My, my. What a difference thirty years makes.
One advantage of living into my sixth decade is memory. And I well remember the Iranian Revolution of 1979, in which Islamists led by the Ayatollah Khomeini toppled the ailing Shah of Iran. At that time, crowds took to the streets in exultation, cursing the Shah and praising an Islamic Revolution that Jimmy Carter’s foolishness did so much to create. Here’s news footage from 1979:
My shot at Jimmy Carter is not gratuitous. Iran-US relations flourished over thirty postwar years. While the Shah was an authoritarian, he was also a liberalizer – granting broad rights for women and ethic and religious minorities and liberalizing education. He also promised constitutional reforms that were unfortunately delayed because he was forced to attend to political and military challenges from Iran’s neighbors.
Carter – deep into his ‘human rights’ phase – decided that the Shah was a bad man and exerted increasing pressure on him in the name of human rights while threatening to cut off US assistance. And this was after Carter spent New Year’s Eve 1977 with the Shah, during which Carter praised Iran as ‘an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world’.
One of Carter’s key demands was that the Shah release ‘political prisoners’, including Islamic radicals, communists and terrorists. As Slater Bakhtavar observed in The American Thinker, these were many of the same culprits we now face in the ‘War on Terror’. But Carter wasn’t satisfied. He intensified the pressure with lamentable results:
The Carter Administration insisted that the Shah disband military tribunals, demanding they be replaced by civil courts. The effect was to allow trials to serve as platforms for anti-government propaganda. Carter pressured Iran to permit “free assembly”, which encouraged and fostered fundamentalist anti-government rallies. The British government and its MI6 intelligence agency also heightened the Shah’s precariousness. The government-controlled BBC presented Iranians with a dossier of twenty hour newscasts detailing the location of all anti-Shah demonstrations and consistent interviews with the exiled outcast Ayatollah Khomeini, making a religious scholar few Iranians knew about into an overnight sensation.
When the Shah was unable to meet the Carter Administration and British demands, the Carter Administration reportedly ordered the Central Intelligence Agency to stop $4 million per year in funding to religious Mullahs who then became outspoken and vehement opponents of the Shah. Unfortunately, the Shah’s efforts to defuse the volatile situation in Iran failed, despite the grant even of free and democratic elections. Confronted with lack of US support and unleashed Mullah fury, the Shah of Iran fled the country.
Subsequent to the Carter Administration’s ill-conceived foreign policy initiative, Iran is now a dungeon. Ayatollah Khomeini’s dictatorship executed the Shah’s prisoners, predominantly communist militants, along with more than 20,000 pro-Western Iranians. Women were sent back into servitude. Citizens were arrested merely for owning satellite dishes that could tune to Western programs. American diplomats were taken hostage, and the Soviet Union invaded Iran’s eastern neighbor Afghanistan as a result of this chaos, allowing it to secure greater influence in Iran and Pakistan. The struggle against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and the defeat of this invading Superpower with help from the United States under President Reagan gave rise to the radicalization and emergence of Muslim zealots like Osama bin Laden. Moreover, within a year of the Shah’s ouster, Iran on its western flank was locked into the Iran-Iraq War, in which the U.S. sided with secular Iraq and its military dictator Saddam Hussein.
And ponder this: if Jimmy Carter hadn’t been such a fool, there would have been no Iran-Iraq War – which cost an estimated 500,000 lives.
Fast forward exactly thirty years. More than half of Iran’s population is under thirty and has no memory of 1979. All they know is that the ‘new boss’ seems to be a lot like the ‘old boss’. Iran is indeed a dungeon and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been reelected in a rigged election. And the people know it and they’re way past taking it.
Here’s a montage of news clips from yesterday, followed by a BBC report. Notice any resemblances to 1979?
As I observed at the outset, it’s good to live a long life – if only to see the application of delayed justice.
Coverage also by Allahpundit and Michelle Malkin
