The Sins of the Shah
Continuing with reading notes from Dreyfuss'
Hostage to Khomeini:
The Khomeini Revolution began in Nov 1976. It was that month that Amnesty International issued reports charging brutality and torture of political prisoners by the Shah of Iran.
The Rostow-Kissinger PolicyThe groundwork for the Revolution had been laid several years earlier by the Colorado-based Aspen Institute. The project itself was rooted in more than a century of Iranian history, during which British intelligence specialists had cultivated the Iranian clergy, secret societies and religious brotherhoods as assets of the British Empire. But the Amnesty International Report was the gunshot that started the war: one of Washington's staunchest allies had been declared to be expendable.
In 1960s and 1970s, the Shah (under the direction of Eugene Rostow at the State Department, and then Kissinger at the NSC) had set his country on a course toward militarization, equipped to be the protectors of British and Anglo-American interests in the Persian Gulf region. London and Washington also intended to prevent Iran from engaging in policies that in any way might threaten the exclusive hegemony of the Anglo-American oil and financial interests. During the 1950s and 1960s, for instance, he involved himself in petroleum deals outside the Anglo-American oil cartel headed by British Petroleum. The Shah had struck an alliance with Italy's Enrico Mattei in the late 1950s, the head of the state-owned ENI corporation, enraging London. Shah ahd also made approaches to the Soviet Union for economic agreements.
Rostow-Kissinger policy had the full cooperation of Israel's foreign intelligence service, the Mossad.
Other people involved w/ this planning includfed Robert W. Komer, Undersec of Defense for Policy for Carter. Komer, who had been a specialist in the Indian Ocean since the Kennedy administration, was workig on a joint task force with the British government to plan Anglo-American strategy in the wake of British military withdrawl from the Arabian Gulf countries between 1968 and 1971. Today, Komer is the man behind the so-called Rapid Deployment Force, the special 110,000 man strike force whose primary mission is the seize areas in the Gulf.
Playing upon his psychological profile, the Kissinger state department convinced the Shah that he had a great need for immense amounts of military hardware. With the hardware came unlimited amounts of US and British intelligence personnel; scores of Iranian officers arrived in the United States, Britain and even Israel for training.
After 1973, however, w/ the sudden rise of oil prices, the Shah began to see an opportunity for independent action. The 1973-74 oil hoax was the work of Henry Kissinger. During December 1973 OPEC meeting in Tehran, the secretary of state had told the Shah to demand an astronomial price increase. Kissinger was acting on behalf of the 7 Sisters oil cartel and the City of London banks, who desired high prices, but Shah saw the price increases as a way to begin to pull his country out of backwardness. He began to talk about making Iran an "industrial power".
The Shah's first open challenge to Kissinger came in 1975, w/ President Houari Boumedienne of Algeria and King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, Iran signed a pact w/ Iraq that ended a war of attrition waged by the Kurdish minority of Iraq. The Kurdish rebellion was a prized project of the CIA -- whose former director, Richard Helms, was ambassador to Iran - the British Secret Intelligence Service and the Mossad. According to Arab sources, Khomeini in 1975 was in exile in Iraq and supported the Kurdish rebellion against his Iraqi hosts. When the Shah closed the door on the Kurds, Kissinger hit the ceiling. Millions of dollars in logistical support and arms went down the drain in Kurdistan, as the Iraqi armed forces lost no time in mopping up the remnants of the rebellion. Killing the remaining Kurdish leaders, Iraq moved into Kurdistan with a number of economic development projects, and today Kurdistan is one of the fastest developing sectors .
In 1977, things took a more serious turn. The Shah began to distance Iran from close identification w/ Israel and Mossad. Steered towards a closer partnership w/ Arabs, including Iraq and Saudi Arabia, cemented at OPEC meetings in 1977 and 1978. Then Iran dropped its longstanding demand for higher prices. In 1977, at a press conference, the Shah startled the world by stating his intention to work for oil price stability. Together, Saudi Arabia and Iran produced nearly 50% of OPEC's output.
The Shah had supported for years the dropping of the US dollar in favor of a "basket of currencies" -- announced that henceforth he would support the continued use of the dollar as a means of payment and pricing for oil exports in OPEC. For several years Kissinger had been trying to convince OPEC to switch to IMF Special Drawing Rights or a similar unit of account. Saudi Arabia had resisted the policy (until now), and Iran had supported it. Saudi King Khalid paid a visit to Tehran, where he arranged Saudi financial support for the Iranians.
Iran was also working closer with the French and West Germans on the eve of the EMS. If the Saudi-Iran-Iraq axis established a solid working relationship w/ the EMS, it would have assembled an unstoppable combination against London. One deal that was especially angering was a three-way deal in which Iran agreed to supply the Soviet Union w/ huge quantities of natural gas, while the USSR supplied an equal amount of its own gas to West Germany. The Shah visited Moscow to discuss an expansion of Iran-Soviet economic cooperation.
Wither the Soviets?
Continuing on w/ reading notes from Dreyfuss'
Hostage to Khomeini:
It would be a mistake to take at face value Brzezinski's comments that the primary target of the Carter administration's alliance with militant Islam is the Soviet Union. The primary target is the economies of America's "allies" in Western Europe.. and the primary weapon is oil.
In 1978, the governments of France and West Germany led the EC - with the exception of Britain - in the formation of the European Monetary System (EMS), conceived as a "seed crystal for the replacement of the IMF" .. the EMS challenged the "controlled disintegration" of the Carter administration. It called for:
- Strengthening the U.S. dollar
- Return to the gold standard
- Expansion of nuclear energy production
- Export of high tech to the developing world
The success of this program hinged on an alliance w/ OPEC nations. As early as 1977, France and West Germany had begun exploring the possibility of consecrating a deal w/ OPEC in which Western Europe would export high tech to OPEC countries in exchange for long-term oil supply contracts at a stable price. In return, OPEC countries woudl deposit their enormous financial surpluses in Western European banks and - eventually - into the EMS's own institutions, which would refund them to the Third World. With those credits, the Third World would begin to gain access to European high technology exports.
When London discovered that it could not dissuade Giscard d'Estaing and Helmut Schmidt from the EMS project in 1978, the green light was given to the Muslim Brotherhood to speed the destabilization of Iran. Western Europe and Japan are almost totally dependent upon Persian Gulf oil, and during 1978 the supply came from: Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Kuwait and the UAE.
In October 1979
The invasion would be calculated not to secure an oil supply for the United States, but rather to withhold it from the Europeans and Japanese. Since the taking of hostages, this threat has been held over the head of the EMS like a sword of Damocles.
Brzezinski's "Islamic card" has functioned as the most brutal end of the policy the Carter administration brought into the White House. One of the first actions Carter took when he assued office in Jan 1977 was to dispatch Walter Mondale to France and West Germany to tell the leaders of those countries that the US would henceforth oppose the sale of nuclear technology to the Third World. West Germany's deal with Brazil, and France's proposed deal with Pakistan, fell under heavy criticism. In Iran, the Shah had pledged to bring Iran into the ranks of the world's top ten industrialized nations by the year 2000, and a comprehensive nuclear program - backed by France and West Germany - was already underway.
Today the Shah's nuclear cooling towers are used as silos for grain, and "Iranization" has become a blackmail threat against every Third World nations seeking to industrialize.
The BBC and the Shah
Continuing on with the notes I'm taking from Dreyfuss'
Hostage to Khomeini, in the last section (which you can find on my political blog,
Above the President, under the title
Brzezinski's Islamic Card) we saw how Brzezinski once again invoked the (reliable) Soviet boogyman (much like his predecessors Truman, Eisenhower and Nixon had done), this time to advance U.S. political interests in the oil-rich Middle East.
In this post, we'll take a closer look at British involvement in the overthrow of the Shah. As the Islamic fundamentalist upsurge was numbering the days of his regime, the Shah of Iran was denouncing not the U.S. National Security Council (where Brzezinski worked) but rather British Petroleum and the British Broadcasting Corporation as their foreign fomenters of the rebellion. Brzezinski was playing an "Islamic card" that had been placed in his hands by the British.
"British" in this context does not mean the people of the United Kingdom, or even its government. Rather, it refers to the ruling familes of the British oligarchy, which since 1660 have ruled Britain unchallenged as the command center for the European feudal nobility and its associated financial interests. Policy for this oligarchy is formulated through the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA) in Britain and through the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), on Park Avenue in New York City in the United States. Other institutions, like the Aspen Institute, are also involved.
Since the era of Charlemagne, when humanity began to pull itself out of the dark ages that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire, the most serious challenge to Europe's noble families has been posed by the nation-state, with a leadership committed to the development of its citizenry and its economy. The scions of this British oligarchy think not in terms of months and years, but in terms of decades and even centuries.
Bertrand Russell, whos Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation did so much to bring Khomeini to power, is the kind of mind who exemplifies such imperial thinking. This 1951 book
Impact of Science on Society discusses ways to control (and reduce) populations.
For the oligarchy, the Khomeini regime - which has leveled the Iranian economy and turned its potential citizens into rampaging mobs - is the "shape of things to come." The destruction of Iran's cities, the forced reversio of Iran to an agricultural rather than industrially developing nation, the cancellation of Iran's nuclear enery program by Khomeini have all been praised by representatives of Britian's ruling class not only as a model for the underdeveloped sector but for the Western world as well.
British dark-age policy has secured hegemony over most of the policy-making apparatus of the United States and its government. "Post-industrialism", "zero growth", "environmentalism", "do your own thing", etc, are all the slogans of this counter-culture movement.
Project 1980sIn 1975, the British dark ages policy was officially incorporated into the future administration of Jimmy Carter in the form of a CFR report entitled 1980s Project, a 30-volume prospectus for the next decade. Participants in this project included Cyrus Vance, Anthony Solomon, Harold Brown, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Leslie Gelb and others, and it moved with the Carter administration to Washington in 1977.
The general theme of this report is the "controlled disintegration" of the world economy.
First made public in 1979, the 1980s Project papers explained that the world financial and economic system needed a complete overhaul, according to which control of key sectors such as energy, credit allocation and food would be placed under the direction of a single, global administration. Overseeing the apparatus suggested by the CFR would be a team of corporate managers drawn from the ranks of oil multinationals and Anglo-American banks.
The objective of this reorganization would be the replacement of the nation-state and the global supervision of the United Nations and the IMF. The world would be divided into regional currency zones. Mediating between these currencies zones would be the IMF, which would retain nearly complete control over the flows of currency and world trade. The U.S. dollar would no longer serve as the world's reserve currency.
The flow of advanced technology into the developing world would be halted.
The U.S. State Department sponsored the Global 2000 Report, which projects - and approves - that this policy will reduce by 3 billion the world's population by the year 2000.
Iran is the test-tube experiment to prove that Third World populations can be made to impose this policy upon themselves.
