04/13/07 – Behzad Yaghmaian – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton, and this is Antiwar Radio.
All right, my friends, welcome back to Radio Chaos, Antiwar Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
Keep the archives of all these great interviews at Antiwar Radio up there at the top of the page.
At Antiwar.com.
And my next guest is Bizad Yagmian.
God, I hope I said that right.
He's a professor of political economy at Ramapo College of New Jersey, an Iranian-American.
Welcome to the show, sir.
Thank you.
Thanks for having me.
Well, it's great to have you here, and everybody, if you go to Antiwar.com today, we are featuring an article by Bizad with Tom Anglehart, How a CIA Coup in Iran and My Life Became One.
And it's a really interesting article.
I urge everybody to go read it, and it's right up there in the highlights at the top of the page at Antiwar.com.
Bizad Yagmian is the author of Embracing the Infidels, Stories of Muslim Migrants on Their Journey West, and Social Change in Iran, an Eyewitness Account of Dissent, Defiance, and New Movements for Rights.
So, yeah, it says here in your article you were born just a few days after the American CIA coup of 1953 over the democratically elected leader Mossadegh in Iran.
Is that right?
Yes.
Actually, I came to this war in the midst of social and political crisis, and as you said, a few days after the coup d'etat that overthrew the popular and democratic governments of Dr. Mossadegh and brought back to power the Shah of Iran.
That's when I was born, and for the rest of my life, ever since that day, my life has been taken hostage by the US-Iran relations, and I'm not the only one.
There are millions of Iranians in the past half a century that have been subjected to that relationship.
The first part of that, the 25 years of the government of the Shah, we lived with the fear of the Shah, America, the CIA, the SAVAK, and all that came with it.
The next 25 years, we live under the fear of the Islamic Republic.
I'm very curious that in both of these time periods, America and its relations with Iran plays an important role.
In the first part, Iranians were jailed, tortured, accused of being anti-American.
In the second part, the same Iranians and more are put in the same jails and tortured, this time accused of being supporters of America.
Nothing has changed, so for the past 50 years, America and its relations with Iran have hunted the Iranians.
I think the time has come, once and for all, for the Iranians to become free of this relationship and to have a chance, really, to form their own lives independent of this tension, whether positive or negative.
When we go back to 1953, I only just recently learned by reading the great book Devil's Game by the reporter Robert Dreyfuss that the Shah had already been in power.
America helped coup d'etat him and overthrow him to pave the way for Mossadegh.
Then they decided they didn't like Mossadegh, so they did a coup against him to put the Shah back into power.
Interestingly, this was the number one footnote of my lifetime, I guess.
I had no idea that the Ayatollah Khomeini and his guys were in on the coup in 1953.
They helped the Shah overthrow Mossadegh.
Almost accurate.
There's a little story that is different here.
The Shah was forced to leave the country because of popular opposition to him.
This is a few days before the coup d'etat.
He left the country because he could no longer stay in power.
America actually did not play a role there.
America played the leading role in engineering and conducting the coup d'etat that overthrew Mossadegh and brought the Shah back to power.
A group of Muslim clerics played an important role here, but the role is not really substantial.
What is substantial here is the following.
In the next 25 years, because of the Shah's dictatorial regime and because of the lack of political liberties in Iran, because of the lack of the possibility of political discourse, the existence of secular political organizations, and on and on, the only group that could actually stabilize itself was those related to the clerics.
The clerics always had access to the mosques, and the mosques were all over the country, in big cities, small towns, and villages.
So, in a sense, the Shah and the US coup d'etat paved the way for the coming to power of Khomeini and the clerics in Iran 25 years later.
This is something I've read about Saudi Arabia as well, that the place is such a dictatorship, the only place that anyone is allowed to go and really say what is on their mind is at the mosque.
So, the religion gets politicized and the politics get religionized.
Yes, and the US has played direct and indirect roles in this.
In the case of Iran, the role was very indirect.
Mosques were places that historically and traditionally gathered people.
So, every Friday, people went to play there, and in other occasions also.
So, subversive anti-government activities were going on in mosques around the country, and that's what gave rise to the amazing possibility for the religious fanatics to organize.
Whereas the secular anti-government, anti-US forces within the country did not have those possibilities.
They had to go underground, and soon after they were arrested, taken to jail, tortured, and many of them actually executed by the Shah.
Well, and you talk about in your article, while you went to the university there, your classmates disappearing and sometimes coming back, sometimes not.
I guess the most striking part of that is how you didn't ask and they didn't answer, and nobody wanted to talk about what had happened.
Because if you're involved in that conversation, you very well could be next.
Yes, what is very interesting is that the Americans have been told many stories about the Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc, and the fear that the population and the citizens felt in those countries.
The censorship to control, the domination by the secret police, all of those.
They know about that, but very similar stuff, not perhaps to that extent, but very similar, was happening in Iran when I was in Iran during the time of the Shah.
That is, we all lived under the fear of the SAVAK, which is the secret police and the Shah, and I have to mention that the SAVAK was organized and trained by the CIA.
So in schools, people would disappear, and when they returned, of course nobody asked questions because they were afraid they were being watched.
In my household, my father would always yell at us if he mentioned the Shah, America, or anything related to that.
He would say, this politics has nothing to do with us, and keep yourself out of politics.
So the fear was pervasive.
Inside the privacy of your home, most people thought they were being watched.
That type of big brother existed in Iran, and America was of course aware of that.
So the American intervention in Iran has been going on for the longest time, and it has really never left us.
And the fear that many of us have now is that, what if the United States attacks Iran?
Apart from the immediate catastrophe and the tragedies that will come out, for how many more years will Iran and the Iranians be taken hostage by this type of intervention and reaction?
Well, that's a good opportunity to bring up the term blowback.
Apparently, according to Chalmers Johnson, the term was coined during the coup of 1953, where one of the CIA analysts wrote, we're going to have some serious blowback coming down the line from this.
And I guess it ought to be emphasized that blowback doesn't just mean unintended consequences of American foreign policy, but it means unintended consequences of covert actions that the American people don't understand.
So when the damage comes back to them, they don't have the ability to figure out why it's happening to them.
And therefore are, I guess, especially willing to accept our own government's explanations.
Why did the Iranians seize the embassy, take these hostages, overthrow the Shah?
Well, because they're crazy, fanatical religionists.
Why did Osama send his guys to crash his planes into our towers?
Well, it's because they hate freedom.
And because the American people are ignorant of the covert activities that created these situations, we don't have the context most of the time to understand and be able to analyze what's happening to us now.
Absolutely right.
And in fact, I would like to mention something.
I mean, the Bush administration has talked about regime change in Iran.
But for the Americans, it's important to know that this is not the first regime change.
If it happens, it would be the second regime change in Iran.
The first happened 50 years ago, 51 years ago.
That's when Mossadegh was overthrown and a new government and the Shah was brought back to power.
So the regime change is a part of the history of the U.S.
-Iran relations.
And when Americans want to change the repercussions, the blowbacks that come as a result of these actions, they really need to act now.
And I'm afraid in the case of Iran, we are running out of time.
Because the situation in the Middle East is extremely volatile.
And any mistake, unintended mistake, could lead to catastrophic results.
Now, there were reports, I guess, a couple of months ago that the Supreme Ayatollah Khomeini, that his newspaper, the newspaper that is identified in Iran as being closest to him and his highest aides and advisers, I guess, wrote some editorials telling Ahmadinejad that he better shut his mouth, that they weren't trying to start any trouble with America, and that he better mind his manners or he's going to find himself out of a job pretty quick.
Is that right?
And what does that mean?
What should Americans understand in terms of implications of that?
That's actually a very interesting point that you raised.
First of all, it is correct.
It means a number of things.
That Iran is a divided country.
What are the divisions?
On one hand, there is a massive gulf between the population and the government.
The Iranian people do not want war.
The Iranian people are not anti-Western.
They do not have any opposition to the Western philosophy, Western culture, all of the above.
Secondly, there are serious divisions within the government.
On one hand, there is a division between the reformists and the conservatives.
And then there is wide-ranging divisions among and within the conservatives themselves.
Ahmadinejad has actually led to a further increase in tension within the conservative camp.
The conservatives in Iran, by and large, have become very pragmatic.
They want to stay in power.
They're repressive.
They're brutal.
But they are in power.
They've been there for 28 years.
They don't want to lose that.
They know a war with America may help them temporarily, but over the long run, they're not going to win.
So a large part of perhaps the Iranian establishment, the conservative establishment, is actually running Ahmadinejad for his reckless international statements that have been actually creating more hazard and danger for the Iranian government.
Well, when you bring up how close Iranians are to Americans in terms of culture, how they like Western culture, how they like our movies, you write in the article about how when you were in jail there in 1999, all they wanted to talk about was all the Iranian expat singers and movie stars and stuff in L.A. and that kind of thing, but I guess if I was to argue from the National Review's point of view or something, Michael Ledeen would say, yes, see, all they need is a nudge and the mullahs will fall and the people of Iran who love America so much will come around and create a democracy that will be friends with America, etc.
And that is not the case because time and time that has been proven wrong.
The Iranians are anti the Iranian government.
That's true.
The Iranians are not against the Western culture.
That is true.
The Iranians want to live a normal life.
That is true.
It does not mean they're waiting for the Americans to come and help them overthrow the government.
They have gone through a very tenuous, long process of political and social change.
They understand their predicaments.
What the Iranians have been doing very persistently and in my opinion successfully in the past 15 years at least is a long-term process of intervention in their own country in order to create more openings.
And they have actually won a lot of stuff.
For example, in Iran today there is some relative degree of freedom of press.
That is, critical press does come to life.
The government stops them, bans them, but they come again.
The government fights back.
They come again.
So this cat and mouse type relationship, fight between the press and the government, all of that means the Iranians have not been sitting on the side watching, waiting for foreigners to come.
Culturally, the Iranians, especially the young Iranians, have done a marvelous job deceding the cultural projects of the Islamic Republic, if not totally, but to a large extent.
And they understand that if there is any change going to come about in Iran, it has to be done locally.
It can be done only by local forces.
And we do have a perfect example of Iraq, that foreign intervention, especially the American type, will only lead to catastrophe.
The Iranians do not want that.
So Levine and others are actually talking about their imaginary situations.
Nobody in the Middle East today wants an American intervention.
It's not only the Iranians.
Iraq and Afghanistan are perfect examples.
In Afghanistan, what we have today is mayhem.
Even the Americans had to admit that the Taliban are back.
The entire southern Afghanistan is ruled by the Taliban.
The Karzai government had to make a deal with the Taliban in order to get the release of an Italian reporter.
So what has changed in Afghanistan, Taliban is removed from Kabul, but they are creeping back.
And Karzai, which was appointed by the Americans, can only control Kabul.
So you have that in Afghanistan.
You also have the mayhem in Iraq.
So nobody in the right state of mind in Iran would want an American intervention to bring quote-unquote, liberty and freedom for them.
Well you know, when I interviewed Wayne White, a former Iran analyst at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, which is the State Department's CIA basically, he said, you know, there was somebody else who once thought that you could topple the Iranian dictatorship with a slight nudge and that the Iranian people will welcome his army as liberators.
And that guy's name was Saddam Hussein.
And he fought an eight-year war.
And the Iranian people surely resisted, no matter what they thought of the Ayatollah.
Precisely.
Excellent point.
I mean, the Iranians, unlike, unfortunately unlike the Americans, have a definite case of collective memory.
They remember their history.
And they're also careful.
They have gone through different periods of struggle and fighting with the government and they don't take unnecessary risk.
And they understand their predicament.
They have seen U.S. intervention, not only in Iraq, but also in Iran.
1953 is vivid and alive.
People remember that.
Right, yeah.
And I think that's something that Americans, that's worth kind of repeating and dwelling on for a second there.
That, you know, when the coup happened in 1979 and the Ayatollah came to power and the Shah was banished, people didn't remember the 50, Americans didn't remember the 53 coup then.
It had only been 26 years, and, you know, as we talked about with the blowback, they didn't understand that this was a reaction to what America had done covertly 26 years before.
The idea that anybody in Iran still, you know, remembers or cares about a coup in 53, you might as well be talking about a coup 5,000 years ago on Mars to the people in America.
You know, why would you still be hung up on that?
That's very true.
The sense of collective memory and history is really important in many other parts of the world.
And unfortunately, it is not.
It is not that important here.
I mean, I teach and I deal with a lot of young people.
And for most of my students, last year is history.
The sense of remembering and memory is very short.
The time span is very, very short.
And I think it's important to remember these because one has to be able to put the dots together and make a story that makes sense.
Otherwise, these stories that are given to us by the government do not provide any clue for us to understand the world around us.
And that's the danger that we're facing now, especially with this government.
In the past six and a half years, we have been bombarded by lies and deceptions, one after the other.
And all it takes is to put them together and you have a large narrative of deception.
And if that is done properly, no one in the right state of mind will follow what the government is suggesting, especially in the case of war with Iran.
Unfortunately, we are not doing that.
And we need to do a better job in that respect.
Otherwise, things will get out of hand.
And I'm really worried.
I mean, I'm not the only one.
Most of the Iranians, of course, those who live in Iran and those of us who live overseas are under the constant fear of the possible attack on Iran.
And of course, as an Iranian, I have romantic notions of being able someday to go back to Iran.
That's very natural.
But even putting that aside, if such an attack happens, not only today and for the near future, our life would be devastated in Iran, but we'll have consequences that will remain with us for generations to come.
Absolutely.
And we spend a lot of time here talking about what kind of immediate repercussions we could suffer as a result of attacking Iran in terms of a depression caused by the high oil prices or attacks on our soldiers in Iraq or perhaps a coup in Pakistan, the sinking of Navy ships in the Persian Gulf, those kinds of things.
But it's hard, isn't it, to just imagine the future and try to guess at what long-term repercussions might come.
But it surely could be said, couldn't it, that no matter what, if we do bomb Iran, there will be repercussions, whether you can think of them now or not, just like we're dealing with the coup of 53, we'll be dealing with the war of 07 for generations to come as well.
Precisely.
And if you learn from history, one of the lessons would be the following, that had the Americans not intervened in Iran in 1953, the chance of fundamentalist government coming to power in Iran in 1975, 1979, would have been much less.
As a result, the chance of the rise of political Islam in the Middle East would have been less, and as a result, all the consequences that we followed later on would have been less.
So the Americans, because of their foreign policy and their covert actions in the past, created a monster that they now have to deal with.
If they continue to do so, that is, if they attack Iran, they would actually be further feeding this monster, and creating even more problems in the years to come.
So it's really upon us, it's so important that we take this very seriously, and we begin thinking about that, that the war is not only a short-term episode of violence, it is really long-term, and the consequences are unpredicted and unknown.
Yeah, well, and maybe that's the plan, too.
I mean, after all, if you have bombs to sell, guaranteeing that there's further chaos for years to come is a good way to guarantee bomb sales to the U.S. government.
Yeah, yeah, that's also very true.
That's also very true.
Now, let me ask you about the reform movements.
I remember this guy, Khatami, with the president in the 1990s, seemed like he wanted to warm relations with the West more and more, and I do remember that in 2005, that the day after Ahmadinejad was elected, I think it was July 2005, all of Ahmadinejad's aides and advisors went out to tell the media to make sure to thank George W. Bush for, you know, warning the Iranians, they better not elect a right-winger, so that's exactly what they did, and Ahmadinejad wanted to thank George Bush, especially for helping him win.
But I wonder, I guess, what are the tensions, what are the different structures of power between Khatami and Ahmadinejad and reformers and hardliners in Iran?
Yeah, I mean, a couple of points.
Yes, any time the Americans had any statements, radical statements, about Iran, they only helped the conservatives and the radical elements of the government, and this we have heard repeatedly, repeatedly, time and again, from the reformist factions within the government of Iran and also from the Iranian activists, look, if you want to help the cause of democracy in Iran, please do not say anything.
So you're absolutely right that Ahmadinejad's victory and later on relative success until a point was actually aided by proclamations from George Bush and the American government.
In terms of the decisions within the Iranian government, yes, the reformists were outsets, that is, they were removed from power, but they still exist.
There is a reformist group that is around the government, and also there are millions of reformist individuals in the country.
I think the Iranians, by and large, are reformists.
They want reform.
And they have proven that through their different types of activities.
And their desire for reform, of course, translated into reformist politicians that come in and out of the government.
On the other hand, the strategic points of power are in the hands of the conservatives.
That is, they control the military, they control the post-Iran, the revolutionary guards, they control the secret police, and so on and so forth.
So, within the government, you have a very decisive division in terms of who controls what at what time.
And the dominant position of the conservatives must be understood not as a permanent position, but as a relative position that can always change.
The balance of power in Iran is not permanent.
It is a changing balance of power.
A few years ago, the reformists really had the upper hand.
Now the conservatives.
Who knows what would happen in the future?
Well, and I know this isn't your area of expertise, but as long as we're talking about the possibility of war with Iran, I might as well bring up the fact that the CIA says it would take them 10 years to make a nuclear weapon if they were to start now.
The International Atomic Energy Agency has inspectors everywhere.
The most they've ever been able to enrich uranium is to 3.6%, which you can't make a nuke out of.
Every nuclear expert in the world is laughing at them and mocking them for their, for Ahmad Jad's overdone pronouncements of success that never quite meet reality.
And further, that anybody could go read Reuters from last Saturday about how the U.S. military found an explosively formed penetrator factory in Iraq, just a few miles south of Baghdad.
And so there is the accusation that all those bombs must be coming from Iran, and geez, no nukes, no bombs to Iraq to kill Americans.
I'm not sure if they even have a fake excuse for starting a war with Iran at this point.
You are absolutely right.
As you said, I cannot make a judgment on whether or not Iran would have access to nuclear power in the next 10 years or 3 years or 5 years.
I don't think anybody does know.
That information is not available.
Everybody who makes any type of proclamation, their statements are based on maybe guesswork.
Well, the IAEA is there.
The IAEA is definitely more equipped than George Bush and people around him.
But what I know for sure is the following, that even if the Iranians did have access to nuclear power, and if they do develop that, it is really definitely for defensive measures, not offensive measures.
I mean, that is clear for all the Iranians that are now, unfortunately, supporting Iran's ambitions for developing nuclear power.
The Iranians must be out of their mind if they wish to start a nuclear catastrophe or nuclear war with another country.
They know they cannot win.
It is quite clear that the Iranians were the first losers in this.
What they want from this energy or nuclear power is the ability to sit down and bark and say, look, you leave us alone and we can coexist as equal partners.
That is really the intention behind whatever Iran is doing.
So the hype around the possible threat that Iran will be posing to the West and Israel and the region is totally false.
It really doesn't exist.
Well, and we know that ever since September 11th, the Iranian government has been bending over backwards to cooperate with America in the war in Afghanistan, arresting Al Qaeda guys and offering to trade them for Mujahideen Al-Khaq terrorists that work for America.
The great peace offer of 2003, where they basically put every single thing on the table and America has told them to go to hell.
We are not interested in any of their peace offers.
Excellent point.
As you said, the Iranians have made many gestures helping the Americans.
They want peace.
The Bush administration does not want peace with Iran.
It does not want peace with Syria.
That is quite clear.
Hence the difference between the administration and the Baker-Hamilton recommendations.
They thought that by talking to Iran and Syria, there lies the possibility of reducing tension in the Middle East.
The Bush administration does not wish to reduce tension.
That is quite clear.
Otherwise, the think tanks, the conservatives, and everybody else around the Bush administration understand that you can only bring stability by talking to Iran and Syria, not by bullying them.
That is another important question.
What is really the intention of the Bush administration?
Chaos and crisis is really what feeds this administration.
And there lies the danger.
And I believe a part of the Iranian government, a section of the Iranian government around Ahmadinejad, are also inspired by the same types of feelings and by the same types of foreign policy.
Well, there is no better way to rally your base than to point at a foreign threat, whether you are an Iranian or an American.
Precisely.
And this has been going on.
And I think the task at this point is to try to diffuse these tendencies.
And I think the most important job that needs to be done is in the United States, not in Iran.
The anti-war movement in the United States must become much more aggressive and much more active in not only opposing the Bush administration's plan for war, but also watching very carefully the Democratic Party and its candidates for presidency.
Because increasingly Clinton, Obama, Barack, and Roberts have been clearly indicating that they would not tolerate a nuclear Iran and nothing should be taken off the table.
That is, they're using the same language as the Bush administration.
And that's very dangerous.
I think Americans should be paying close attention to that.
And by their activities, they need to make those Democrats to understand that war is not an option.
Yeah.
No, that is the most important point of all.
There is only one Democrat presidential candidate who's come out explicitly against war on Iran, and that's Denis Kucinich, who's a one percenter.
And you're absolutely right.
Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Barack Obama have all said the exact phrase, all options are on the table.
And in fact, I think John Edwards and Barack Obama were having a contest for who could be more slavishly devoted to the Israel lobby and who could make a bigger deal out of Iran's failing nuclear enrichment process, in spite of all evidence.
That's very true, and I think that's very crucial.
So, what can the anti-war movement do here?
Frankly, the anti-war movement here has been very violent, and no matter what happened in the past six years, America remains a democracy.
There are possibilities of massive, massive civil action that one has here, but we lack in Iran.
The protesters in Iran would be jailed and tortured, whereas protesters in the United States do not face the same consequences.
So, there are a variety of types of actions that could actually be used to defuse the crisis, to reduce the possibility of war.
Students could boycott their classes, people could have street demonstrations, workers could go on strike, people could have letter-writing campaigns, everything, there are many things that they could do.
Voting is only one action, one possibility, and we did that in November, but that cannot be all, because if we only stick to voting and do not use other possibilities, our votes will be wasted.
And I'm so frightened that this is the direction we're going now.
Yeah, well, the protesters that you would like to see in the street, they don't know or have any reason to believe that they would have to suffer consequences of a war against Iran.
It would just be another war far away, you can't smell the burning bodies or hear the anguished screams from here, and so they don't have the ability, the background knowledge to examine what consequences might blow back and affect them personally, and so it's not a priority.
And, you know, I think that maybe this is something that you understand pretty well teaching college undergraduates, but then again, you may not, being someone who is from another land and who has traveled around the world and been different places, most Americans don't even really believe in foreigners, I don't think.
I mean, to most Americans, foreigners are an imaginary thing that sometimes it's the other team that we go fight or what have you.
But other than that, I think when Americans picture the Middle East, they picture scenes from the Disney movie Aladdin.
They don't know, it might as well be another planet.
So I guess if I could get you to wrap up, attempting to remind my audience that Iranians are individuals, they're human beings, and you know, silly things like that?
Yes, I mean, the point of the story that I wrote, and you refer to that in Tom Dispatch, is really to put a human face to this drama, that what happens politically and militarily affects real people, and the real people have real lives.
And the point of my story was to show what that impact has been on me, a real person from Iran.
So information is very important, and programs like yours and similar programs are important contribution to providing the sufficient information that could help us present the catastrophe.
And I really admire you for the work.
So we need to pass on whatever we know in different forms, using different types of media.
All right, Behzad Yaghmayyan, did I say it right?
Perfectly.
All right, cool.
He's a professor of political economy at Ramapo College of New Jersey, and he's the author of Embracing the Infidels, Stories of Muslim Migrants and Their Journey West, and Social Change in Iran, an eyewitness account of dissent, defiance, and new movements for rights.
Thanks very much for your time today, Behzad.
Thank you for having me.
All right, my friends, this is Antiwar Radio, and we'll be right back after this very important message.