Plus change,

plus il est Le Stupide

In case you were operating the heavy machinery of life drunk on cough syrup and under the assumption that there is anything new under the Sun, fire up a little Foreigner

and read this remarkable gem that blogger Hossein Derakhshan (“hoder” over hoder.com) at has disinterred from the NYT Time Closet (with a big h/t to Wampum as well.)

And you read, let the names “Mossadegh” and “Ahmadinejad” gambol around the sweet, green meadows of your imagination and braid each other’s hair until you notice how completely, terrifyingly

Plug-N-Play our enemies have become.

Here is a little snip.

From the New York Time.

From August 15th.

Of 1953. (emphasis mine)

Mossadegh plays with fire

Source: The New York Times, Editorial

August 15, 1953

The world has so many trouble spots these days that one is apt to pass over the odd one here and there to preserve a little peace of mind. It would be well, however, to keep an eye, on Iran, where matters are going from bad to worse, thanks to the machinations of Premier Mossadegh.

Some of us used to ascribe our inability to persuade Dr. Mossadegh of the validity of our ideas to the impossibility of making him understand or see things our way. We thought of him as a sincere, well-meaning, patriotic Iranian, who had a different point of view and made different deductions from the same set of facts. We now know that he is a power-hungry, personally ambitious, ruthless demagogue who is trampling upon the liberties of his own people. We have seen this onetime chamption of liberty maintain martial law, curb freedom of the press, radio, speech and assembly, resort to illegal arrests and torture, dismiss the Senate, destroy the power of the Shah, take over control of the army, and now he is about to destroy the Majlis, which is the lower house of Parliament.

His power would seem to be complete, but he has alientated the traditional ruling classes — the aristocrats, landlords, financiers and tribal leaders. These elements are anti-Communist. So is the Shah and so are the army leaders and the urban middle classes. There is a traditional, historic fear, suspicion and dislike of Russian and the Russians. The peasants, who make up the overwhelming mass of the population, are illiterate and nonpolitical. Finally, there is still no evidence that the Tudeh (Communist) party is strong enough or well enough organized, financed and led to take power.

All this simply means that there is no immediate danger of a Communist coup or Russian intervention. On the other hand, Dr. Mossadegh is encouraging the Tudeh and is following policies which will make the Communists more and more dangerous. He is a sorcerer’s apprentice, calling up forces he will not be able to control.

Iran is a weak, divided, poverty-stricken country which possesses an immense latent wealth in oil and a crucial strategic position. This is very different from neighboring Turkey, a strong, united, determined and advanced nation, which can afford to deal with the Russians because she has nothing to fear — and there the West has nothing to fear.

Thanks largely to Dr. Mossadegh, there is much to fear in Iran.
...

Go here for the rest.

And then, a scant few days after the article above hit print...

The 1953 Iranian coup d'état saw the overthrow of the democratically-elected administration of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq and his cabinet from power by British and American intelligence operatives working together with elements of the Iranian army. Bribing Iranian officials, news media and others with British and American funds, Kermit Roosevelt, Jr. of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA),[1] organized the covert operation aiding retired Iranian General Fazlollah Zahedi and Colonel Nassiri. The project to overthrow Iran's government was codenamed Operation Ajax (officially TP-AJAX).

The motivation of the coup planners is disputed. According to a report on the BBC, Britain, motivated by its desire to control Iranian oil fields, contributed to funding for the widespread bribery.
…

So we ripped the heart right out of the democratically-elected government of Iran because it didn’t suit us.

Then we installed a tyrant.

And in the process, over time, managed to so alienated the citizens of the sovereign nation of Iran, that they eventually rose up against the despot we yoked them with and threw in their lot with the vehemently anti-Western Islamic Republic

of this guy.

So the Iranians had their 1776 and threw their version of the Brits out, but piloted their revolution away from all things Western and into the arms of theocracy.

Which, in turn, so thoroughly freaked us out and threatened our growing Middle Eastern oil empire-by-proxy that we backed the hell out of this guy

as a regional counterweight.

We liked him.

Saddam saw himself as a social revolutionary and a modernizer, following the Nasser model. To the consternation of Islamic conservatives, his government gave women added freedoms and offered them high-level government and industry jobs. Saddam also created a Western-style legal system, making Iraq the only country in the Persian Gulf region not ruled according to traditional Islamic law (Sharia). Saddam abolished the Sharia law courts, except for personal injury claims.

We really, really liked him!

After Khomeini gained power, skirmishes between Iraq and revolutionary Iran occurred for ten months over the sovereignty of the disputed Shatt al-Arab waterway, which divides the two countries. Iraq and Iran entered into open warfare on September 22, 1980. The pretext for hostilities with Iran was this territorial dispute, but the war was more likely an attempt by Saddam, supported by both the United States and the Soviet Union, to have Iraq form a bulwark against the expansion of radical Iranian-style revolution. It was believed by many that Saddam was invading Iran to counter the potential threat of an expansionist revolutionary Islam. "With the support of moderate Arab states, the United States, and Europe, and heavily financed by the Gulf states, Saddam Hussein had become the defender of Gulf Arabs against an expansionist, fundamentalist Iran."[22].

Consequently, many viewed Iraq as 'an agent of the civilized world'[23]. The blatant disregard of international law and violations of international boarders were ignored. Instead Iraq "received economic and military support from its allies, who conveniently overlooked Saddam's use of chemical warfare against the Kurds and the Iranians and Iraq's efforts to develop nuclear weapons."[24].

A butcher? Sure. A beast? Definitely. And a thug. The leader of a Stalinist-style dictatorship. A child-killer…that the United States supercharged. A monster that we armed and funded; whose bloody hand Don Rumsfeld gladly shook

when we needed a go-to guy in that tough neighborhood.

This is one, small facet of the history of that region as the people there have lived it; people who know perfectly well that their lives and government have been used and used and used again as rooks and pawns in a vast and lethal game of global superpower petro-politics.

And then (because injury gets so lonely without insult) you discover that your invaders and conquerors aren't being led by crafty Caesars or Alexanders or Napoleons.

Instead the most powerful military in history has become a plaything for morons.

Damaged halfwit Conservative pig people. A political movement of bedwetting cowards and third generation trustifarian whiners as incapable of forming new geopolitical memories

as this guy.

Which is why Cheney and Bush and McCain can stand in front of cameras and lie and lie and lie while the rest of the planet cringes in horror.

Because they are not talking to the rest of humanity. They are not even talking to that part of America that actually reads and thinks and remembers.

They are talking to The Base.

They are talking to their reliably ignorant armies, who gleefully send other people’s children to clash and die by night. The vast morally stillborn wad of conservative meat who are literally unable to comprehend that the disasters that are making them poop their Limbaughroos today are the consequences of actions their nation took in their name yesterday.

They wander ever onward, deeper and deeper into a shrieking night, led by snickering traitors who can hang onto power despite having been proven utterly, tragically wrong about everything all the time for one, simple reason: that the political base on which their Party rests is made of those people whose IQ only approaches triple-digits if one is willing to measure them in binary, and those that are skilled in exploiting them for depraved ends.

And so the more things change, the more they remain Teh Stoopid.