Joe's 11/26/05

November 2005: The US governments involvement in Iran in 1953 is relevant to the events of the past 5 years. It was in 1953 that the CIA successfully engineered the overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected leader Mohammed Mossadegh and reinstalled the US backed dictatorship of the Shah in Operation Ajax. The fear of communism was used as the means to garner public support for the actions. Mossadegh’s downfall is that he believed that Iran’s oil should belong to the Iranians, not controlled by the Anglo-American Oil company (now BP) and he nationalized Iranian oil. The Shah by all accounts was a ruthless monarch put into power by the support and meddling of the British and American governments, in their quest for favorable oil arrangements. Under the Shah, the only places of relative freedom and sanctity were the mosques. In 1979, the citizenry rallied against the Shah and around Ayatollah Khomeini (though, to the surprise of many, Khomeini later revealed unexpected political aspirations). Next, the take over and siege at the US Embassy by students attempting to prove (through seized documents) the extent of US involvement in Iran, as they feared the US would again try to orchestrate the reinstallation of a Shah type monarchy. The timeline then moves to Sadaam’s Iraq, who with US backing started the Iran-Iraq war which resulted in a million deaths. It’s hard to believe that the Islamic revolution would have taken place had Iranian democracy been allowed to flourish and had the Shah not been artificially propped up. More recently, the CIA actively supported the recruitment of radical Sunni Muslims to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, of which one of the respondents was Osama bin Laden. A corporate controlled US government has shown itself to be anti-democratic where the money interests of its political financiers are concerned.

Prior to our country’s war of independence from the English….what if another country had invaded, occupied, kicked the English out and said you are now free, vote? No need for patriots, founding fathers or the colonist’s struggles to sort through what definitions of freedom and form of government was right for them. The occupiers simply occuppied, installed their shell form of government and orchestrated some transitional leaders acceptable to them (a foreign government). Would we have the same governmental structure and constitution that we have now?

In 2004 (after US troops had been in Iraq for some time), the CIA reported that civil war in Iraq is a distinct possibility, whether the US is maintaining forces there or not.

Has our government done such a fair job of overseeing the planet’s resources and welfare that we (the voters) allow them to force both moral & physical authority over complete populations? Our government has become increasingly controlled by corporate politics and profit over the years, reducing the loftiest goal of this society to that of market penetration and conspicuous consumption. On a planet with finite natural resources, the corporate “winner take all” philosophy dominates our land and government. The Bush administration wants this philosophy to be global and more pervasive. Is this the culture our country has deteriorated into? Is this all there is? Please let there be more!

America’s original governing documents are excellent. Major course changes are always possible in this country, if enough of the voting public becomes fed up and educates themselves beyond the short term smoke screens of the corporate/government media machines and forces change through the political process and actively communicates with their elected officials. To do nothing will validate the end of our own democracy and solidify a hollow and self absorbed future for our children. I don’t want to be a big fat American glutton, mentally or physically. My relatives go back to the 1600’s in this country. It’s my country too; not just Cheney’s, Scalia’s, Bush’s, Rove’s, Exxon’s, Walmart’s, Monsanto's, Cargill's…..or anyone else with enough money to buy more democracy than the rest of us.

Election finance reform must be drafted and passed. Lack of finance reform in our election processes will insure that the same type of self serving scondrels continue to comprise most of the choices on both national and state ballots in this country. Enough! Just fucking enough!