From Sproul Steps to Cairo University

Very interesting, Mr. Obama.  The buzz is just starting up, but in time Prez O's admission yesterday in his speech at Cairo University that the CIA engineered the overthrow of Mohammed Mossaddeq (pictured here) will be seen as a major turning point in U.S. foreign policy.

The Right Wing is already getting hysterical.  Mitt Romney, of the immovable hair and room temp IQ, is crying foul.  This sort of thing just isn't done.  How dare Obama admit the truth in such an unflattering way, and in front of a foreign audience!  That latter point, wait and see, will be emphasized increasingly over the next few days, because the first part of the criticism is a little disingenuous, after all.  The CIA did engineer the overthrow of the democratically-elected Prime Minister of Iran in 1953, and we had help from the British, and we did it because the anti-imperialist, highly-educated (a Master's in Law from the Sorbonne, a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Lausanne) Mossaddeq decided to nationalize the Iranian oil industry, which at the time was known as the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (the forerunner to British Petroleum).

A Persian friend of mine, born in Tehran, told me a number of years back that it was this coup that did more to sour U.S. - Iran relations than any other historical event.  And what really bugged the Iranians is that the whole operation only cost about $300,000.  That's bang for the buck, I have to say. But I don't recall any other American President ever openly admitting the numerous roles the U.S. has played in overthrowing inconvenient heads of state.  George W. Bush sort of hinted at it as part of his justification for toppling Saddam; in effect, Bush said that for too long the U.S. had aligned itself with repressive dictators and that it was time to change course.  That was the funny part about our former Prez and his drug-ravaged brain: occasionally he just blurted out the embarassing truth, such as his admission that the country was "addicted" to oil.

America was addicted to oil back in 1953, of course, and the last thing the Eisenhower Administration wanted to see was a movement in the Middle East toward nationalization of the oil industries.  We more or less owned the (royal) family-run filling station known as Saudi Arabia, we had big stakes in Kuwait and Iraq, and Mossaddeq was setting a dangerous trend.  If these sovereign countries started claiming the oil under their land was theirs, where might that lead?  Mexico had already nationalized its oil industry, with the able assistance (as an ideologist) of none other than Leon Trotsky.

Which brings up a salient point.  The cover story for our deposition of Mossaddeq was that he was "leftist" and pro-Soviet, and in 1953 you can imagine that such a rationale had huge selling power.  Which Mitt Romney, his diminutive brain working fast under that hat of high-tensile- strength hair is bound to mention, once his handlers mention it to him.  Ditto Rush Limbaugh and the Dittoheads, and Michael Medved and Pat Buchanan and on and on.  Obama is taking things out of context.

Not really.  He's setting the record straight.  Mossaddeq was a nationalist and an anti-imperialist, and that's why the Iranian Majlis (Parliament) overwhelmingly elected him in 1951.  He had no intention of freeing his country from foreign domination in order to become a Soviet satellite, any more than Ho Chi Minh intended to become a Communist satellite in throwing off the French in Indo-China.

Attending that bastion of non-Mainstream Thought, the University of California at Berkeley in the late Sixties, I of course had become quite familiar with the Mossaddeq story in history and political science classes.  It was so radical to talk about the CIA's role in overthrowing a foreign head of state.  I frankly considered it another elaborate conspiracy theory that one heard daily from the Sproul Hall Steps.  Now we have the President of the United States openly acknowledging it as the truth.

He's a smart guy, that O, and he knows that the story doesn't stop there.  Pick up any tome of Noam Chomsky and you can read the extensive list of similar covert coups: Guatemala, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Chile, Greece, Iraq (not Saddam, the other one) and numerous others.  All essentially for the same reason: we wanted a reliable, Right Wing, business-friendly thug to oversee the safety and profitability of our business interests in these places.  You see, we didn't really build this country on rock 'n roll: we built it by extracting profit from the Third World, as Britain had done before us, and the Dutch and Romans before that.

How much of that can the Prez afford to admit?  And if he does, will he choose Sproul Steps as his venue?  If he does, I'm, like, there.