Tracy writes:

> Then I expect a detailed log of all "our" activity in
>  the region since 1918 with an entry every 5 minutes!

That's not as difficult as it sounds. If you mean "our" to include the
British (members of the Coalition of the Willing) and Turkey (a member of the
Coalition of the Billing), then "our" interference can be traced back 300 years.

I'm writing this wholly from memory due to simply a lack of time, thus
pleased be warned that there may be a few errors in the following.

The Turkish Ottoman Empire that dominated the middle east and southeastern
Europe was finally brought to an close by World War I, but for the 200 years
prior, the Ottoman Empire ruled Baghdad with such a tight grip that the city,
which had once been a shining jewel of cultural achievement, became a backwater
of little or no cultural or political importance.

Near the close of WWI, Woodrow Wilson argued very strenuously not only for a
League of Nations but also for the rights of self-determination for the
peoples that were going to become free of their former occupiers. The Allies
(Britian, France, Italy) acquiesced to Wilson, but only in order to keep the United
States in the war. At the war's end, Wilson was beyond irate when he discovered
that he had been snookered -- and only very reluctantly participated in
drawing the national boundaries of the countries of the region, "creating" the
countries of Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, etc.

The British Gen. Maude marched into Baghdad in 1917, following the fall of
the Ottoman Empire, declaring that they had come "not as conquerors, but as
liberators." The British said that their intentions were to stay only a few
months, certainly no more than a few years, only until a new civil government could
be established.

That decision to withdraw took a bit longer than was originally promised and
was eventually put off until 1953. In 1920, a vast reserve of oil was
discovered in what was now northern Iraq at Kirkuk. Only very little earlier, a young
Winston Churchill had decreed that the British Royal Navy was to convert its
entire fleet to oil-driven ships. Staying in Iraq had now become a matter of
"national security."

Although the British occupied Iraq during all of WWII, their focus obviously
moved elsewhere. In Baghdad, in an act of resistance to the British
occupation, the Baath Party was formed in 1943, modeled around the nature and activities
of Britian's great enemy at the time, the Nazi Party of Germany. The exit of
the British in 1953 left a power vacuum and allowed the Baathist Party to rise
to ascendency. That in itself was not particularly alarming at the time. Oil
continued to flow, and so long as it did, some sense of self-determination was
to be allowed.

However, at the same time, the Soviet Union was striving to ascend to
superpower status, to put itself on an equal footing with the US, Britain and France
-- and it had recently obtained nuclear weapons capability. In response, the
United States became the predominant "interferer" in the region from the middle
1950's on. The missile crisis of October, 1962 caused us, as an unspoken quid
pro quo for the withdrawal of the Soviet IRBMs from Cuba, to withdraw our
obsolete Jupiter IRBMs that we had placed in Turkey, our most reliable partner in
the region at the time, and a recently elected member of NATO.

At basically the same time (the late 1950's) the US, principally through the
actions of the CIA, helped the Shah of Iran come to power. For all of the
1960's, Iran, and especially Tehran, was considered so friendly to the United
States that the Navy Navigation Satellite program that I -- and 300 other students
-- worked for maintained a tracking station in Tehran. Although I never went
there, a number of my friends did and seemed to greatly enjoy it.

But the Shah ruled Iran with an iron fist and a secret police. To the great
majority of the people of Iran -- even the most liberal, most well-educated
people of Iran -- the US, the CIA, and the Shah had all become synonymous and
were thrown out of the country with the rise of the Islamic Revolution in the
late 1970's, beginning with the occupying of the US Embassy in Tehran.

The US and Britain, fearing the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, and most
especially the cutoff of oil from the middle east, a commodity which had now
become truly a critical item for the "national defense" of the Western countries,
began throwing their support behind the secular government of Saddam Hussein in
Iraq, hoping that he would act as a counterbalance to the ascendant theocracy
that was taking hold in Iran.

Wirt Atmar

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