Just East Of Eden-Iran:
Images And ReflectionsBy Gaither Stewart
13 November, 2007
Countercurrents.org(Rome) US power in the Middle East has never recovered from the blow of the Iranian Revolution. The miscalculations and blindness to reality concerning Iran of 25 years ago have led the USA down erroneous paths ever since.
While the drums of war roll and the US President speaks of war against Iran, questions and more questions emerge from the disastrous past of US-Iran relations. After the great lie about Iraq, one must wonder if Iran’s nuclear ambitions are the problem. The obvious answer is: not at all. Oil is the issue.
Many Europeans suspect Bush’s threats of war against Iran are electoral propaganda. They reason that America cannot sustain another military front. Bush’s rhetoric is considered bluff, dangerous bluff however because it is combined with America’s engrained ignorance about Iran.
In August 1978, the CIA predicted that the regime of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi in Iran could last another ten years. Despite revolts exploding all over ancient Persia, Western businessmen believed this too and swarmed over the country in search of lucrative contracts.
As an interpreter for a group of Italian companies, I was in the captivating country of Iran during 1977-78. As foreigners who have lived there testify, Iran is a special country that gets in your blood. It’s the dry summer heat, the cold winters and those purple mountains.
While the CIA was making its rosy Iran situation reports, the Iran created by the American puppet, Shah Pahlavi, was disintegrating. While curfews kept the streets clear after 8 p.m. the resistance controlled the city after midnight. In an early act of repression the Shah’s police mowed down students in the holy city of Qom. Every day millions of marchers clamored for the heads of the Pahlavis. Quickly the circles tightened around the Shah and US interests in Iran. Though no one knew for certain what was happening, the whole city began to stink of stale gas and terror and greater battles to come.
Yet, in the generalized chaos they continued working on new streets, emblematic of the millenary continuity of Persia-Iran. In September a general strike paralyzed the nation. Each day young cab drivers at my old hotel boasted of how they would hang the Shah and cut off the heads of the SAVAK beasts.
When would the Shah make his move, foreign businessmen wondered? And what were their American protectors doing? Yet, you could smell it, the revolution. I would tell the businessmen what I thought was happening but none of them felt it. They didn’t want to know the reality. Their investments in the Shah’s Iran were too great.
But the revolution was there.
Yet, at night in the hotel bar, time stopped. Like all the hotel bars in all the African capitals of all the former European colonies it was a sad place. A place for lonely businessmen.
Meanwhile, Washington was paralyzed. The Shah’s glass castle was leaking on all sides. While the SAVAK continued to torture subversives and martial law tightened, Ayatollah Khomeini then in Paris exile prepared his return, protest mushroomed in Tehran and in front of my eyes soldiers threw away their guns and joined the people. Yet, Westerners were still blind, waiting for the US to move.
On the eve of the revolution, I attended a strange meeting in a downtown office building organized by Bechtel Corporation to celebrate the opening of its office in Tehran with over 100 employees. Close to political power in the USA, the Bechtel construction company was dedicated “to making money” while also helping to overthrow foreign governments unfriendly to US interests. Yet, in Iran, Bechtel and the US government failed and its men vanished from Iran. Today, I note, Iran is not even listed among the many countries where Bechtel has worked to further American interests and to make money.
In Iran, chaos reigned. It was revolution!
Washington had had blind confidence in the Shah’s American-armed military forces that had made Iran the gendarme of the region. The entire West was as incredulous as were the businessmen who counted on the US Marines to put things right.
The rest of the story is well known. In January of 1979 the Shah fled to Egypt. Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile to become the leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran. In February Iranian students occupied the US Embassy in Tehran and held its personnel as hostages. This was Iran’s revenge for the US-organized coup that overthrew Premier Moussadeq in 1953 for his nationalization of Iran’s oil.
New Iran didn’t know what to do with the hostages. It didn’t know how to negotiate. The fundamentalists were busy making the Islamic republic and Khomeini learning to control power. The young revolutionaries, the mujahadeen and the Socialists and the Communists, didn’t care about diplomatic and international rules and niceties. This was revolution.
Iranians then exulted again at the fiasco of the US military attempt to rescue the hostages. Oh, how they seethed on the banks of the Potomac. All their assessments were wrong, all attempts to salvage something from the disaster wrong. So, in 1980 American-armed Iraq attacked Iran still in chaos, while Washington upped its own confusion by secretly selling more arms to Iran. Yep, to revolutionary Iran! In order to pay for the dirty war against the new leftwing Sandinista government in Nicaragua. The Iran-Contras scandal. La drole de guerre! America armed both sides.
Iraq could never defeat Iran then, no more than American armies today or its Blackwater mercenaries could defeat ancient Iran whose history reaches back to the beginnings of time. Iran is not tribal Afghanistan or artificially created Iraq. From the Persian Gulf to the Caspian Sea, from villages of the Elbruz Mountains to the magic fountains of Isfahan, Iran is solidity. Iran is durability, part of our cultural heritage. This is territory of ancient peoples, some believe the location of the Garden of Eden and Cain’s land of Nod, somewhere East of Eden.
Gaither Stewart is originally from Asheville, NC. He has lived his adult life abroad, in Germany and Italy, alternated with residences in The Netherlands, France, Mexico, Argentina and Russia. After a career in journalism as Italian correspondent for the Rotterdam newspaper, Algemeen Dagblad, and contributor to media in various European countries. His books of fiction include, "Icy Current Compulsive Course, To Be A Stranger" and "Once In Berlin", published by Wind River Press. His new novel, "Asheville," is published by www.Wastelandrunes.com He lives with his wife, Milena, in Rome, Italy. E-mail: [email protected]
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