Brendan Clifford

Persia/Iran is undergoing a process of being saved from itself by an American/Jewish campaign of redemption.  As a first step on the way to freedom it has to be “bombed to shit” as the Leader of the Free World has put it.

The government of Israel represents Freedom in the Middle East, and the Government of the United States represents Freedom in the rest of the ‘free world’.  Freedom is democracy, and these are the only practising democracies in the Middle East and the rest of the world.  To cast doubt on them is to cast doubt on Democracy itself.

Britain, the founder of practical democracy, stands idly by.  In better times—not very long ago—it created the Persian problem, but now it prefers to stand idly by.  It appeals to the British national interest in justification of its bold stance of standing idly by in the face of the demand of the Leader of the Free World that it should do something to resolve the problem it created.  But the recent past is now another country for Britain.

In those days it was an Empire, remaking the world, and not acknowledging that it had any national interest.  Everything it did in the course of remaking the world was done in the interest of the world, free from all selfish national concerns!  But it left remaking of the world half-done.  It withdrew from world affairs abruptly, leaving them a mess, struck the pose of being a petty kingdom, and self-righteously denied responsibility for what it had done in the world during its period of megalomania.  It even seems to deny that it did it!

In those better times it revelled in the memory of itself.  It has now become thoroughly amnesiac.  It has become existentialist in the sense of denying continuity of existence between the present moment and the moment that preceded it.

Britain had a Persian policy when it launched its first World War.  It policy was to squeeze Persia out of existence jointly with Russia.  It had an understanding with Tsarist Russia that they should share that region of the world between them in the course of making war on Germany.  Russia was already in control of Northern Persia, and Britain was already marking Southern Persia in red on maps, as part of the Empire.  The remainder, Independent Persia, was a buffer area between the two.

But the Great War miscarried.  The mass armies of Tsarist Russia failed to crush the German defences, were themselves destroyed, and the State collapsed.

And Britain, in its conquest of Mesopotamia, failed to ride rough-shod over the Turkish forces, as had been expected.  It only conquered Mesopotamia with years of hard fighting, and with compromises that confused the situation by bringing new forces into play.

In its previous War—the Boer War—Britain had relished the hard fighting with the Boers.  It was tired of slaughtering inferior peoples in Fuzzy-Wuzzy wars, and was glad to have a trial of strength with a people of their own stock.  But it was not glad when the Turks failed to respond as an inferior people, and the degree of resistance offered by their cousins, the Germans, left the British traumatised in victory. 

[It was that victory over the Ottoman Turks which created the Palestine problem by wresting it from the Ottoman Empire—in those days Arabs and Jews lived unproblematically under Ottoman suzerainty, ed.]

In the aftermath of the Great War, Persia was put together as a state by a soldier who used his position in the Army to become a warlord and, like Napoleon, take the chaotic political situation in hand by forming a dynasty based on military power and political acumen.

Reza Khan became Reza Shah, made the state into a nationalist power-structure and renamed it Iran.  In 1939 he declared Iran neutral in Britain’s 2nd World War.

Britain was making no real effort to fight the War it had declared.  It took its Army home in the course of the first battle (France, May-June 1940).   France, having declared war at Britain’s instigation, and having lost, made a provisional settlement with Germany, pending a final settlement when Britain called off its Declaration of War.  Britain dismissed the French  settlement as a betrayal and made war on France, but did not try to re-engage.  It kept Europe in a war situation by using the Navy to spread the War by engaging in futile conflicts on the margins.

In August 1941 Britain declared that Iran had become a hostile state by maintaining normal relations with Germany while Britain was at war with it.

There might have been a semblance of justification if Britain had gone to the League of Nations to bring about War on Germany.  But Britain had never surrendered its war-making rights to the League.  When setting up the League it had maintained itself as an independent world Empire, thus depriving the League of substance.

It invaded Iran in 1941 because it was one of the things it was able to do.  It passed its invading Army through Iraq on the way.  Iraq was a state constructed by means of a ‘Treaty’ with Britain—like the Irish Free State.  Iraq declared neutrality in the war on Germany, as Ireland did.  It did not oppose the British war on Iran, but it asserted a right to monitor the passage of the British Army through it on the way to Iran.  But `prime Minister Churchill dismissed all that ‘Treaty rights’ nonsense.  He took a side-swipe at Bagdad, overthrew the neutral Government of Rashid Ali, and replaced it with the puppet Government of Nuri es-Said.

Then he deposed Reza Shah in Iran.  And he complained irritably about these upstart places that gave themselves pretentious new names.  You knew where you were with Mesopotamia and Persia, but now they called themselves Iraq and Iran, and how could one be expected to remember which was which.

Iraq was a region of the Ottoman Empire.  It had no distinctive sense of itself.  It was not a kingdom or a nation or a civilisation or a Province.  It was a territory occupied by a miscellany of peoples and religions who had lived intermixed with each other within the Ottoman state.

Britain changed its mind halfway through the conquest of the Middle Eat about what it was going to do with it.  At first it was to be governed as an extension of the Indian Empire that would connect it with Egypt.  But, when the Turks offered effective resistance to British conquest, Britain decided to raise up a kind of Arab ‘nationalism’ to help it disrupt the enemy.  It got a declaration of religious war against Istanbul from the religious authorities in Mecca in return for a promise that there would be a Kingdom of Arabia when the Turks were defeated.  Hence Lawrence of Arabia!

The extension of the Indian Empire into Arabia was aborted mid-way through the War.  Arabia was to undergo a kind of national development.  And then the French demanded a piece of Arabia in compensation for bearing the brunt of the war on Germany.  And finally there was the British agreement with the Jews to import a Jewish population into Palestine which would act as a colony of the British Empire and become a Jewish State within the Empire, and serve as a front of the Empire against Arab development.

And ‘Iraq’ was invented as a nation for one of the sons of the Sharif of Mecca to be King of.  (Mecca itself had in the meantime been lost to Abdullah Ibn Saud (Abdulaziz bin Abdul Rayman), founder of the Waahabi Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.)

Iraq was to be a democratic kingdom.  The king was to be elected.  But a local candidate in Basra stood against the son of the Sharif of Mecca in the election and seemed certain to win.  So he was invited to afternoon tea at the British Embassy, kidnapped and deported.

Iraq was a British Treaty State—such as Ireland might have been, but for the refusal of the anti-Treatyites to surrender and their rapid resurgence after defeat.  The puppet government of Nuri as-Said, set up by Churchill in 1941, continued for many years after the War.

Iran was an entirely different matter.  It was a civilisation of long-standing, with a huge territory.  It was the first World Empire, encompassing the known world, when the known world was the world that it knew.  The barbarian Greeks warded it off—warded off civilisation—and then discovered civilisation through it.  When Greece declined, its culture was preserved in Persia and made known to Europe.  And when Europe was groping for Enlightenment it was already there in Persia: in Omar Khayamm, only needing to be translated.

Persia, being a civilisation, absorbed its conquerors and conquests, and remained in being.

It preceded the Jews.  In 500 BC the Emperor Cyrus of Persia returned them from Babylon to Jerusalem:  to have another go at restoring the temple—the one which the Romans later felt obliged to destroy because it fostered outrageous conduct by the Home Rule Jewish State!

The British (Gentile) strategists, who in 1917 decided to form another Jewish State in Palestine to support it, and import a Jewish population to Palestine to base it on, were of the opinion that the destruction of the Jewish State by the Romans in 60 AD was made necessary by the excesses of Jewish nationalist conduct.  They were also of the opinion that a restored Jewish State in the hands of a Jewish nationalist population would be likely to repeat the conduct which led to the destruction of the state by the Romans.  But they thought that, if the Jews were shaped into a colony of the Empire, the power and influence of the Empire would save them from themselves.

Britain, however, was in decline from the moment it “won the war” in November 1918, greatly increasing the extent of the Empire, diminishing its means of governing it by immediately demobilising the Army by which the increased territory was gained, while at the same time destroying the stability of Europe by imposing a punitive settlement on the defeated nations that was not viable.

Britain went ahead with the Jewish colonisation of Palestine—which it had conquered from the Ottoman Empire—but reneged on the promised foundation of Arabia as a state.  Such an Arabia would possibly have made the establishment of a Jewish enclave tolerable.  However, in 1947 Britain gave way to a Jewish terrorist assault on its Palestine administration, washed its hands of the whole project it had set in motion, and let Jewish nationalism free on the Arab population.

The Arab Treaty States were not consulted by Britain on the matter of the imposition of a Jewish colony and State.  They were nominally sovereign, and voted against the new State in the United Nations.  But their votes counted for nothing against the block votes of the client states of the USA and Russia—even though a regional principle was supposed to operate on these matters.

Iraq, Jordan, Egypt and Syria made a military gesture of opposition, but none of them had actual sovereignty and real military power.  None of them had an actual national foundation, except Egypt to a certain extent, and all of them have been broken in one way or another.

Only Iran survived.  But Iran did not come within the ambit of “Arab nationalism”.  It is not Arab, and it was not involved.  It belonged to a different order of things.  As Persia, it lived within its own history—its own civilisation.  It had a history to live within.  It was not a Western creation.

Britain had invaded it in August 1941 because it was neutral as regards the German War—alleging it was not neutral, but was in alliance with Germany under cover of neutrality.  Which was it?  It doesn’t matter.  There was no real difference between the two from the British point of view.

Reza Khan could not stop the invasion, but he refused to make terms with it.  He abdicated and passed on his authority to his son, Mohamad Reza Pahlavi.

It so happened that Britain invaded jointly with Soviet Russia.  It was rumoured that it had produced anti-Russian propaganda for the invasion, which had to be discarded because Germany attacked Russia just then, and became a British ally—in fact, much more than an ally:  it replaced Britain in the War against Germany which Britain had started, and it won it by defensive action that carried it into the heart of Europe.

Britain occupied Iran jointly with Russia while seeing Russia as its main enemy—Churchill saw it as the main enemy and Churchill was Britain for the duration of the war.  The occupation of Iran by two forces that were fundamentally hostile to each other limited what either could do to Iran.  Its sovereignty was not challenged de jure.  A new Shah succeeded the old within the dynasty.  A new party sprang up under Russian influence, Tudeh.  The Americans entered the War and influenced the course of the Occupation.  

A kind of democracy existed—a kind of constitutional monarchy.  Dr. Mussadeq took Office as Prime Minister with the support of a grouping of parties that he put together.  He nationalised the oil industry.  Britain set about subverting him by bribery and other methods.  The United States was looked to as a counter to British scheming, but the CIA joined MI6 to undermine Mussadeq’s democracy.

It was a brittle democracy, depending too much on parties that were interest groups rather than generally operating political parties.  Mussaddeq was disposed of.  Monarchical government resumed.  But it was social reformist rather than nationalist.  It began with an extensive land reform comparable to the Irish land reform conducted by the Tories in 1903.  Tenants became landowners.  And it seems that the Shah imagined he could plant an up-to-date capitalist system on that base—as if Capitalism was a pure expression of human nature, which human nature could not resist if brought into contact with it.

It seems that it was this systematic modernising, wrenching Persia out of its past, that caused the downfall of the Shah.  His State structure crumbled in the face of a mass protest of 10,000 theology students.  A theocratic constitution was adopted by referendum.  Conflict with the US and Israel began.  The US Embassy shredded its documents—but the shreds were pieced together by the women of Iran.  The documents demonstrated the extent of CIA activity.  That affront to Washington was unforgivable!  Therefore Iran must be destroyed!

The latest message from Washington is that Iran must destroy itself, or else Washington will do the job for it.

Washington has been on the job for three weeks.  What it has demonstrated so far is that the Ayatollahs created a State with a power of resistance far greater than any of the British Treaty States.  Iraq collapsed into civil at a touch, a mere display of “Shock and Awe” by Bush and Blair.  We do not say that the Americans and the Jews will not finally destroy Persia.  We have often noticed liberal democracy commands the greatest destructive force ever seen in the world.

`Editorial Note:

Radio Eireann reported on 28th March that President Trump has seized weapons—which European countries had ordered and paid for for use in Ukraine—for use  against Iran!