A Terrible Trap To Be In

Peter Hitchens writes:

How lucky we are that the US is not trying to rescue us from tyranny.

The map is littered with demolished countries, lawless, broke, full of graves and ruins, and the sound of weeping, which the West, led by Washington DC, has recently tried to help. Syria is ruled by an Al Qaeda graduate. Iraq is an impossible mess. Afghanistan is back in the hands of the Taliban, more firmly than ever. Libya is howling chaos, still without a government 14 years after it was ‘saved’ from Colonel Gaddafi (we won’t dwell here on the gigantic increase of lawless migration into Europe that this brought about).

You may even remember the ‘Arab Spring’ of 2010 to 2012, when soppy journalists and soppier politicians went into raptures about street protests across the Arab world. Democracy, they claimed, would at last spread to this despotic region.

Alas, the Arab world took our support seriously, and its greatest achievement was the totally predictable election of a Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt. Well, the West did not want that, which might explain why demonstrations against the Brotherhood’s democratic but inconvenient Islamic rule swept Egyptian streets.

It also might explain the absence of much outrage when the Brotherhood was overthrown by a military junta (which we mustn’t call it), and the junta then went on to massacre hundreds of Muslim Brotherhood supporters in Cairo in the summer of 2013.

Human Rights Watch later reported that the Egyptian police and army ‘methodically opened fire with live ammunition’ on crowds demonstrating against the Brotherhood’s removal from power. They said that a minimum of 817 people died during the violence but it is likely the actual figure was 1,000 or more.

Does this repression sound familiar? Was it a bit like the use of live ammunition on the streets of Iran’s cities now? It was. But note the soft, meek behaviour of the White House at the time. The US criticised the use of force but avoided saying that the army’s overthrow of Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi was a ‘coup’, though it obviously was. For this would have legally triggered the shutting off of American military aid, worth about £1billion a year.

Selective outrage is no outrage at all. Either you are furiously opposed to the crushing of street protests by violent repression, or you are not. So please understand my suspicion that President Trump’s current fury against Iran is a political pose rather than the real thing. And the same goes for many other Western statesmen and women who have drawn themselves up to their full height to deliver scorching condemnations of the Iranian mullahs and their regiments of killers.

Don’t misunderstand me. I loathe the Iranian regime and all its works. Soon after I visited Iran some years ago, they arrested my friend Jason Rezaian, who had guided me round the country, and threw him into solitary on ludicrous charges of spying. He was eventually released, after 544 days of hell, in a cynical swap.

But I don’t think Western politicians currently know or care much about that beautiful, much-abused and tragic country or about its suffering people, ceaselessly forced to pay for the stupidities of their rulers and of foreign states.

How many in the West even know of the repellent 1953 coup, jointly organised by the CIA and Britain’s MI6, which overthrew Iran’s last legitimate, democratic leader, Mohammed Mossadegh? Most Britons and Americans have never heard of it. Most Iranians can never forget it.

Mossadegh wanted Iran to control its own oil. Britain and the US, furious at their potential loss of money and power, bribed officials, military officers and politicians, paid fake protesters, suborned newspapers, hired mobsters and lined up the Shah to take over. The event was known as ‘Operation Ajax’, and many of the documents proving its origin and nature have now been published.

There is no dispute about whether it happened or who did it. The MI6 agent was Monty Woodhouse, later twice Tory MP for Oxford. The CIA’s man was Kermit Roosevelt, grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt. The Shah’s secret police regime, which lasted from 1953 till 1979, was based on this shameful and morally wrong event, and the fury of his eventual overthrow is rooted in Iranian resentment of this Western imposition on that country.

I am old enough to remember in late 1960s Oxford, charming young Persian men collecting signatures for petitions against the savagery and cruelty of the Shah’s then world-famous Savak secret police. And I recall saying to them that I wondered how long it would be before they were in charge, and people just like them were collecting signatures of protest against their government. Which of course happened, as the early hopes of the 1979 revolution shrivelled under the freezing gaze of the Ayatollah Khomeini.

Yet the BBC as long ago as 2016 released details of strong contact between Khomeini and President Jimmy Carter, (‘Two Weeks in January: America’s secret engagement with Khomeini’) showing that the two were on far better terms than is generally admitted. The then British ambassador to Tehran, the late Sir Anthony Parsons, thought that the sooner Khomeini and Iran’s generals got together, and the military transferred their allegiance from Shah to Ayatollah, the better the chances of ‘saving the country’. And we all know how that worked out. The resulting regime has been cruelly oppressive at home and aggressive abroad for nearly 50 years.

But have our responses helped to bring that to an end? Or have they deepened and prolonged it? Perhaps the worst period was the Iran-Iraq war of 1980 to 1988, known to Persians as ‘the imposed war’. Iranians are convinced that the US encouraged the Iraqi tyrant Saddam Hussein to move against them in a hideous, grinding conflict that cost both countries a total of about half a million lives.

Then came economic sanctions, which – still – mainly punish the Iranian people rather than the often wealthy and corrupt leaders of the nation. In 2015, an agreement was struck to reduce those sanctions in return for Iranian limits on nuclear enrichment. But that brief hope was quickly snuffed out by none other than Donald Trump.

What good does all this do? Can you imagine what it is like to live under sanctions? For Iranians, most of whom are decent humans just like us, it has meant years of enforced poverty and lack of opportunity, for them and for their children. Their savings are devastated by inflation, unemployment runs high and let’s not forget the cruel little details like the non-availability of good-quality medicines.

Imagine if Britain, by a series of events all too easy to imagine in the modern world, also became a sanctioned pariah, ignorantly misrepresented to the outside world by journalists and politicians who have never been here, under a regime that relished international hostility – as the mullahs do, given that their crude nationalism is the only thing that keeps them popular.

It is a terrible trap to be in, and one which is almost impossible to escape. And this country, alas, has done much to bring it about.