Don't bomb Iran: Part Two: Why do they want the bomb?

If you're going to bomb folks, it stands to reason that you know a little something about them. That's where our free press has always fallen down. Our historians haven't done much better.

For example, did you know that Imperial Japan was hostile to the United States in 1941 (when the United States was by law nuetral in foreign affairs) in large part because the Roosevelt administration placed an oil embargo on Japan in response to their brutal invasion of Chinese Manchuria?

Did you also know that the United States produced 50% of the world's oil at the time? It was the world's largest producer by far. Now how do you suppose the U.S would react to having its fuel cut off in the middle of armed hostilities?

It also wasn't a secret that with the Lend-Lease program, the administration was angling to enter the European war on Britian's side. Eventually, it stood to reason, that war would come come to Japan's shores. It could have been years away, but the Japanese knew it was going to happen. Pearl Harbor didn't just come out of nowhere, folks.

Once you understand that, you understand that Pearl Harbor wasn't exactly an unprovoked attack. It was an example of preventative warfare, not at all unlike the 2003 invasion of Iraq or the current debate over attacking Iran. Japan knew that it would eventually face war with the United States, so it sought to cripple the Pacific fleet first. Granted, no American policymakers and very few in the media or academia will actually tell you that.

Our historical understanding of Iran isn't much better. Everyone knows, or should by now, about the 1953 CIA coup against the only elected government Iran ever had. But that wasn't the first instance of the western powers interfering with Persian governance.

Reza Shah Pahlavi was basically the father of modern Iran. It was he forced the international community to stop referring to it as Persia. He modernized the country during the '20s and '30s and established a new Parliament.

Much as they did in Afghanistan a century earlier, Great Britain and the Soviet Union were engaged in a Great Game in Iran in the years between the First and Second World Wars. To counter this influence,  Reza Shah became closer to Hitler's Germany. After Hitler invaded the U.S.S.R, the Soviets and British jointly invaded and occupied Iran to ensure an Allied supply route to the Russians and forced the Shah to abidicate in favour of his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Reza Shah was forcibly exiled by the British to South Africa, where he died in 1944.

After the war, the junior Pahlavi Shah was a close ally of the United States and the United Kingdom. As a matter of fact, the only time the U.S openly threatened anyone with a nuclear attack was when Stalin refused to evacuate northern Iran after the German defeat. That threat caused the Soviets to redouble their efforts to get the bomb for themselves, which they finally did in 1948. Other than that, things were going swimminingly. That is, until the Iranians got it into their heads that a little democracy would do them good.

In 1951, Mohammad Mosaddegh was appointed Prime Minister and he nationalized the wildly exploitive Anglo-Persian Oil Company ( known to modern Gulf of Mexico enthisiasts as BP). The British, as you might imagine, didn't cotton to this. After Mosaddegh closed the British embassy in October 1952, fearing a coup directed from London, Churchill implored President Truman to remove him. Truman refused.

During this period, Mossaddegh moved to limit the extraconstitutional powers of the Iranian monarchy, which convinced the British and the newly sworn in Eisenhower administration that he was a communist. It should be noted that in the early days of Ike's presidency, the Dulles brothers (John Foster and Allen, respectively the Secretary of State and Director of Central Intelligence) thought that pretty much everyone was a communist. President Eisenhower approved Operation Ajax and dispatched the alcoholic grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt, Kermit, to Tehran to carry it out.

Even the Shah was leery about overthrowing Moseddegh, agreeing to Ajax only after Kermit Roosevelt told him that his opinion was irrelevent to the United States, although it would be just cricket if he was on board. The Shah agreed to sign a decree firing Moseddegh, but only after he fled to Rome, by way of Baghdad. In August 1953, Moseddegh was finally removed from power.

The United States sought to protect the Shah from any further challenges to his reign. To further that end, the CIA financed and trained his vicious secret police force, SAVAK. You know the brutal torture methods that post-revolutionary Iran employs? They had been used on the revolutionaries by SAVAK, who very possibly learned them from the CIA.

Make no mistake, the Shah was perhaps the first and most successful serious reformer in the Middle East. He was the first - and for a good long time, only -  Muslim leader to recognize Israel. Education and women's rights grew by leaps and bounds during the later years of his rule. Unfortunately, his reforms were more than the domestic traffic would bear, particularly in the deeply religious countryside. So he pushed through his reforms by force, never hesitating to to torture or murder anyone who challenged his authority.

While the American people were spared the details of Operation Ajax for decades, Iranians had a pretty good idea who sponsored the reversal of their democracy and the murderous excesses of SAVAK. It should come as no surprise that the Iranian Revolution took such a stridently anti-American tone. Republicans love to decry President Obama's "apology" (which was actually little more than an acknowledgement) for the overthrow of Moseddegh, but the fail to learn the most important lesson from its history. As the great Dan Carlin put it, "When you get rid of Moseddegh to have the Shah, you wind up with Khomeni."

Operation Ajax also had a devestating effect on America's popular reputation in the region.

United States Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who visited Iran both before and after the coup, wrote that "When Mossadegh and Persia started basic reforms, we became alarmed. We united with the British to destroy him; we succeeded; and ever since, our name has not been an honored one in the Middle East."

This is what intelligence professionals call "blowback." You might accomplish your short-term goals through a given operation, but you're just as likely to suffer unforseen, long-term drawbacks because of it.

At the time of the 1979 Revolution, Iran hadn't formally sent its military beyond its borders in centuries. But the world - from the ancient Greeks, through the British, Russians, and finally the Americans with Ajax - never stopped infringing on Iran's sovereignty.

Then on September 22, 1980 things went from bad to incalcuably worse. Fearing that the fervor of the Iranian Revolution would spread to its Shi'a majority, Saddam Hussein's Iraq invaded Iran, begining a savage eight year war that would kill a million people. Iraq repeatedly used chemical weapons on Iran, prohibited since the end of the First World War, some sixty years earlier. And the world did nothing.

Actually, that's not true. President Reagan dispatched former (and future) Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to shake hands with Saddam. The United States restored full dilpomatic relations with Iraq, and gave them both financial and intelligence aid in their war against the Iranians.

By the end of the war, both sides resorted to human wave fighting, more common to the 16th century than the modern era. And a plurality of the soldiers at the point were in their early teens.

After the Iran-Iraq war, Iran's geostrategic position continued to deteriorate. When the 1991 Gulf War ended, it was discovered that Saddam was within six months of testing a nuclear weapon. In 1998, both Hindu India and Sunni Pakistan detonated weapons. Iran's eastern neighbour Afghanistan had been a festival of chaos since the Soviet-sponsored coup against the monarch in 1973. In 1999, Iran very nearly went to war with Afghanistan after the Taliban butchered a number of Iranian diplomats to death. Oh, and Israel has had nuclear weapons for forty years. Most accounts have their stockpile at about 200.

Then came 9/11 and it's aftermath, which history will show as a squandered opportunity of monumental proportions.

Seeing a chance to dispatch their Taliban enemy and quell the anarchy on its border, Tehran cooperated fully with Washington during the initial invasion of Afghanistan. During the 2002 loya jirga in Germany, Iran is said to have used its influence with various Northern Alliance factions to name America's choice for president, Hamid Karzai, to office.

In the spring of 2003, a letter purported to have come from the Iranian Foreign Ministry was delivered to the United States by the Swiss. In the letter, Iran stated it was willing to negotiate the following;

US aims: (Iran accepts a dialogue "in mutual respect" and agrees that the US puts the following aims on the agenda)

1. WMD: full transparency for security that there are no Iranian endeavors to develop or possess WMD, full cooperation with IAEA based on Iranian adoption of all relevant instruments (93+2 and all further IAEA protocols)
2. Terrorism: decisive action against any terrorists (above all Al Qaida) on Iranian territory, full cooperation and exchange of all relevant information.
3. Iraq: coordination of Iranian influence for activity supporting political stabilization and the establishment of democratic institutions and a non-religious government.
4. Middle East:1) stop of any material support to Palestinian opposition groups (Hamas, Jihad etc.) from Iranian territory, pressure on these organizations to stop violent action against civilians within borders of 1967.
   2) action on Hizbollah to become a mere political organization within Lebanon
   3) acceptance of the Arab League Beirut declaration (Saudi initiative, two-states-approach)

Let's review, shall we? Iran possibly offered to end both its WMD program and sponsorship of terrorism, and said that it would recognize Israel and bring peace to Iraq. Essentially, all it wanted in return was a security guarantee from the United States. If true, that could have been the most stunning development in the post-Cold War era.

Sadly, we'll never know if it was true. The United States ignored the letter and the Bush administration doubled down on its "regime change rhetoric. Tehran's nuclear program, which even the American intelligence community concedes had been suspended, would soon resume.

Even if the worst case scenario was the case, and the letter was unauthorized, it could not have resulted in a replay of the 1986-'87 Iran-Contra scandal. The veracity of the letter could easily have been verified through the Swiss diplomatic back-channel. It should also be noted that at the time American diplomats were sitting across the table from the Iranians during the Afghan negotiations.

This was not a case of Iranian "moderates" seeking high-tech arms, and completely a product of Michael Ledeen's fevered imagination. Ledeen, it should also be noted, was also implicated in the distribution of the forged Iraqi "Yellowcake" memo. The presumed Iranian letter could've been easily verified with a minium of embarassment to the Bush administration.

If the letter was real, the fact that it was ignored sent a powerful message to Tehran. A peace offer had been spurned by a country that held regime change as official policy for thirty years and would soon have a quarter of a million troops on two of its borders.

That, combined with the increasing nuclearization of potentially hostile powers in the region and the long history of foreign interference in its internal affairs, makes the motives of the Iranian weapons program very easy to understand.

What would any country in Iran's strategic and historical position do? There are no shortage of suggestions that Iran is crazy to want nuclear weapons. But any objective look at the situation makes it easy to argue that they'd be crazy if they didn't.