February 11, 2013
But who will help them act it out?
Getting two devoted fans of Israel like UK Foreign Secretary William Hague and his junior minister Alistair Burt to explain their hostility towards Iran was never going to be easy.
Mr Hague had said the ransacking of the British embassy in Tehran in November 2011 was carried out "with regime consent". Orchestration by the Iranian authorities is automatically denied but the incident was obviously in retaliation to Britain's ratcheting up sanctions intended to cripple the Iranian economy, a repetition of our ‘dirty tricks’ of 60 years ago.
Why, exactly, were we doing it again, I wanted to know. Had we so quickly forgotten the devastating effect of sanctions on civil society, especially children, not only in Iran in the 1950s but against the Iraqis in the 1990s before the brave “coalition of the willing” reduced their country to rubble and ruination? But never mind, they were just collateral damage in the West’s great scheme of things.
For more than a year I’ve been putting questions like these to the Foreign Secretary through my MP. What proof is there that Iran's nuclear technology has a military dimension (and please spare us the usual faked intelligence and sexed-up dossiers)? Shouldn’t he be more concerned about Israel's nuclear arsenal, the deranged leadership in Tel Aviv and the threat the Zionist State poses to the region and beyond?
Doesn’t Israel’s refusal to sign up to the Non-Proliferation Treaty or engage constructively on the issue of its nuclear and other WMD make it a leading candidate for sanctions, quite apart from its brutal oppression and occupation of the Holy Land?
In any case, what threat is Iran to Britain? And who gave Hague permission to wage economic warfare against a friendly people – in our name? We remember only too well how Cameron, Hague and Burt voted enthusiastically for the Iraq war, an appalling lack of judgement based on a pack of lies that anyone exercising average diligence could see through. It should have disqualified them from holding high office ever again. The military adventure cost well over a million lives, caused utter misery, wrecked much of Iraq’s heritage and generated intense hatred worldwide.
Mr Hague’s job, I suggested to my MP Henry Bellingham, is to make friends not enemies.
“It is our Government that has played a decisive role in securing toughest ever EU sanctions on Iran including the embargo on their oil that we called for in opposition and that many said was well nigh impossible.” –UK Foreign Secretary William Hague to the Conservative Friends of Israel, October 2012
Has Iran wronged Britain? Quite the opposite.
It is illuminating to recall the depths to which “the allies” will stoop. The British Government has menaced Iran ever since it took a major shareholding in Anglo-Persian Oil in 1914 and swindled the host country out of its fair share of the profits. In 1951 Anglo-Iranian Oil (as renamed in 1935) declared £40 million profit after tax but gave Iran only £7 million. At the same time Arabian American Oil was sharing profits with the Saudis on a 50/50 basis. Whereupon Iran, after many years of fruitless negotiation for a square deal, nationalised its oil to achieve longed-for economic and political independence and combat poverty.
Britain’s Tory government at the time responded with crippling oil sanctions and froze Iran’s sterling assets in order to bring the democratic administration of Dr Mossadegh to its knees, thus creating the cruel circumstances that eventually led to the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
The CIA, in cahoots with Britain’s MI5, played an ugly game of provocation, mayhem and deception. The Shah was persuaded to sign two decrees, one dismissing Mossadegh and the other nominating the CIA's choice, General Zahedi, as prime minister. These decrees, in direct violation of the Iranian constitution, were written by the CIA. After the planned coup initially failed the Shah fled to Rome. When it was judged safe to do so he returned in 1953.
Mossadeq was arrested, tried, convicted of treason by the Shah's military court and sentenced to death.
Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh said http://www.mohammadmossadegh.
The
sentence was later commuted to three years' solitary in a military
prison, followed by house arrest until he died. His supporters were
rounded up, imprisoned, tortured or executed.
Foreign oil companies were allowed to form a consortium to restore the flow of Iranian oil, and the US and Britain were rewarded with the lion's share (40% to Anglo-Iranian). The consortium agreed to share profits on a 50-50 basis with Iran but refused to open its books for inspection by Iranian auditors or allow Iranians to sit on the board. Anglo-Iranian changed its name to British Petroleum in 1954.
A grateful US massively funded the Shah's government, including his army and secret police force, SAVAK. The whole sordid enterprise came unstuck with the 1979 Revolution. The US is still hated today for reinstating the Shah and his vicious SAVAK, and for snuffing out the Iranians’ democratic system of government, which the Revolution unfortunately didn’t restore. Britain, as instigator and junior partner in the wretched affair is similarly despised.
On top of that, Iran is still resentful at the way the West, especially the US, helped Iraq develop its chemical weapons and armed forces, and how the international community failed to punish Iraq for using those chemical WMD against Iran in the Iran-Iraq war. In that conflict the US, and eventually Britain, were in league with Saddam enabling him to more easily acquire or develop such weapons. At least 100,000 Iranians fell victim.
David Cameron (b. 1966) wasn’t even a twinkle in his father’s eye when Britain last crushed Iran’s economy, and he was probably carousing with his Bullingdon Club pals at Oxford while Iranians were dying in their thousands from Saddam’s poison gases. Hague (b. 1961) seems similarly oblivious to the dirty tricks previous British foreign secretaries pulled on Iran. Obama (b. 1961?) was a community organiser in Chicago while the Iranians were being gassed by chemicals his country supplied to Saddam. Amazing how all three so effortlessly assume the mantle and mindset of their twisted predecessors.
Britain’s present-day Tory dominated Government, instead of straining every sinew to develop trade and co-operation – the civilised way to influence other nations – is spoiling for another fight and seems eager to send our young men (and women) to die in Iran for… well, for what? Israel? America? Another Zionist fantasy?
There is no reason to suppose the evil of the 1950s isn’t still stalking the corridors of power.
And just for the record, did Mr Hague make any effort to see Iranian leaders before inflicting his economic terror plan on their people and taking us all a fatal step nearer the war that Washington's neo-cons have been cooking up for some time? Continue reading>My Catbird Seat
But who will help them act it out?
by Stuart Littlewood
“We put a lot of energy with France and Germany into agreeing at the end of July strong additional European Union sanctions on Iran which will begin to bite over the coming months…” – UK Foreign Secretary William Hague, 5 October 2010Getting two devoted fans of Israel like UK Foreign Secretary William Hague and his junior minister Alistair Burt to explain their hostility towards Iran was never going to be easy.
Mr Hague had said the ransacking of the British embassy in Tehran in November 2011 was carried out "with regime consent". Orchestration by the Iranian authorities is automatically denied but the incident was obviously in retaliation to Britain's ratcheting up sanctions intended to cripple the Iranian economy, a repetition of our ‘dirty tricks’ of 60 years ago.
Why, exactly, were we doing it again, I wanted to know. Had we so quickly forgotten the devastating effect of sanctions on civil society, especially children, not only in Iran in the 1950s but against the Iraqis in the 1990s before the brave “coalition of the willing” reduced their country to rubble and ruination? But never mind, they were just collateral damage in the West’s great scheme of things.
For more than a year I’ve been putting questions like these to the Foreign Secretary through my MP. What proof is there that Iran's nuclear technology has a military dimension (and please spare us the usual faked intelligence and sexed-up dossiers)? Shouldn’t he be more concerned about Israel's nuclear arsenal, the deranged leadership in Tel Aviv and the threat the Zionist State poses to the region and beyond?
Doesn’t Israel’s refusal to sign up to the Non-Proliferation Treaty or engage constructively on the issue of its nuclear and other WMD make it a leading candidate for sanctions, quite apart from its brutal oppression and occupation of the Holy Land?
In any case, what threat is Iran to Britain? And who gave Hague permission to wage economic warfare against a friendly people – in our name? We remember only too well how Cameron, Hague and Burt voted enthusiastically for the Iraq war, an appalling lack of judgement based on a pack of lies that anyone exercising average diligence could see through. It should have disqualified them from holding high office ever again. The military adventure cost well over a million lives, caused utter misery, wrecked much of Iraq’s heritage and generated intense hatred worldwide.
Mr Hague’s job, I suggested to my MP Henry Bellingham, is to make friends not enemies.
“It is our Government that has played a decisive role in securing toughest ever EU sanctions on Iran including the embargo on their oil that we called for in opposition and that many said was well nigh impossible.” –UK Foreign Secretary William Hague to the Conservative Friends of Israel, October 2012
Has Iran wronged Britain? Quite the opposite.
It is illuminating to recall the depths to which “the allies” will stoop. The British Government has menaced Iran ever since it took a major shareholding in Anglo-Persian Oil in 1914 and swindled the host country out of its fair share of the profits. In 1951 Anglo-Iranian Oil (as renamed in 1935) declared £40 million profit after tax but gave Iran only £7 million. At the same time Arabian American Oil was sharing profits with the Saudis on a 50/50 basis. Whereupon Iran, after many years of fruitless negotiation for a square deal, nationalised its oil to achieve longed-for economic and political independence and combat poverty.
Britain’s Tory government at the time responded with crippling oil sanctions and froze Iran’s sterling assets in order to bring the democratic administration of Dr Mossadegh to its knees, thus creating the cruel circumstances that eventually led to the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
The CIA, in cahoots with Britain’s MI5, played an ugly game of provocation, mayhem and deception. The Shah was persuaded to sign two decrees, one dismissing Mossadegh and the other nominating the CIA's choice, General Zahedi, as prime minister. These decrees, in direct violation of the Iranian constitution, were written by the CIA. After the planned coup initially failed the Shah fled to Rome. When it was judged safe to do so he returned in 1953.
Mossadeq was arrested, tried, convicted of treason by the Shah's military court and sentenced to death.
Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh said http://www.mohammadmossadegh.
“My greatest sin is that I nationalised Iran’s oil industry and discarded the system of political and economic exploitation by the world’s greatest empire… With God’s blessing and the will of the people, I fought this savage and dreadful system of international espionage and colonialism. I am well aware that my fate must serve as an example in the future throughout the Middle East in breaking the chains of slavery and servitude to colonial interests.”
The
sentence was later commuted to three years' solitary in a military
prison, followed by house arrest until he died. His supporters were
rounded up, imprisoned, tortured or executed.Foreign oil companies were allowed to form a consortium to restore the flow of Iranian oil, and the US and Britain were rewarded with the lion's share (40% to Anglo-Iranian). The consortium agreed to share profits on a 50-50 basis with Iran but refused to open its books for inspection by Iranian auditors or allow Iranians to sit on the board. Anglo-Iranian changed its name to British Petroleum in 1954.
A grateful US massively funded the Shah's government, including his army and secret police force, SAVAK. The whole sordid enterprise came unstuck with the 1979 Revolution. The US is still hated today for reinstating the Shah and his vicious SAVAK, and for snuffing out the Iranians’ democratic system of government, which the Revolution unfortunately didn’t restore. Britain, as instigator and junior partner in the wretched affair is similarly despised.
On top of that, Iran is still resentful at the way the West, especially the US, helped Iraq develop its chemical weapons and armed forces, and how the international community failed to punish Iraq for using those chemical WMD against Iran in the Iran-Iraq war. In that conflict the US, and eventually Britain, were in league with Saddam enabling him to more easily acquire or develop such weapons. At least 100,000 Iranians fell victim.
David Cameron (b. 1966) wasn’t even a twinkle in his father’s eye when Britain last crushed Iran’s economy, and he was probably carousing with his Bullingdon Club pals at Oxford while Iranians were dying in their thousands from Saddam’s poison gases. Hague (b. 1961) seems similarly oblivious to the dirty tricks previous British foreign secretaries pulled on Iran. Obama (b. 1961?) was a community organiser in Chicago while the Iranians were being gassed by chemicals his country supplied to Saddam. Amazing how all three so effortlessly assume the mantle and mindset of their twisted predecessors.
Britain’s present-day Tory dominated Government, instead of straining every sinew to develop trade and co-operation – the civilised way to influence other nations – is spoiling for another fight and seems eager to send our young men (and women) to die in Iran for… well, for what? Israel? America? Another Zionist fantasy?
There is no reason to suppose the evil of the 1950s isn’t still stalking the corridors of power.
And just for the record, did Mr Hague make any effort to see Iranian leaders before inflicting his economic terror plan on their people and taking us all a fatal step nearer the war that Washington's neo-cons have been cooking up for some time? Continue reading>My Catbird Seat
