Paul Schools Santorum on Iran in GOP Debates

During Thursday's Ames, Iowa GOP debates, Rep. Ron Paul was questioned about his views on Iran.  He advocated lifting sanctions and letting Iran defend its borders instead of fighting endless wars and provoking through our actions other countries to war with us.  It was a classic noninterventionist, conservative argument, one our Founding Fathers would surely endorse.

But that wasn't good enough for Rick Santorum who verbally jumped out of turn in front of Herman Cain to defend his anti-Iran policy.  During Santorum's defense he claimed we had been at war with Iran since 1979; in turn Ron Paul corrected him claiming 1953.

As a student of history, I found it appropriate to share with you the truth in Dr. Paul's words.  For the vast majority of adulthood, the history lesson we remember and are told begins with the violent overthrow of a pro-American Iranian leader, the Shah, with the subsequent hostage taking of Americans at our embassy.  I remember those days well.  Yet most of us aren't quite old enough to remember a complex story of American interventionism gone awry.  Nor were the secret events of 1953 fully elucidated to the American public as they have been in more recent times.  Lets examine some history together and learn how events all across the globe impacted our relations with Iran.

During WWII, Venezuela passed the Hydrocarbons Act of 1943 which asserted that profits made from foreign oil companies had to be shared 50/50 with the state.  This precursor to oil nationalization was copied in 1950 by Saudia Arabia in its dealings with Aramco as King Ibn Saud achieved a similar agreement under the threat of nationalization.  Seeing successful profit-sharing results in other oil producing nations, the idea of nationalization grew wildly popular in Iran with regards to Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC, whom we know today as British Petroleum or BP) and its Abadan refinery at the time responsible for 20% of the world supply (Abadan is my sweetheart's birthplace so there is personal familiarity).  While the British slowly reacted to the profit-sharing demands, a group of radical Iranians terrorists lead by Navvab Safari and his secret society Fada'iyan-e Islam with a history of assassinations since 1946, assassinated the Prime Minister Haj Ali Razmara while praying in a mosque on March 7, 1951--just days after Razmara had spoken out against AOIC nationalization.  Razmara's assassination vaulted the issue into the Iranian parliament which days later voted for nationalization and a new pro-nationalization Prime Minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh.

This expropriation naturally resulted in an outcry from the British who blocked the Persian Gulf and succeed in dropping Iranian oil production by 95%.  After a period of time realizing that Mosaddegh would offer no recourse to the stolen assets, the British planned a coup using MI6.  As historian John W. Limbert points out in Chapter 3 of his work Negotiating with Iran: Wrestling the Ghosts of History (2009) with the UK under Socialist Party rule they hardly held the moral high ground:

Prime Minister Clement Attlee's socialist government, which had nationalized much of British heavy industry, could not well oppose the Iranian oil nationalization on principle. (p.72)

During 1951-2 both the UK and the US would change the party in control of leadership, first the UK choosing Prime Minister Winston Churchill and followed by US Churchill's wartime ally, Dwight Eisenhower.  Churchill began to lobby the US to assist in the coup playing on American fears that the UK might withdraw from the Korean War:

"Britain was supporting the Americans in Korea, [Churchill] reminded Truman, and had a right to expect Anglo-American unity on Iran." (Wikipedia, 1953 Iranian Coup D'état quoting Stephen Kinzer: All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror, John Wiley and Sons, 2003, p.145)

With the election of Eisenhower and installation in January of 1953, the new president authorized using the CIA to cosponsor the coup codenamed "Operation Ajax".  The coup then occurred on August 19, 1953.  Whereas pro-American Mosaddegh had been democratically elected, the result of the coup was to install a king, the Shah, who ruled with tyranny as an American puppet over the nation.  The Sharia-law loving Islamic fundamentalists, angered both by the coup and the secularism of the Shah, staged their own revolution in 1979.  The CIA created the word "blowback" specifically to mean the unintended consequences of this anti-democratic American imperialism.

Quite simply, Americans were fighting their first war--the Korean War--under the banner of the United Nations and leaving behind the notions of both non-interventionism and with Truman declaring the it a "police action" circumventing the constitutional requirement for a congressional declaration of war.  Because Truman had illegally intervened into Korea, the pressure was augmented for the US to support its longtime ally.  Additionally, the Korean War removed the moral high ground of non-interventionism and may have help signal to Churchill that such actions by the US were now acceptable leaving the door open for Churchill to petition the US into a second instance of interventionism when clearly this was a dispute between--at that time two friends of the US:  Iran and the UK.  Ron Paul obviously knows his history and were we all to study Iran would learn of a classic case of interventionism gone awry and a warning echoed by Paul for us not to intervene.

Additional reading:  TotallyFreePress, Iran’s History, the CIA / MI6 & Operation Ajax

Goodbye Iran, Hello USA!

Today Nacilbupera's honeybunny officially became a naturalized citizen of the USA! Honeybunny was born in oil country, SW Iran, not far from Iraq. She became a political refugee to the USA in 1979 when the Shah was overthrown and Khomeni began his iron-fisted rule as supreme leader both politically and religiously. She has lived and worked continuously as a legal, permanent resident alien in the US for the past three decades, never really even wanting to return to the once westernized, peaceful nation now bent on destroying Israel and the USA. She began toying with the idea of becoming a citizen a few years ago and the idea came to fruition late last year when she sent in her $750 and her application.

Nacilbupera found the Naturalization Test most intriguing. An applicant studies 100 US history, civics, political and geography questions and must answer 6 out of 10 questions correctly. The questions range from easy: "What ocean is on the West Coast of the United States?" to moderate: "The Federalist Papers supported the passage of the U.S. Constitution. Name one of the writers." Honeybunny learned quite a bit in studying for the test; we would put her knowledge above that of the average American on the street, although most unfortunately that isn't the highest bar. The test examines the Constitution broadly, but not specifically. For example, none of the questions deal with identifying the section and amendments which limit the power of the federal government to the states or how the constitution has been misinterpreted by using the commerce clause as justification for just about anything.

The naturalization ceremony held in Salt Lake was thoughtful and inspiring. A choir from a junior high school sang for us as well as a couple of speakers addressed. Judge Samuel Alba, a naturalized citizen from Mexico, presided over the ceremonies and shared his story of being born to migrant farm workers and eventually becoming a District Court Judge. He provided the statistics from the group of 62 newly-naturalized citizens. They were from around the world, a couple of dozen countries represented including the largest representation: 13 from Mexico and 5 from each of India and Iran. Other countries we knew of included Haiti, Dominican Republic, Somalia, Russia, & Azerbaijan. The judge made everyone commit to do their duty and be a voter in the upcoming elections. He had volunteers speak on why they decided to become citizens; an overriding theme was freedom. One turbaned man praised the military's decision in March to allow Sikhs to keep their beards and turbans. (We're not really sure how you wear a helmet and a turban but the beards could be an asset in countries where beards are a cultural norm.)

It bothered us that English wasn't emphasized more. A few citizens were there with interpreters and citizenship documents are downloadable in English, Spanish, Vietnamese, Tagalog, and Chinese. While honeybunny is fluent in English, we wondered about the abilities of those few with interpreters. We don't understand the role of an interpreter if citizens are supposed to be able to speak, read, write, and understand basic English. Perhaps our observations didn't reveal a wholly accurate picture.

Overall, we thoroughly enjoyed the experience and highly recommend attendance at a swearing-in ceremony: the new citizens accompanied by their families and friends were friendly, patriotic, and optimistic. We wish them well and hope they will continue their studies of our county and its greatest document: our Constitution. Perhaps they will join us tomorrow in the numerous tea parties scheduled including here in Utah celebrating our country's protest and revolt from unconstitutional overtaxation and oppression.

New Rebirth to Old Persia?

Iran's Flag (Pre-Islamofascist-Revolution)

Nacilbupera would be amiss if we didn't publicly show our support for the demonstrators in Iran; acutely so when we are married to a 1979 political refugee from the great Persian nation.

Iran has been hijacked by Islamofascist terrorists; this is not new. They held our people--workers in our embassy--hostage until Reagan took office because they new better than to mess with Reagan. Khomeini and his puppet president Ahmadinejad are huge supporters of terrorist groups including Hamas. In Tiananmen-esque style they are arresting and slaughtering their own young people who sought nothing but peaceful demonstration in lieu of a corrupt, rigged election. They have taken hostage 8 diplomats employed at the English Embassy in Tehran. They have banned freedom of the press and threatened anyone who seeks to simply tell the truth of what is going on. They seek nuclear weapons against UN resolutions while the Persian economy tanks. They spread their hate by chanting "Death to America" in their mosques.

But the Persians are a proud people with centuries old history--predating Shi'a Islam and the birth of the Prophet Muhammad--including Cyrus, Darius, and Xerxes. Under these classic rulers Persia was the world's superpower and particularly in the case of Cyrus allowed Jewish (and other) religious freedoms. Persians today, Nacilbupera feels, yearn for the freedom of religion of their forefathers. They don't want to be the Islamofascist Republic of Iran. They respect the Jewish, Armenian (Christian), and Zoroastrian religious minorities that peacefully coexist within their borders and have done so for millennia. They DO believe in the holocaust and its tragedy. Most of them are followers of Islam but not of jihad against America. We see this in their chat today: "Ahmadinejad is Hitler and a holocaust is here."

Nacilbupera praises the efforts of its people to peacefully revolt and overthrow the Isalmofascist regime. We also are completely willing to support the Persian People if and as they deem it necessary to overthrow the regime by force as we Americans had to do in declaring ourselves free from Britain in 1776. Finally, Nacilbupera believes that the reason why so many noble Persians are willing to risk their lives and property is because they realize that their leaders are fixated on obtaining nuclear weapons which will result in retaliation from the international community in the form of an inevitable war, like neighbors Iraq and Afghanistan who were unsuccessful in overthrow tyranny by themselves.