Comments for Obama's Denials of US interference in Iran not credible »
Posted By hyperbola 5 months, 3 weeks ago in Political OpinionThe Obama administration has responded to Iranian allegations of manipulating opposition protests inside the country with flat denials. However, there is considerable evidence of extensive US operations against Iran, spanning a range of diplomatic, intelligence and military activities.
USA Today last week noted that the US Agency for International Development (USAID) was handing out $20 million in grants this financial year to unnamed organisations “to promote democracy, human rights, and the rule of law in Iran”. For next year, the Obama administration is seeking another $15 million via the Near Eastern Regional Democracy Initiative, which has similar aims.
...One of the funnels for funding is the state-funded National Endowment for Democracy, which has been intimately involved in “colour revolutions” in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics. The NED website lists a number of Iranian organisations including the National Iranian American Council as recipients of its funds.
This openly acknowledged program is, however, just the tip of the iceberg. In a series of articles in the New Yorker, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh provided details of the Bush administration’s efforts to foster “regime change” in Tehran and prepare for a military strikes. There is no reason to believe that the Obama administration has ended any of these covert activities by the CIA and the Pentagon.
In one of his first articles entitled “The Coming Wars” in January 2005, Hersh reported that the US military had been staging commando operations inside Iran for months to accumulate “intelligence and targeting information on Iranian nuclear, chemical and missile sites” for future military strikes. US special forces were operating from bases inside neighbouring, US-occupied Afghanistan and Iraq. The use of the military for covert operations avoided the formal legal constraints under which the CIA operated. (“US carrying out acts of war against Iran, magazine reports”)....
...In 2006, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sought an extra $75 million to fund anti-Tehran propaganda and support opposition groups...
...The article provided details of US covert operations inside Lebanon, Syria and Iran, including the use of Al Qaeda-linked Sunni groups deeply hostile to Shiite Iran. (“The Bush administration’s new strategy of setting the Middle East aflame”)...
...In January 2007, the Boston Globe reported that ...
Reports also emerged in 2006 and 2007 that the US was covertly assisting armed guerrillas...
...The advent of the Obama administration resulted in a tactical shift in US foreign policy, not a fundamental change in direction....
It is not possible at this stage to determine the full extent of US involvement in the recent Iranian presidential elections and the subsequent protests. However, the entire campaign run by Mir Hossein Mousavi before and after the poll bears an uncanny resemblance to previous US-backed “colour revolutions” in Eastern Europe and former Soviet Republics. Given the intensive activities of the CIA, Pentagon and State Department, not only in recent years, but going back to the 1953 US-backed coup that overthrew the nationalist Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq, it certainly can be ruled out that the Obama administration has simply sat back and watched events unfold.
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dissent5 months, 3 weeks ago
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Color Revolutions, Geopolitics and the Baku Pipeline
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As the political makeup of the Central Asia Caspian region is complex, especially since the decomposition of the Soviet Union opened up a scramble in the oil-rich region of the Caspian from the outside, above all from the United States, it is important to bear in mind the major power blocs which have emerged.
They are two. On the one side is an alliance of US-Turkey-Azerbaijan and, since the Rose Revolution, Georgia, that small but critical country directly on the pipeline route. Opposed to it, in terms of where the pipeline route carrying the Caspian oil should go, is Russia, which until 1990 held control over the entire Caspian outside the Iran littoral. Today, Russia has cultivated an uneasy but definite alliance with Iran and with Armenia, in opposition to the US group. This two-camp grouping is essential to understand developments in the region since 1991.
Now that the BTC oil pipeline has finally been completed, and the route through Georgia has been put firmly in pro-Washington hands, an essential precondition to completing the pipeline, the question becomes how will Moscow react? Does Putin have any serious options left short of the ultimate nuclear one?
A clear strategy
A geopolitical pattern has become clear over the past months. One-by-one, with documented overt and covert Washington backing and financing, new US-friendly regimes have been put in place in former Soviet states which are in a strategic relation to possible pipeline routes from the Caspian Sea.
Ukraine is now more or less in the hands of a Washington-backed ‘democratic’ regime under Viktor Yushchenko and his billionaire Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko, known in Ukraine as the ‘gas princess’ for the fortune she made as a government official, allegedly through her dubious dealings earlier with Ukraine Energy Minister Pavlo Lazarenko and Gazprom.
The Orange Revolution, at least from the side of its US sponsors, had little to do with real democracy and far more with military and oil geopolitics.
http://www.propeller.com/story/2009/06/30/color-re...
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berkeley5 months, 3 weeks ago
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we must remember that obama is playing a role, he is following a script. as president there are certain things he must say, and others he is not allowed to say.
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we, as a country, have interfered in most of the nations of the world, numerous times. iran has been high on that list for decades. it still is. anyone who cares to look can document that. good article. -
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