power and or the temporary abridgment of proper democratic process.

"Did Al Gore defy the power elite and, as opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi has done, demand a recount at the risk of being killed?"

Al Gore believed more than any other major political leader that humanity faced a threat against it's very existence, this was his and should be our prime directive; survival of the species and thus Gore didn't have the same emotional luxury that Mousavi; enjoys.

[bertman]

2. Recommending after reading the first two paragraphs.

He had me from "a degenerate and corrupt Christendom."

Thank Jaheeezus for faith-based government intervention. In everything.