bboc/14_Massacres_and_repression_in_Iran.tex

\chapter{Massacres and repression in Iran}

\chapterauthor{François DERIVERY}

\emph{(to my friends — where are they today? — from the Tudeh Party of Iran)}

Iran — Persia — an ancestral country, the cradle of humanity, whose millennial history and high culture fall on your shoulders, with the sweltering heat, as soon as you set foot on the tarmak of Mehrabad airport in Tehran.

In the spring of 1975, it took long half hours to cross the various airlocks, full of SAVAK spies and armed soldiers, and reach the exit.
Foreigners were treated much better than nationals, especially and meticulously controlled.

Previously, everyone had had plenty of time to contemplate, parked in a reserved area of the airport, the American military jumbo jets, painted in khaki, which did not bother to hide.
We did not fail to notice also, a little later and in this register, the Coca-Cola factory installed in the city center.

The immediate impression was that of a country under siege and a bubbling of multifaceted life badly gridded by a police force yet omnipresent.

Despite the mistrust and surveillance of conversations (Iranians go so far as to say — in private — that one in five people met in public places is directly or indirectly linked to SAVAK, one in three in universities) and although some names are taboo, no one has forgotten the 1953 coup,  led by the CIA, which ended dr. Mossadegh's national independence government and put the country back under the control of Anglo-American oil companies.

In addition to its essential strategic position on the borders of the USSR (\enquote{first line of defense of the Western world}), Iran also has a substantial interest: its oil.

The beginnings of the war for oil date back to 1870. The country has long been under foreign influence, especially English and Russian.
The Anglo-Persian Company grants Iran 16\% of its oil revenues. Russia (Georgian Oil Company), then the USSR will occupy for a long time militarily the northwest of the country.

If Persian culture is millennial and refined, its history certainly does not lack bloody events. It is a long litany of wars, assassinations, repression and violence.
Often, in this country almost always ruled by potentates with little concern for human rights, physical elimination appears to be the simplest and fastest way to settle disputes, especially political ones.

The conjunction of these two factors: a background of ancestral violence on the basis of despotism and the oil war stoked by the plots and interventions of Anglo-Saxon capitalism, will give birth to the Shah's regime, a sinister machine to oppress, murder and exploit an entire people.
No less than six successive presidents of the United States will have watched over the fate of the sovereign as much as the good profitability of their investments, which rested on the shoulders of a characterful individual who became a megalomaniac dictator.

Mohamad Reza Pahlavi comes from good stock. His father, Reza Khan, modestly nicknamed \enquote{the Great}, had deposed the last Qajar in a military coup at the head of a Cossack regiment.
Proclaimed king in December 1925, he was crowned by his troops on April 24, 1926 and founded the Pahlavi dynasty.
Born in a poor neighborhood in the south of Tehran, he is a military man and an energizer, able to defenestrate a recalcitrant minister with his own hands during a council.
To establish his power, he did not hesitate to launch punitive expeditions against active minorities whom he massacred mercilessly: Bakhtyanis, Kurds, Kashgaïs.

In 1933 he obtained the renegotiation of the oil agreements with the Anglo-Persian which became the Anglo-Iranian. Iran's share of oil revenues rises to 25%.

At the beginning of the Second World War, he did not hide his sympathy for the Germans, like Atatürk, his model. A Nazi propaganda center opened in Tehran in 1940.
The Allies then occupied the country to reduce German influence and establish an oil supply route from the Gulf via the USSR.
They forced Reza Shah, who complied on September 16, 1941, to abdicate in favor of his son Mohamad Reza.

The Americans will not leave. Roosevelt made the decision at the end of 1942. At the Tehran Conference in 1943, it was mainly weapons and military advisers who were sent, under the guise of rebuilding the country.

The first difficulties of the new regime took place at the end of 1944, with the communist uprising in Azerbaijan, supported by the USSR.
The repression is fierce and causes 200 deaths a day. The monster demonstrations in support of Azerbaijan that take place in Isfahan and Tehran in front of the parliament, at the initiative of the Tudeh party, are repressed no less savagely.

In 1946, these were the attempts to secede several regions of the \enquote{Russian zone} bordering the Caspian: Guilan, Khorassan, Mazanderan, and the attempt at an independent republic in Kurdistan.
The bloodshed continued and the Americans flocked in 1947. These conflicts allow the United States to get what it has been looking for for a long time: Iran's withdrawal from the USSR.

In June 1947, they granted a credit of \$26 million in aid to Iranian troops. George Allen is the new ambassador of the United States.
General Vernon Evans is appointed head of the military mission. General Schwartzkopf is delegated to the reorganization of the gendarmerie.

That same year, in 1947, Truman created the CIA.

In February 1949, on the 2nd, the Shah was the target of an assassination attempt in Tehran.
This event will mark the spirit of the sovereign, especially vis-à-vis the one he will always consider as his main enemy, and against whom he will wage a ruthless war: the Marxist-Leninist Tudeh party of Iran.
Although the responsibility of the Tudeh has not been clearly established – especially because of the immediate lynching of the aggressor, the photographer Fakhr Araï – the Shah will never give up his intimate conviction.
Communist ideology is also a permanent reproach to the satrap's life that he leads, in view of the too conspicuous misery of the population.
The bourgeoisie barely exists, in Iran, it will know its rise only in the 1970s, with the massive arrival of oil revenues. But the Shah is a follower of expeditious judgments and methods.
He proved this in February 1948 by having the journalist Massoud, director of the weekly \emph{Marde Emrouz} (\enquote{The Man of the Day}), murdered with a revolver in front of the door of his newspaper.
The latter threatened to make revelations about the way of life of the royal family. There are already rumor in town that the Shah maintains a troop of seids to expeditiously liquidate the most agitated opponents.

At the beginning of 1951, foreign interventions and the stranglehold of the Anglo-American oil companies sparked a nationalist revival and ensured the popular success of Dr. Mossadegh's National Front party.


Mohamad Hedayat, known as Mossadegh (\enquote{the Valiant}) was born in 1881. Fine politician, he studied in Paris and was a financial inspector at the age of 15.
Since Shah Razmara's Prime Minister (who is accused of boiling prisoners alive!) was assassinated in the Tehran bazaar by Khalid Taharassebi (March 7, 1951), Ayatollah El Kachani publicly supported Mossadegh's candidacy.
The Shah, however, appointed Hossein Ala, his ambassador to Washington, to the vacant post. This is a unanimous protest of the population. The Bazaar rises up against the Shah.
On 13 March, he had to give in and appoint Mossadegh as prime minister.

He immediately pursued a resolutely anti-British policy and obtained from Parliament, on April 30, 1951, the law of nationalization of Iranian oils, which withdrew from the Anglo-Iranian the immense oil fields of which it held the concession.

This is the incredulous stupor on the London and New York Stock Exchanges. Both claim to be \enquote{scandalized}. Mossadegh is called \enquote{crazy}. It must be said that the Anglo-Iranian, as it should be, watered a good part of the deputies...

On June 10, 1951, the Iranian flag flew at the headquarters of the Anglo-Iranian in Khoramshahr. A victory of the people, they are rare.
Ambassador U.S. Harriman having supported the British too openly, his car was stopped in Tehran by demonstrators.

The Shah's compromises with the Anglo-Saxons, his hostility to Mossadegh, were particularly badly perceived by the population. Mossadegh was re-elected in 1952.
On February 26, 1953, apparently defeated, the Shah resolved to exile, in secret, towards Rome, in a small private plane.
His tragicomic stopover at Baghdad airport will give Soraya the opportunity to flaunt her unconsciousness and lightness: she is only interested in her suitcases and jewelry. A constant in her behavior.

It is the CIA's intervention that will save the Shah — and will save Iran from the international opprobrium of a left-wing government. The operation will be carried out by two friends:
the American Kim Roosevelt, cia envoy, who provides logistical support, and the renegade Zahedi, a former mossadegh supporter whom the British will be able to \enquote{return} following an incredible kidnapping.
In August 1953 he obtained the support of troops still favorable to the Shah to overthrow Mossadegh. 

Zahedi, during the Second World War, did not hide his pro-Nazi sympathies.
A dubious character, corrupted by gambling and obsessed with sex (he boasts of holding the addresses of all the prostitutes in Isfahan), it is he who, as a reward for his betrayal, will succeed Mossadegh as Prime Minister.

On August 13, 1953, the Shah, who had returned from exile, dismissed Mossadegh by a \enquote{firman} worn by Nassiri, the future boss of SAVAK.

On August 19, Mossadegh was on the run. He will be recaptured, surrounded in his small brick house in Tehran, imprisoned, tried on November 8, 1953, sentenced to death, then pardoned by the Shah (who does not want to make him a martyr) and finally sentenced to three years in prison.

The funds needed for the coup were provided by the United States to the tune of \$400,000 and by Iran's Melli Bank.
In addition to the two main protagonists, other characters participated in the plot, such as General Nassiri.
But it was Allen Dulles who oversaw the affair and pulled the strings, along with his deputy Richard Helms, who would become U.S. ambassador to Tehran in 1974.

The coup of August 19, 1953 – an exceptional fact in the history of Iran – caused only 200 deaths! 

And it is immediately the return of oil companies.

On August 5, 1954, an agreement was signed with an international oil consortium including English, French, Dutch and Americans.
The National Oil Company of Iran is established. The consortium will have to return part of the 260,000 km2 of oil fields it controlled.

Meanwhile, an intriguing and dubious individual continues his journey to power: General Teymour Bakhtiar, the governor of Tehran.
Initially a supporter of Mossadegh, he betrayed him to pursue his own game. He ordered the massacre of Tudeh supporters — 800 arrests — in the courtyard of Gharz prison.
With the help of Attorney General Azmoudeh, who was responsible for giving these purges legal cover, he also made \enquote{disappear} more than 3,000 Mossadegh supporters in summary executions (\emph{Le Monde}, 13-14 November 1955).

It was this executioner who created the SAVAK, the political police of the Shah of sinister reputation, a real police state within the state, in 1956, with the technical and financial assistance of the United States and the Israeli Mossad.
Bakhtiar's excessive ambition will be at the origin of his loss. After trying to compete with the Shah, he was assassinated in Iraq by the Shah's agents (1959).

These various events have resulted in strengthening the power of the Shah who becomes an absolute despot and concentrates all the powers, while the Americans, firmly established, use Iran in their policy of encircling the USSR, through the overarming of CENTO, the pro-American pact that unites Iran, Turkey and Pakistan.
Invested with the role of gendarme of the region, north and south on the Gulf, militarized Iran works closely with US forces and logistics.

Oil money is starting to flow. The fortune of the Shah and his entourage swelled.
Western newspapers complacently echoed the splendor of the palaces of Golestan or Niavaran, on the heights of the city, the escapades of Ashraf, the shah's sister, able to spend millions of dollars in Monte Carlo overnight.
Because the whole court travels, for pleasure but also to conduct juicy negotiations and conclude sumptuous contracts with large international companies, to which the country is delivered.
Corruption spreads, but newspapers are muzzled, any protest is repressed.
In The European newspapers there is only talk of the multiple female adventures of the Shah – a sexual \enquote{collector} – and the anxieties of Farah Diba.
The Shah spent the winter in St. Moritz, traveling to Mexico, was received by Giscard-d'Estaing, the Queen of England and all of Gotha. He regularly consults Kissinger.
Previously, the symbolic summit of this period of splendor and media success, the Shah had wanted to crown himself in a luxury deployment, during the celebration of the 2,500 years of Persepolis, in front of an audience of statesmen and crowned heads honored by his invitation (October 26, 1967)\footnote{De Gaulle delegated Pompidou there.}.

Yet, while Ashraf is building a palace with a golden leafy roof, a modernist \emph{look}\rfootnote{Word in English in the original}, surrounded by barbed wire and watchtowers, in the middle of the desert, the misery of the population has never been so unbearable.
However, with the rise in oil prices, the annual per capita income, previously one of the poorest in the world, amounted in 1972 to 870 dollars (8 times higher than that of Pakistan).
But the great mass of Iranians see nothing of this money, except continuous inflation and the unbearable cost of living. Driven by hunger and necessity, they demonstrate regularly, as they can, and are just as regularly massacred in the street — because both the police and the troops do not do detail.
Between 1960 and 1979 thousands of deaths accompanied the multiple movements of crowds and protests.

In 1961, for example, it was the strike of the bricklayers of Tehran, 30,000 people, victims of a ferocious exploitation.
They are paid 35 rials (25 F) to make 1,000 bricks that bring 3,500 rials to the contractor. The police engage in a massacre.
It reoffended shortly afterwards by suppressing a student demonstration on January 21, 1961 (100 dead). 
On April 4, 1963, Ayatollah Khomeini, who had publicly criticized the Shah, was arrested in Qom on the 6th.
During the huge demonstration of protest that followed, more than 1,000 people were killed (\emph{Le Monde}, February 20, 1964).

\section{The SAVAK\footnote{Sāzmān-e Ettelā'āt va Amniyat-e Keshvar: \emph{Information and security organization of the country}.}}

As we can see, the shooting in the crowd and the almost daily massacres that marked the end of the Shah's regime in 1979 had antecedents.
The Shah has never led, with regards to the population and despite propaganda gestures (the \enquote{White Revolution} of 1963) and high-sounding declarations (\enquote{his deep union with his people}), but a policy of systematic repression, in blood, of all criticism and any contestation.
For him, it was not only a question of reigning as an absolute despot, but also of holding the country, in accordance with the strategic and political agreements concluded with the American ally and mentor who, without more scruples in Iran than elsewhere, wielded his bloody puppet behind the scenes.
As a reciprocity, however, according to the American journalist Jack Anderson (who lit up the Watergate affair), the Shah, with the help of Richard Helms his CIA adviser, helped Nixon to be re-elected, thanks to a gift of several million dollars that would have passed through Mexico to be opportunely \enquote{laundered}.

It would have been difficult to talk about SAVAK, the political police, without a historical reminder that situates its field of appearance and the field of action.
The SAVAK is just the most terrifying element of a complex device. It is also the basis, the foundation, both of the Shah's personal power and of his organization and effectiveness.
Savak is in every way the reflection of the Shah. He made it his personal tool as soon as he managed to get rid of Bakhtiar, its creator.
Subsequently, General Pakravan in June 1961, then General Nassiri in 1966 (\enquote{An intellectual replaced by a man with a fist}) will ensure the direction.

In 1975, the Iranian army officially had 400,000 men, the gendarmerie 80,000, SAVAK at least 100,000.

A \enquote{Super SAVAK} controls the organization, it is the Imperial Inspectorate Organization (IIO), which is under the direction of General Yasdanpanah and then Hossein Fardous.
This organization has some 200 senior officers. Finally, a special office is composed of about fifteen handpicked officers.
It oversees the building and drastically controls the activities of the entire system. It is accountable only to the Shah.

This secret police, an organization of infiltration, infiltration and close surveillance of the population, is everywhere.
Any Iranian can feel spied on at any time, and monitors his words accordingly. This permanent psychosis owes nothing to the imagination.
In Iran, there is no such thing as freedom of expression. Any criticism of the regime, let alone of the Shah or his family, is a crime punishable by immediate imprisonment.
The name of the secret organization is also taboo. In each household the portrait of the Shah or his son must appear. As soon as a stranger approaches in the street the tone drops, the conversation stops.
How many innocent passers-by or genuine patriots have not been wrongly suspected of belonging to the feared police, and how many others have rightly been?
Public places, mosques, the Bazaar (which will remain, along with the universities, the main focus of popular resistance) but also factories, shops, and of course international hotels (the Intercontinental, the Royal Tehran Hilton), where employees are often intelligence agents, are constantly monitored.
Microphones and cameras are hidden in hotel rooms. We spy on everything. Ordinary connections are open, including mail to foreign countries.
Politicians, activists, students living in Europe, the United States or the USSR are under constant surveillance — there are also, of course, SAVAK agents who try to infiltrate opposition circles abroad — and their families or friends are put on file for all intents and purposes and sometimes arrested.

Civil servants and politicians do not escape suspicion, any personality of the regime is doubled by a security officer.
SAVAK's offices are numerous in Tehran, its headquarters are located near Chemirand, at the crossroads of Saadabad.
The \enquote{Committee}, rightly feared, is a huge building with thick walls, clad in antennas. Individuals suspected of a crime — which can range from a simple crime of opinion to suspicion of membership of a banned political organization such as the Tudeh — real or supposed, are arrested and taken to interrogation centers or prisons.
This is the beginning of an uncertain adventure, and often horror, because torture is practiced regularly.
The conditions of detention of prisoners are an ordeal and, under the impetus of American and Israeli advisers familiar with the latest refinements of \enquote{psychological torture}, blackmail, imprisonment and torture of relatives are also practiced.
In addition to judgments behind closed doors, which are the responsibility of a military court with decisions never justified, summary executions and deaths by torture, other usual practices are more expensive in abjection, such as these almost daily television broadcasts of confessions and self-criticism of prisoners, which everyone knows were obtained by torture and blackmail, so much,  obviously, the \enquote{repentants} were made up, their wounds poorly concealed for the occasion.

Many Iranian intellectuals and artists were sent to the Shah's jails, many died there. On the sidelines of the splendour of Persepolis, the regime seemed to want to absolutely decapitate its people of its democratic elites.
The Western press and international bodies have ended up giving timid echoes of these systematic violations of human rights.
But when a journalist dares to ask the Shah – who has always denied torture – what he thinks, he gets the following answer:
\enquote{Amnesty International? What is that? We don't know!} (Actuel 2, 24 June 1974)

In 1971, the trial of the \enquote{Group of Eighteen} took place in Tehran. They confessed under torture to being communists, then retracted.
A French observer, Me Mignon, who can attend two court hearings (prosecution and \enquote{defense} are provided by soldiers) reports that several of the detainees have shown scars and sequelae of torture. One accused, Chokrollah Paknejad, said:
\enquote{I was taken after my arrest to the SAVAK cellars in Khoramshahr where I was stripped naked with my fists. I was beaten during 20 hours of interrogation. Then I spent a week in the toilets. from Abadan prison, without clothes.
I was then transferred to Evin (a prison in northern Tehran) where I was again tortured, whipped and beaten. Then I was applied the weight \enquote{handcuffs} (the prisoner's hands are tied behind his neck, they hang heavier and heavier weights) and beaten.}
Another defendant, Nasser Kakhsar, will tell how he saw engineer Nikadvoudi die under torture in Ghezel-Galeh prison from a spinal cord injury. His crime was to \enquote{read books}. Ayatollah Saidi also died in Ghezel-Galeh.

Nouri Albala and Libertalis of the International Federation of Democratic Jurists also attended some trials of Iranian opponents detained in Evin.
Between 28 January and 6 February 1972, six defendants were sentenced to death. Others are accused of attacks on banks, police stations...
Despite the law, hearings are held in camera. Prisoners are tortured in indefinite police custody. Some tell.
Sadegh was hit with a revolver butt on his head resulting in internal bleeding and then a coma.
Others were tied to a white-heated metal table. It is at the time of arrest, in general, that the abuse is most extensive.
\enquote{The defendant passes into the hands of karate and judo specialists, he then falls into a coma. Usually the hands, feet or nose are broken. 
Upon waking up, the prisoner must sign a confession stating that he has not been subjected to any torture.}

\enquote{SAVAK agents forced Mr. Asghar Badizadegan to sit on an electric chair to burn him for four hours. He fell into a coma.
The burn had reached the spine and it spread such a smell that no one approached our cell. He did not die but had to do three surgeries. Today he has to use his hands to walk.}

As for Mehdi Savalani \enquote{he can no longer walk, he had both legs broken. Torture by electric shock is the most common, it leaves no trace but produces general paralysis.
They also inject drugs such as cardiazol which panics the heart rate, and they tear off the nails, they subject the prisoners to ultrasound, shocks on the head}; \enquote{I also saw a prisoner who was unable to urinate because weights had been hung on his sex.}

Description of Evin Prison: \enquote{The dungeons are dark and so wet that the sugar melts on its own, they measure 1.20 by 2 meters by 2 meters high, with a small mesh opening of 40 cm. 
No other light. The three of us lived there.}

During the last years of the Shah's regime, the bloodiest, colloquia and assemblies met throughout America and Europe, especially in universities, to denounce torture and demand freedom of expression in Iran.
The Shah was scolded by the crowd in Switzerland, but SAVAK was strongly established in universities (the estimated figure in 1975 was 4,000 agents abroad) to the point of physically intervening to oppose the Tudeh and ransack its stands during demonstrations of support (Cité Universitaire, Paris, 1977).
It is the war: that of the opponents to obtain the fall of the dictator, that of the regime for its survival. And in Iran it is the daily massacre of a people who revolt.

As for the press, newspapers such as \emph{Le Monde} and also the \emph{Sunday Times} and even the \emph{Financial Times} publish reports on cases of torture in Iran.
In 1975, the Parisian lawyer Yves Baudelot investigates in Iran the disappearance of three political prisoners, Dr. Simin Salehi, Loftollah Meysamie and Hosseyn Djaveri.
General Azizi, director of the prison administration, said he knew nothing about the detainees, who, according to testimonies, had been tortured.
It was Amnesty International that was to reveal that Salehi had died under torture, eight months pregnant.
The conditions of detention, according to Baudelot, are considered by the jailers as \enquote{conducive to confessions}, confessions that are denied to them as much as they can by the prisoners.
According to the lawyer, torture of relatives of the family is usually practiced. A woman is raped in front of her husband, her children, including young children, are tortured to make him confess.

The Sunday Times of 19 January 1975 published a testimony by journalist Philip Jacobson. 
He claims that his newspaper's investigations establish without any possible dispute the reality of torture in Iran.
According to him, tortured prisoners fall into three categories: those who are suspected of belonging to left-wing political organizations or of having participated in guerrilla actions; religious hostile to the Shah; middle-class intellectuals and common people who have criticized the regime in some way in public.
Several testimonies collected attest to the presence of the boss of SAVAK, Nemet-Ollah Nassiri, in the torture chambers.
\enquote{Some prisoners — Jacobson adds — are prepared for their own execution by a refinement of psychological torture.}

SAVAK frequently uses an innovation in torture, a variant of the electric chair dear to Uncle Sam: the \enquote{hot table} or the \enquote{grill} or the \enquote{roast board}.
Jacobson describes this instrument as \enquote{an iron lattice resembling a box spring, in which flows an electric current as in a rotisserie.
The tortured are tied up on this chassis until they start grilling.} As for women, they are preferably beaten savagely after being raped.

In the United States, petitions were sent, notably from the University of Berkeley in 1975, to obtain information on the fate of disappeared such as Dr. Ali Shariati, theologian, Mrs. Hadjebi Tabrizi, Dr. Gholamhossein Sa'edi, writer, S. Sol- tanpour, writer...
The petitioners (more than 2,000) are received on the steps of the embassy by an employee who refuses to say his name. They are invited to send a letter by mail to Tehran.
American authors and artists such as Noam Chomsky, Laurence Ferlinghetti, Kay Boyle, Joan Baez participate in these actions.

It can be estimated in 1975 that some 137,000 prisoners passed through the SAVAK Committee — the headquarters, particularly hated.
To this must be added an equal number of people directed to Gashr or Evin and who were tortured there. On seven men arrested, on average, only one escaped torture.
The Association of Iranian Democratic Youth and Students (ODYSI, Toudeh) estimated in 1977 that some 300,000 people were tortured, men and women, in SAVAK prisons during the 20 years of its existence.

In the interrogation rooms, the panoply of instruments of torture hangs on the walls, as in the sado-maso dens now fashionable, where the bourgeois fantasy of civilized violence is expressed.
But here, the rest is otherwise sinister, torment can lead to death. Metal whips hang from nails, electric sticks are aligned on stools, nail puller pliers are exposed prominently.
Not to mention the easel and the roasting board. But other tortures are practiced, such as the introduction of boiling water into the intestine by clysterium, electrocution of the genitals, which \enquote{make the victims, men and women, howl like wolves}.
Or burning irons are introduced into the mouths of the tortured (\emph{Caifi Newsletter}, New York, March 1975).

There would be no end to detailing the list of victims. The total, like the methods, are overwhelming.
Not just for the Shah, a megalomaniac maniac who would have been nothing but a failed despot without the support given to him by the CIA, in 1953 to regain his lost throne, overthrowing Mossadegh.
The latter remains the national hero of Iran, for every Iranian, despite the undeniable charisma of Khomeini, who, in his own way, continued his fight.
Whatever is said in the West (where American propaganda is the rule), Iran is not only a great country — it has always been — but it is also a modern and evolved country where, since the fall of the Shah, enormous progress has been made in the social field.

On the other hand, the CIA coup of 1953, and the ensuing US hegemonic policy, as well as the unconditional support given to the satrap of another age, Reza Pahlavi, condemned Iran to 25 years of stagnation, causing a liability of a few million deaths and an unprecedented amount of suffering.

It can also be argued that the United States, through this act of unacceptable intrusion into the internal affairs of another country, was primarily responsible for the failure of an attempt at a secular and democratic government in Iran.
Just as they are directly responsible for the advent of an Islamic republic with which, to say the least, they do not have an ounce of credit.
The United States, moreover, has not forgiven Iran for having been ousted since, like Cuba, Libya and now Iraq, it subjects it to a severe blockade, even going so far as to threaten any country that trades with it with retaliatory measures.
Capitalist freedom keeps its logic.

\rauthor{François Derivery}