I like history. Most of you might have notice that I like to take current events and place them in a historical context, usually to prove how friggin' dumb somebody in the media or blogosphere is. It's a big part of my charm.So let's look at history and put some current events in context, shall we? Then we can all laugh at how friggin' dumb most Republican politicians, commentators, disc jockeys and bloggers are. I promise, it'll be fun!
On January 16, 1979, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran fled his kingdom and his government was replaced by the theocracy of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khmomeini. The protests that finally toppled the Shah had been underway for a year and had been building for nearly a decade before that.
Pahlavi was a strange man, politically speaking. On one hand, he was a brutal autocrat that routinely tortured and murdered his own people. On the other, he was possibly the most progressive force in the Modern Middle East. He was far most Western and modern than suited the tastes of his people, which was a contributing factor to his overthrow. His brutality fed the vengeance with which it was it was carried out.
But the Shah was America's man. In fact, the CIA and Britain's MI6 toppled the democratically elected Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 to give Pahlavi supreme power. You see, Mossadegh wanted to nationalize the Ango-Iranian Oil Company, which you now know fondly as BP, and this somehow became the problem of the United States. When the Shah was formally reestablished on the Peacock Throne, the CIA - with the help of the Israeli Mossad - funded and trained Iran's vicious secret police, SAVAK, which proceeded to terrorize the Iranian people for the next quarter-century.
Because the Shah was America's man, he was President Jimmy Carter's problem. Though they've never said how he would do it, Republican politicians and commentators continue to blame Carter for not preventing the Iranian Revolution. And when the Pahlavi went into exile, Carter was blamed for abandoning an ally. However, when Carter admitted the terminally ill Shah to the United States that October for treatment - an act which precipitated the hostage crisis - Carter was blamed for that.
The thing that's important to remember here isn't whether the Republican Party wasn't as responsible for the chaos in Iran as any Democrat or that the GOP wasn't bursting with ideas about how to prevent anything that occurred. No, the important thing to remember is that it worked. Jimmy Carter was tagged as an ineffective weakling and it stuck. That there was really nothing that the Carter Administration could have practically done is immaterial.
If you're so inclined, you can make an equally compelling case for the weakness of Carter's successor, Ronald Reagan. Reagan sent the Marines to Lebanon as part of a peacekeeping force following the 1982 Israeli invasion. Then Reagan directed them to take sides in the Lebanese civil war, which isn't something peacekeepers usually do. Unsurprisingly, Hezbollah attacked the Marine barracks on October 23, 1983 and killed 241 Americans. It was the single largest death toll the American military suffered in a single day since the Tet Offensive fifteen years before.
President Reagan's response was to evacuate from Lebanon, which many have suggested was the single most important "green light" given to anti-American terrorists. And it didn't stop there. The Reagan Administration reacted to the subsequent hostage taking in Lebanon by putting into motion the Iran-Contra Affair, almost every aspect of which constituted an impeachable offense.
Reagan famously said that he wouldn't negotiate with terrorists. And he didn't. He sent heavy weapons to the Iranian sponsors of the hostage takers without negotiating, and the results were predictable. Doing so without signing a presidential finding or notifying Congress was a direct violation of the National Security Act of 1947 and it should have cost Reagan his presidency. In many important ways, this was significantly worse than Watergate in that it directly and adversely impacted the foreign affairs of the United States in a manner contrary to law.
You'll note that I didn't even have to address the "Contra" side of the Iran-Contra affair to tell that story. This is because I'm 32 flavours of amazing!
Weakness is in the eye of the beholder, and what that eye sees is determined mostly by the spinning of political hacks. Because Republicans are good at delivering a unified message, Carter was forever painted as weak in the face of something that he couldn't really do anything about. Because Democrats can't agree on what time it is, let alone anything else, Reagan got away with running away from terrorism and arming a rogue state without accomplishing anything for having done it. Funny how that works, isn't it?
I only bring this up because we're seeing the same thing happening to President Obama in the face of the ongoing Egyptian uprising.
What's happening in Cairo and Alexandria is the direct consequence of U.S foreign policy in the region that began long before Obama was even born. Does anyone believe that Hosni Mubarak would have lasted in office for 30 years unless he was seen as America's man in the region? I don't. Without the tens of billions of dollars in U.S foreign and military aid that Mubarak has received, it's unlikely that he would have survived six months following the assassination of Anwar Sadat.
Going back to the '53 coup against Mossadegh, the United States has propped up strong men in the region and looked the other way as they murdered anything the resembled democratic opposition. Fortunately for those strong men, democratic opposition is fairly easy to liquidate. Unfortunately for the rest of us, that only leaves a highly organized radical opposition to take over when history runs its course.
For the last week and a half, I've been listening to Republicans and their ilk - mostly on Fox News and in the blogosphere - bemoan Obama's "weak foreign policy" and how this is "costing" America Egypt. Amazingly few people are asking retards like Sarah Palin what Obama should be doing, or better still, what they would be doing if they were in his place. Instead, we just hear more empty-headed nonsense about Reagan and freedom, none of which is especially helpful or even true.
I don't happen to think that the Muslim Brotherhood is as radical as some observers do. Any group that's regularly denounced by the likes of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri has to have something to recommend it. I'll grant you that they aren't pro-American, pro-Western or friends of Israel, but that's quite a bit different than being al-Qaeda, Hamas or Hezbollah.
However, I could be wrong. It's been known to happen from time to time. But what these same Republicans either dishonestly or ignorantly aren't acknowledging is that it was their very "freedom agenda" that put Hamas in Hezbollah in the offices they occupy today. The only way that Barack Obama is going to "save" Egypt is for the United States to install a more genteel version of Mubarak against the wishes of the Egyptian people, and I'm not sure that's possible.
There are plenty of good and honest reasons to hate Jimmy Carter and oppose Barack Obama. And you know what? It would be a really good idea if everybody started focusing on them rather than inventing a narrative in Cairo or rewriting history in Tehran.
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