Anyone silly enough to believe the US wants to bring democracy to Iran should have a look at what the US is currently doing to sabotage democracy in Iraq.
President Trump has been aggressively threatening to cut off Iraq’s oil revenue if it allows the return to office of former prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, whom the Trump administration views as too sympathetic to Iran.
And the threats appear to be working, as Antiwar’s Jason Ditz reports:
“Once and possibly future Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s candidacy is increasingly in doubt this weekend, with reports that President Trump’s demand he not be allowed to return to office increasing the possibility that the Coordination Framework bloc may withdraw him as their choice for premier.
“Last year’s Iraq elections ended with the usual deeply split parliament, though the State of Law Party’s fourth place finish with 6% of the vote was generally seen as enough to give Maliki the coalition leadership, since current PM Mohammed al-Sudani does not intend to return.
“Late last month, Trump demanded that Maliki step down from the nomination, but he refused at the time, saying that the US should stay out of Iraq’s internal affairs. Maliki was already Iraq’s PM from 2006 through 2014.”
Ditz explains that Trump is able to sway Iraqi politics with credible threats due to the US control that was imposed on the nation’s economy following the Iraq invasion:
“Underpinning this whole thing is that after the 2003 US invasion and occupation of Iraq, the country was restructured such that all of Iraq’s oil revenue was paid in US dollars through the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Since that revenue is almost the entirety of Iraq’s government budget, that means the US can virtually seize Iraq’s treasury at any time and bankrupt the country on a moment’s notice.”
This is what US-imposed “democracy” looks like in practice: giving a nation the freedom to do what Washington tells them to do and elect the leaders that Washington allows them to elect.
You may recall that the narrative to justify the US coalition’s overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003 was the urgent need to bring freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people. The US literally titled the invasion “Operation Iraqi Freedom”. They then killed a million people, plunged the region into chaos and instability for years, and ensured that the Iraqi people would forever remain under the boot of the US empire.
There is no excuse for a grown adult to believe the US empire wants to bring democracy to Iran. The US consistently props up dictatorships and monarchies in the middle east exactly because they do not want the will of the people to determine the actions and policies of the governments of those nations. Truly democratic states in the region would see people using their votes to elect leaders who are hostile to Israel and the United States, and who set fossil fuel policies which advance the interests of their own people rather than the interests of the western empire.
This is why the middle east is rife with wealthy monarchies who are extremely friendly with the US and its allies. That didn’t happen by accident; the west has been intimately involved with aggressively manipulating middle eastern affairs for generations. This includes Iran; the CIA staged a coup in 1953 to replace its democratically elected government with a US-aligned monarchy, who was then overthrown in the Iranian Revolution in 1979.
The plan isn’t to bring democracy to Iran, and there’s a convincing argument to be made that it’s not even to preserve Iran as a unified state. Influential Iran hawks have been pushing balkanization as the preferred strategy lately, with war propagandists now promoting the idea that an Iran fractured along ethnic lines might be in everyone’s best interest. This strategy would create unfathomable strife and horrifically deadly chaos, but it would allow for the toppling of the Iranian government without having to go to all the trouble of replacing it with a new government. They can just smash Iran to eliminate a disobedient regional power and let the pieces land where they may, with no fear of a future revolution replacing their puppet regime in a large and unified state.
The US does not seek democracy, it seeks planetary domination. That’s all these moves are ever about, and the empire doesn’t care how many people it needs to hurt along the way in order to get there.
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Caitlin Johnstone 