Ron Paul Gives Rick Santorum a History Lesson on Iran

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
August 13, 2011

Ron Paul gave Rick Santorum a history lesson last night at the Ames, Iowa, GOP debate. After Paul said there is no evidence the Iranians are developing nuclear weapons and the United States should mind its own business, Santorum launched into the standard establishment narrative.

He said Iran “must be confronted,” in other words the U.S. must go to war against the Islamic nation, and then described Iran’s government as “a mullahcracy that tramples the rights of women, tramples the rights of gays, tramples the rights of people all throughout their society — and is the greatest supporter of terrorism in the Middle East and around the world.”

Paul then gave the former Pennsylvania senator a history lesson. Anthony Gregory, writing for Antiwar.com, filled in the details:

First, Santorum says Iran has been at war with the United States since 1979. Ron points out that the bad blood between Americans and Iranians began in 1953, when a CIA coup installed the Shah. Indeed, we should remember that before 1953, the Iranians tended to look very warmly upon the Americans, who, unlike the British, had left the Iranians alone. Their democratically elected leader Mohammad Mosaddegh, partly for his popularity due to his resistance to British corporate imperialism, was even Time Magazine‘s Man of the Year in 1951.

Not only did the U.S. install the Shah two years later; the CIA taught his secret police force, Savak, how to torture. Savak went on to imprison and torture tens of thousands of political prisoners, adopting such practices of nearly unfathomable brutality as using broken glass and boiling water on subjects’ rectums, mutilating women’s breasts, and cooking victims alive.

After years of being ruled by this U.S.-backed regime, the Iranians overthrew the Shah and the Islamic Revolution of 1979 swept the nation. But, despite what the propagandists say, Iranians still did not hate Americans for our freedom — only for our government’s foreign policy. All the attempts to get Iranians angry at Americans for our culture or modernity failed, Michael Scheuer, former CIA counterterrorism expert, points out.

Read the rest of Gregory’s post here.

This article was posted: Saturday, August 13, 2011 at 7:41 am

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