Our intervention in Iran in ’53 paved the way for political Islam’s rise

Shawn Amoei at Huffington Post on neocons rewriting the history of Iran to rationalize foreign intervention. Excerpt begins with 1953 American-British overthrow of democratically-elected Mohammed Mossadegh:

The coup reinstated the Shah whose unremitting despotism would continue for another quarter-century. Thus an all-too-brief democratic experiment was prematurely aborted by a dictatorship that would soon give rise to another.

This single act of intervention paved the way for an Islamist regime in Iran and the rise of political Islam across the Greater Middle East. The story of this coup–and its most famous victim–reminds us of the dangers of foreign intervention. Its potency at a time of growing tensions with Iran has made the history a prime target of contemporary interventionists.

One attempted distortion appeared in a Wall Street Journal review by Sohrab Ahmari. In researching this piece, I found that Ahmari’s review is essentially a reprise of his February 2009 pseudonymous review of Gholam Reza Afkhami’s biography of the Shah. Behind the anonymity of a fictitious name, Ahmari presents much of the same, but does so with the brazen language of an ideologue that expects no accountability. While a visceral contempt for Mossadegh shines through his writings, Ahmari gushes over the Shah and a paradise that never was. “Javid Shah!” is Ahmari’s proclamation when his advocacy needn’t be disguised as analysis.

Profiled recently as “the neocons’ favorite Iranian,” Ahmari has been caught twisting statistics to suit his agenda in the past. The biography of the Shah that Ahmari to construct his case was in fact written by a former minister of the Shah and criticized for, among other things, relying too heavily on the Shah’s own autobiographies.

…This brings us to another colorful character who insists that Mossadegh was overthrown by a popular uprising–Amir Taheri. The 70-year-old Iranian was editor-in-chief of one of the Shah’s primary propaganda arms until that regime’s collapse in 1979. Taheri occupies a unique place in American political discourse. As Jonathan Schwarz of Mother Jones magazine observed in 2007, “There may not be anyone else who simply makes things up as regularly as he does, with so few consequences.”

Among Taheri’s greatest hits is a story he fabricated about Iranian Jews being forced to wear distinctly colored badges à la Nazi Germany. Iranian historian Shaul Bakhash of George Mason University detailed “case after case” of Taheri’s use of nonexistent sources. Where sources did exist, Taheri “distorted the substance beyond recognition.”

…The above list is by no means exhaustive. Still, it takes a special kind of moral idiocy to defend the colonial interests of Britain’s dying empire against the “most democratic, enlightened government in Iranian history.” Those who do so deny the disaster of past interventions while calling for new ones. Unmasking these efforts may make it a little less likely for war to occur, so defenders of democracy would do well to follow Mossadegh’s famous dictum, “If I sit silently, I have sinned.”