3/10/06
What Really Happed to the Shah of Iran
By _Ernst Schroeder_ (mailto:[email protected])
My name is Ernst Schroeder, and since I have some Iranian friends from
school and review your online magazine occasionally, I thought I’d
pass onthe following three page quote from a book I read a few months
ago entitled, “_A Century Of War : Anglo-American Oil Politics and the
New World Order_
( 532309X/netnative) “, which
was written by William Engdahl, a German historianm . This is a book
about how oil and politics have been intertwined for the past 100
years.
I submit the below passage for direct publishing on your website, as I
think the quote will prove to be significant for anyone of Persian
descent.
“In November 1978, President Carter named the Bilderberg group’s
George Ball, another member of the Trilateral Commission, to head a
special WhiteHouse Iran task force under the National Security
Council’s Brzezinski. Ball recommended that Washington drop support
for the Shah of Iran and support the fundamentalistic Islamic
opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini. Robert Bowie from the CIA was one
of the lead ‘case officers’ in the new CIA-led coup against the man
their covert actions had placed into power 25 years earlier.
Their scheme was based on a detailed study of the phenomenon of
Islamic fundamentalism, as presented by British Islamic expert,
Dr. Bernard Lewis,then on assignment at Princeton University in the
United States. Lewis’s scheme, which was unveiled at the May 1979
Bilderberg meeting in Austria, endorsed the radical Muslim Brotherhood
movement behind Khomeini, in order to promote balkanization of the
entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines.
Lewis argued that the West should encourage autonomous groups such as
the Kurds, Armenians, Lebanese Maronites, Ethiopian Copts, Azerbaijani
Turks, and so forth. The chaos would spread in what he termed an ‘Arc
of Crisis,’ which would spill over into Muslim regions of the Soviet
Union.
The coup against the Shah, like that against Mossadegh in 1953, was
run by British and American intelligence, with the bombastic American,
Brzezinski, taking public ‘credit’ for getting rid of the ‘corrupt’
Shah, while the British characteristically remained safely in the
background.
During 1978, negotiations were under way between the Shah’s government
and British Petroleum for renewal of the 25-year old extraction
agreement. By October 1978, the talks had collapsed over a British
‘offer’ which demanded exclusive rights to Iran’s future oil output,
while refusing to guarantee purchase of the oil. With their
dependence on British-controlled export apparently at an end, Iran
appeared on the verge of independence in its oil sales policy for the
first time since 1953, with eager prospective buyers in Germany,
France, Japan and elsewhere. In its lead editorial that September,
Iran’s Kayhan International stated:
In retrospect, the 25-year partnership with the [British Petroleum]
consortium and the 50-year relationship with British Petroleum which
preceded it, have not been satisfactory ones for Iran =80¦ Looking to
the future, NIOC [National Iranian Oil Company] should plan to handle
all operations by itself.
London was blackmailing and putting enormous economic pressure on the
Shah’s regime by refusing to buy Iranian oil production, taking only 3
million or so barrels daily of an agreed minimum of 5 million barrels
per day. This imposed dramatic revenue pressures on Iran, which
provided the context inwhich religious discontent against the Shah
could be fanned by trained agitators deployed by British and
U.S. intelligence. In addition, strikes among oil workers at this
critical juncture crippled Iranian oil production.
As Iran’s domestic economic troubles grew, American ‘security’
advisers to the Shah’s Savak secret police implemented a policy of
ever more brutal repression, in a manner calculated to maximize
popular antipathy to the Shah. At the same time, the Carter
administration cynically began protesting abusesof ‘human rights’
under the Shah.
British Petroleum reportedly began to organize capital flight out of
Iran, through its strong influence in Iran’s financial and banking
community. The British Broadcasting Corporation’s Persian-language
broadcasts, with dozens of Persian-speaking BBC ‘correspondents’ sent
into even the smallest village, drummed up hysteria against the Shah.
The BBC gave Ayatollah Khomeini a full propaganda platform inside Iran
during this time. The British government-owned broadcasting
organization refused to give the Shah’s government an equal chance to
reply. Repeated personal appeals from the Shah to the BBC yielded no
result. Anglo-American intelligence was committed to toppling the
Shah.
The Shah fled in January, and by February 1979, Khomeini had been
flown into Tehran to proclaim the establishment of his repressive
theocratic state to replace the Shah’s government.
Reflecting on his downfall months later, shortly before his death, the
Shah noted from exile,
I did not know it then – perhaps I did not want to know – but it is
clear to me now that the Americans wanted me out. Clearly this is
what the human rights advocates in the State Department wanted =80¦
What was I to make of the Administration’s sudden decision to call
former Under Secretary of State George Ball to the White House as an
adviser on Iran? =80¦ Ball was among those Americans who wanted to
abandon me and ultimately my country._[1]_
( 1090.html#_ftn1) [1]
With the fall of the Shah and the coming to power of the fanatical
Khomeini adherents in Iran, chaos was unleashed. By May 1979, the new
Khomeini regime had singled out the country’s nuclear power
development plans and announced cancellation of the entire program for
French and German nuclear reactor construction.
Iran’s oil exports to the world were suddenly cut off, some 3 million
barrels per day. Curiously, Saudi Arabian production in the critical
daysof January 1979 was also cut by some 2 million barrels per day.
To add to the pressures on world oil supply, British Petroleum
declared force majeure and cancelled major contracts for oil supply.
Prices on the Rotterdam spot market, heavily influenced by BP and
Royal Cutch Shell as the largest oil traders, soared in early 1979 as
a result. The second oil shock of the 1970s was fully under way.
Indications are that the actual planners of the Iranian Khomeini coup
in London and within the senior ranks of the U.S. liberal
establishment decided to keep President Carter largely ignorant of the
policy and its ultimate objectives. The ensuing energy crisis in the
United States was a major factor in bringing about Carter’s defeat a
year later.
There was never a real shortage in the world supply of petroleum.
Existing Saudi and Kuwaiti production capacities could at any time
have met the 5-6 million barrels per day temporary shortfall, as a
U.S. congressional investigation by the General Accounting Office
months later confirmed.
Unusually low reserve stocks of oil held by the Seven Sisters oil
multinationals contributed to creating a devastating world oil price
shock, with prices for crude oil soaring from a level of some $14 per
barrel in 1978 towards the astronomical heights of $40 per barrel for
some grades of crude on the spot market. Long gasoline lines across
America contributed to a general sense of panic, and Carter energy
secretary and former CIA director, James R.
Schlesinger, did not help calm matters when he told Congress and the
mediain February 1979 that the Iranian oil shortfall was
‘prospectively more serious’ than the 1973 Arab oil embargo._[2]_
( 1090.html#_ftn2) [2]
The Carter administration’s Trilateral Commission foreign policy
further ensured that any European effort from Germany and France to
develop more cooperative trade, economic and diplomatic relations with
their Soviet neighbor, under the umbrella of détente and various
Soviet-west European energy agreements, was also thrown into disarray.
Carter’s security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and secretary of
state, Cyrus Vance, implemented their ‘Arc of Crisis’ policy,
spreading the instability of the Iranian revolution throughout the
perimeter around the Soviet Union.
Throughout the Islamic perimeter from Pakistan to Iran,
U.S. initiatives created instability or worse.”
— William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and
the New World Order, © 1992, 2004. Pluto Press Ltd. Pages 171-174.
_[1]_ ( ref1) [1] In
1978, the Iranian Ettelaat published an article accusing Khomeini of
being a British agent. The clerics organized violent demonstrations
in response, which led to the flight of the Shah months later. See
U.S. Library of Congress Country Studies, Iran. The Coming of the
Revolution. December 1987. The role of BBC Persian broadcasts in the
ousting of the Shah is detailed in Hossein Shahidi. ‘BBC Persian
Service 60 years on.’ The Iranian. September 24, 2001.
The BBC was so much identified with Khomeini that it won the name
‘Ayatollah BBC.’
_[2]_ ( ref2) [2]
Comptroller General of the United States. ‘Iranian Oil Cutoff:
Reduced Petroleum Supplies and Inadequate U.S. Government Response.’
Report to Congress by General Accounting Office. 1979.
From: Baghdasarian