Imperialists plot ‘regime change’ in Iran

The 1979 Revolution in Iran overthrew the dictatorial regime of Mohammad Reza Shah, who had been Washington’s obedient puppet. Since then, intimidation, threats and actual aggression by the imperialist powers of the U.S. and Western Europe against Iran have been taking shape on numerous fronts.

The U.S. and the dominant powers of Europe, even after 26 years, have not come to grips with the new reality of today’s independent Iran. They are still dreaming of turning the wheels of history back and re-establishing their political, military and economic domination over the oil-rich country. But, to their regret, today’s Iran is not the Iran of 1953, when a pack of U.S.-British intelligence officers could carry out a palace coup and overturn the entire state apparatus by influencing the top ranks of the Iranian military.

Therefore, a new, more sophisticated and comprehensive strategy, worthy of the era of globalization, has to be devised—a strategy that consists of using the entire arsenal of corporate propaganda tools at the disposal of world imperialism, as well as the “honorable” offices of the United Nations General Secretary, if possible its Security Council, the International Atomic Energy Agency—the UN’s nuclear watchdog, and the NGOs of the day—so-called “human rights” and even women’s organizations. Behind all this are the cruel economic sanctions against the entire population of Iran and threats to use tactical nuclear devices.

Divide and conquer

The period immediately following World War II saw the rise of nationalist fervor, a new labor movement and new socialist organizations in Iran.

The British government, trying to strengthen the tentacles of the British Petroleum Co. around Iran’s oil industry and its mighty labor force, armed a minority of the Iranian Arab population living in the Gulf region to attack striking workers, whose demands did not go beyond the right to organize and the right to safe housing, with clean, running water and electricity. These armed Arabs who attacked the oil refinery workers were themselves poor and destitute. They were used by the British and Arab feudal sheiks in the pay of the British intelligence service.

When the imperialist powers cannot control a government and cannot subvert it from within, they resort to creating discord between different nationalities and setting centrifugal tendencies in motion, tearing the national and unifying fabric of the society apart. The first stage in the division of the country is to challenge the commonality of interests of different nationalities in a geographical entity that has lasted for centuries.

What is so insidious about encouraging the nationalities to be at each other’s throats is that such schemes are presented with an aura of pseudo-progressivism—of emancipation from national oppression. In Iraq this scheme, formulated by the most decadent breed of British and Yankee imperialism, is nothing short of a plan for privatization and expropriation of Iran’s national wealth: its natural resources, especially oil and natural gas, its financial institutions and public health insurance enterprise, the manufacturing and public service sectors, and finally the urban and rural public-landed properties.

The final stage of this plan is to open wide the doors of Iran’s labor and commodity markets to the giant transnational corporations, led by Wall Street.

The latest anti-Iran propaganda show was performed by Michael Ledeen, a resident scholar of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a co-founder of the Coalition for Democracy in Iran, and a former consultant in the Department of State, Department of Defense and the White House.

Ledeen, an arch-reactionary at the service of the most rabid and blood-thirsty faction of world imperialism and Zionism, is a strong advocate of regime change, not only in Iran but also in Syria, Egypt and even Washington’s ally, Saudi Arabia.

On Oct. 26, on behalf of the AEI, he participated in a conference named “The Unknown Iran, Another Case for Federalism.” Ledeen, an inept and wishful thinker, prematurely assumes that federalism has already taken root in Iraq, and it is now Iran’s turn to be dragged into factional fighting, a civil war and division.

The agenda of the conference was to promote and exploit the differences between various nationalities, races, and religious and ethnic groupings across Iran. Ledeen is a staunch supporter of launching U.S. military intervention and the occupation of Iran. In this conference he courted a few isolated individuals who self-righteously had appointed themselves spokespeople for different nationalities there. Among the four members of the panel, the spectrum of ideas ranged from self-rule to outright separatism for various nationalities.

A fleeting glance at the U.S.-NATO war on Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and now Iraq leads one to believe that balkanization of many independent countries, especially the petroleum-rich states of the Middle East, is at the heart of the U.S. strategy for world domination.