[ssf] Fisking : Carpet Baggers and Carpet Weavers WAS Re: [sheffield-anti-war-coalition] In the military sex-speak of the Pentagon, Iraq would endure a 'spike' of violence

adam bashid adam at diamat.org.uk
Mon Feb 5 12:20:15 GMT 2007


25/01/07 15:55 GERALD ALI wrote:

>     7  items, but most are short, last one is for fun, language by Fisk, it's a good one. 

More by Fisk below, and Robert Newman's *History of Oil" for light relieve:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7374585792978336967


"Christopher Montague Woodhouse was asking himself if he had helped to 
create the Islamic revolution in Iran.

He was an old man now, but you could see the energy that still gripped 
him, a tall, dignified, brave and ruthless 79-year-old.

It was snowing that morning in Oxford in 1997, but he had come to the 
gate of his retirement home to greet me, his handshake a vice.

He sat ramrod-straight in his library with the mind of a young man, 
answering my questions with the exactness of a Greek scholar, each 
sentence carefully crafted.

He had been Britain's senior secret agent in ''Operation Boot'' in 1953, 
the overthrow of Iran's only democratic prime minister, Mohamed Mossadeq.

It was 'Monty' Woodhouse who help bring the Shah of Iran back from 
exile, along with his colleagues in the CIA, who set in motion a 
quarter-century in which the Shah of Shahs, ''Light of the Aryans'', 
would obediently rule Iran -- repressively, savagely, corruptly, and in 
imperious isolation -- on our behalf.

Woodhouse was a reminder that ''The Plot'' -- the international 
conspiracy, *moamara* in Arabic -- was not always the product of Middle 
East imagination.

Woodhouse was in the last years of a life in which he had been a 
guerrilla fighter in Greece, a Tory MP and a much honoured Greek 
linguist and academic.

Almost everyone who had destroyed Iranian democracy was now dead; Kermit 
Roosevelt, the senior CIA man in Tehran, his boss Allen Dulles, Robin 
Zaehner of the British Foreign Office, the two mysterious Rashidian 
brothers who organised the coup, Mossadeq himself, and the last Shah of 
Iran.

'Monty' was the last survivor ...


... The project had not attracted President Truman, but when Eisenhower 
arrived at the White House in 1953, America was already fearful that 
Mossadeq would hand his country over to the Soviets.

The CIA end of the operation was run by the splendidly named Kermit 
Roosevelt -- grandson of the buccaneering ex-president Theodore -- and 
his victim was the very opposite of Saddam Hussein.

'No nation goes anywhere under the shadow of a dictatorship,' Mossadeq 
once said -- words that might have come from President George W. Bush's 
speechwriters half a century later.

But one thing Mossadeq did have in common with the later dictator of 
Iraq; he was the victim of a long campaign of personal abuse by his 
international opponents.

They talked about his ''yellow'' face, of how his nose was always 
running; the French writer Gerard de Villiers described Mossadeq as 'a 
pint-sized trouble-maker with the agility of a goat'.

On his death the *New York Times* would claim that he 'held cabinet 
meetings while propped up in bed by three pillows and nourished by 
transfusions of American blood plasma.'

True, Mossadeq, an aristocratic with a European education, had a habit 
of dressing in pink pyjamas and of bursting into tears in parliament.

But he appears to have been a genuine democrat -- he had been a renowned 
diplomat and parliamentarian -- whose condemnation of the Shah's tyranny 
and refusal to sanction further oil concessions gave his National Front 
coalition mass popular support.

When Woodhouse arrived in Tehran -- officially, he was the British 
embassy's ''Information Officer'' -- Iran was already on the brink of 
catastrophe.

Negotiations had broken down with the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company [1], 
whose officials, Woodhouse admitted, were 'boring, pig-headed and tiresome'.

The British ambassador was, according to Woodhouse, 'a dispirited 
bachelor dominated by his widowed sister' and his opposite number an 
American business tycoon who was being rewarded fro his donations to the 
Democratic Party ...


... Mossadeq rejected the last proposals for a settlement with the 
Anglo-Iranian Oil Company [1] and threatened the Shah -- who had already 
left Iran -- and from that moment his fate was obvious. Roosevelt 
traveled secretly to Tehran while Woodhouse met the Shah's sister Ashraf 
in Switzerland in an attempt to persuade her brother to stay on the throne.

The Shah himself received a secret emissary bent on the same purpose, a 
certain General H. Norman Schwarzkopf -- father of Norman Schwarzkopf 
who would lead US forces in the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq.

The Shah went along with the wishes of his super-power allies.

He issued a firman dismissing Mossadeq as prime minister, and when 
Mossadeq refused to obey and arrested Colonel Nimatullah Nassiri -- who 
had brought the Shah's order -- the mobs whom Roosevelt and Woodhouse 
had brought duly appeared on the streets of Tehran ...

... But Mossadeq's rule and the coup that ended Iran's independence in 
1953 would provide a bitter lesson to the revolutionaries of 1979.

If the Shah was ever to be dethroned, there could be no flirtation with 
constitutional rights, no half-measures, no counter-revolutionaries left 
to restore Western power in Iran.

A future revolution would embrace more than five thousand dead; it must 
be final, absolute -- and unforgiving.

The spies, the ancien regime, would have to be liquidated at once ...


... There were also lessons for the Americans and British, and for the 
Shah, had he chosen to pay attention.

The Shah would henceforth always be seen as a tool of the United States 
and Britain.

The fall of Mossadeq, as James A. Bill has written, 'began a new era of 
intervention and growing hostility to the United States among the 
awakened forces of Iranian nationalism'.

Woodhouse was to become deeply depressed by Khomeini's subsequent 
revolution.

'I felt that the work we had done was wasted, that a sort of complacency 
had taken over once the Shah had been restored,' he said. 'Things were 
taken for granted too easily.'

After Mossadeq had been booted out, Allen Dulles praised Woodhouse for 
visiting Washington and persuading the Eisenhower administration to back 
the coup: 'That was a nice little egg you laid when you were here the 
last time!' he told the man from MI6 ...

... But we don't go for ''little eggs'' anymore. More ambitious 
ideological projects, vast armies -- and bigger egos -- are involved in 
''regime change today.

Maybe that's why they can fail so quickly and so bloodily.

The coup against Mossadeq was the first such operation carried out by 
the Americans in the Cold War -- and the last by the British.

At least we never claimed Mossadeq had weapons of mass destruction.

But the final word must go to the CIA's man, Kermit Roosevelt. 'If we 
are ever going to try something like this again,' he wrote with great 
prescience, 'we must be absolutely sure that [the] people and army want 
what we want.' ...

... The 'sort of complacency' which Woodhouse defined was based upon the 
security services which the Shah established after his return.

Savak -- *Sazman-i Etelaat va Amjiniat-i Keshvar*, the 'National 
Information and Security Organisation' -- was to become the most 
notorious and the most murderous, its torture chambers among the Middle 
East's most terrible institutions.

A permanent secret US mission was attached to Savak headquarters.

Methods of interrogation included -- apart from the conventional 
electric wire attached to the genitals, beatings on the soles of the 
feet and nail extraction -- rape and ''cooking'', the later a 
self-explanatory form of suffering in which the victim was strapped to a 
bed of wire that was electrified to become a red-hot toaster.

Mohamed Heikal, the greatest of Egyptian journalists, once editor of *Al 
Ahram* and former confident of Nasser, has described how Savak filmed 
the torture of a young Iranian women, how she was stripped naked and how 
cigarettes were used to burn her nipples.

According to Heikal, the film was later distributed by the CIA to other 
intelligence agencies working for American-supported regimes around the 
world including Taiwan, Indonesia and the Philippines.

Colonel Nimatullah Nassiri, the man who served Mossadeq with the Shah's 
eviction order, controlled Savak for almost fifteen years of the 
monarch's reign and employed up to 60,000 agents.

At one point, it was believed that a third of the male population of 
Iran were in some way involved in Savak, either directly or as 
occasional paid or blackmailed informants.

They included diplomats, civil servants, mullahs, actors, writers, oil 
executives, workers, peasants, the poor and the unemployed, a whole 
society corrupted by power and fear ...

... For the West, the Shah became our policeman, the wise 'autocrat' -- 
never of course, a dictator -- who was a bastion against Soviet 
expansionism in south-west Asia, the guardian of our oil supplies, a 
would be democrat -- the 'would' more relevant than the 'be' -- and a 
reformer dedicated to leading his people into the bright economic future.

Over the next quarter-century, the international oil industry exported 
24 billion barrels of oil out of Iran; and the 'policeman of the Gulf' 
was more important than ever now that the British were withdrawing from 
the 'east of Suez'.

But the Shah's rule was never as stable as his supporters would have the 
world believe. There was rioting against his regime throughout the 1960s 
and four hundred bombings between 1971 and 1975.

In early 1963 the Ayatollah Khomeini repeatedly condemned the Shah's rule.

On 3 June, the day marking the martyrdom at Kerbala of Imam Hussein, the 
grandson of the Prophet, he publicly denounced the Shah's corruption and 
was promptly arrested and taken to Tehran. An outburst of popular anger 
confirmed Khomeini as a national opposition leader.

Sixteen months later, on 4 November 1964, he delivered a speech in which 
he condemned a new law giving American forces immunity from prosecution 
for any crimes committed inside Iran. Henceforth, an American who 
murdered an Iranian could leave the country; an Iranian who murdered an 
Iranian could be hanged. Next day, Khomeini was exiled to Turkey ...

... The Shah's ''White Revolution'' succeeded in alienating the middle 
classes by legislating for land reform and the clerics by increasing the 
secular nature of the regime, especially by giving electoral power to 
women ...

... When the Islamic revolution eventually overflowed Iran, we would 
often wonder at the Iranian capacity for both cruelty and sensitivity, 
for sudden anger and immense, long and exhausting intellectual application.

In a country of violent history, its public squares were filled with 
statutes of poets -- Ferdowsi, Hafiz, Saadi -- rather than conquerors, 
although the Shah and his father naturally occupied substantial plinths.

An Arab politician once compared Iranian persistence in adversity to the 
country's craft of carpet-weaving.

'Imagine that one carpet, worked on by scores of people, takes about ten 
years to complete. A people who spend years in manufacturing just a 
single carpet will wait many more years to achieve victory in war.

Do not take lightly the patience and perseverance of the Iranians ..."

-- Robert Fisk :: The Great War for Civilisation

[1] Now known as ''British Petroleum PLC''

> Robert Fisk: This jargon disease is choking language 
> In the military sex-speak of the Pentagon, Iraq would endure a 'spike' of violence 
> Published: 13 January 2007 
> I once received an invitation to lecture at "The University of Excellence". I forget where this particular academy was located - Jordan, I think - but I recall very clearly that the suggested subject of my talk was as incomprehensible to me as it would, no doubt, have been to any audience. Invitation rejected. Only this week I received another request, this time to join "ethics practitioners" to "share evidence-based practices on dealing with current ethical practices" around the world. What on earth does this mean? Why do people write like this? 
> 
> The word "excellence", of course, has long ago been devalued by the corporate world - its favourite expression has long been "Quality and Excellence", invariably accompanied by a "mission statement", that claim to self-importance dreamed up by Robin Cook when foreign secretary - swiftly ditched when he decided to go on selling jets to Indonesia - and thereafter by every export company and amateur newspaper in the world.
> 
> There is something repulsive about this vocabulary, an aggressive language of superiority in which "key players" can "interact" with each other, can "impact" society, "outsource" their business - or "downsize" the number of their employees. They need "feedback" and "input". They think "outside the box" or "push the envelope". They have a "work space", not a desk. They need "personal space" - they need to be left alone - and sometimes they need "time and space", a commodity much in demand when marriages are failing.
> 
> These lies and obfuscations are infuriating. "Downsizing" employees means firing them; "outsourcing" means hiring someone else to do your dirty work. "Feedback" means "reaction", "input" means "advice". Thinking "outside the box" means, does it not, to be "imaginative"?
> 
> Being a "key player" is a form of self-aggrandisement - which is why I never agree to be a "key speaker", especially if this means participation in a "workshop". To me a workshop means what it says. When I was at school, the workshop was a carpentry shop wherein generations of teachers vainly tried to teach Fisk how to make a wooden chair or table that did not collapse the moment it was completed. But today, a "workshop" - though we mustn't say so - is a group of tiresome academics yakking in the secret language of anthropology or talking about "cultural sensitivity" or "core issues" or "tropes".
> 
> Presumably these are same folk who invented the UN's own humanitarian-speak. Of the latter, my favourite is the label awarded to any desperate refugee who is prepared (for a pittance) to persuade their fellow victims to abide by the UN's wishes - to abandon their tents and return to their dangerous, war-ravaged homes. These luckless advisers are referred to by the UN as "social animators".
> 
> It is a disease, this language, caught by one of our own New Labour ministers on the BBC last week when he talked about "environmental externalities". Presumably, this meant "the weather". Similarly, an architect I know warned his client of the effect of the "aggressive saline environment" on a house built near the sea. If this advice seems obscure, we might be "conflicted" about it - who, I ask myself, invented the false reflexive verb? - or, worse still, "stressed". In northern Iraq in 1991, I was once ordered by a humanitarian worker from the "International Rescue Committee" to leave the only room I could find in the wrecked town of Zakho because it had been booked for her fellow workers - who were very "stressed". Pour souls, I thought. They were stressed, "stressed out", trying - no doubt - to "come to terms" with their predicament, attempting to "cope".
> 
> This is the language of therapy, in which frauds, liars and cheats are always trying to escape. Thus President Clinton's spokesman claimed after his admission of his affair with Monica Lewinsky that he was "seeking closure". Like so many mendacious politicians, Clinton felt - as Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara will no doubt feel about his bloodbath in Iraq once he leaves No 10 - the need to "move on".
> 
> In the same way, our psycho-babble masters and mistresses - yes, there is a semantic problem there , too, isn't there? - announce after wars that it is a time for "healing", the same prescription doled out to families which are "dysfunctional", who live in a "dystopian" world. Yes, dystopian is a perfectly good word - it is the opposite of utopian - but like "perceive" and "perception" (words once much loved by Jonathan Dimbleby) - they have become fashionable because they appear enigmatic.
> 
> Some newly popular phrases, such as "tipping point" - used about Middle East conflicts when the bad guys are about to lose - or "big picture" - when moralists have to be reminded of the greater good - are merely fashionable. Others are simply odd. I always mixed up "bonding" with "bondage" and "quality time" with a popular assortment of toffees. I used to think that "increase" was a perfectly acceptable word until I discovered that in the military sex-speak of the Pentagon, Iraq would endure a "spike" of violence until a "surge" of extra troops arrived in Baghdad.
> 
> All this is different, of course, from the non-sexual "no-brainers" with which we now have to "cope" - "author" for "authoress", for example, "actor" for "actress" - or the fearful linguistic lengths we must go to in order to avoid offence to Londoners who speak Cockney: as well all know - though only those of us, of course, who come from the Home Counties - these people speak "Estuary" English. It's like those poor Americans in Detroit who, in fear and trepidation, avoided wishing me a happy Christmas. "Happy Holiday!" they chorused until I roared "Happy Christmas" back. In Beirut, by the way, we all wish each other "Happy Christmas" and "Happy Eid", whether our friends are Muslim or Christian. Is this really of "majorly importance", as an Irish television producer once asked a colleague of a news event?
> 
> I fear it is. For we are not using words any more. We are utilising them, speaking for effect rather than meaning, for escape. We are becoming - as The New Yorker now describes children who don't care if they watch films on the cinema screen or on their mobile phones - "platform agnostic". What, Polonius asked his lord, was he reading? "Words, words, words," Hamlet replied. If only... 




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