Trump Needs to Read History Books, Probably for the First Time
There is a joke: People who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it–as well as the eighth grade.
Which brings me to a recent quote from Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in a televised message to President Trump: Re-read your history books. The problem there, of course, it that it implies that Trump read them the first time, and, as he does not even blush to admit, Trump doesn’t read. I’m not saying he can’t read, just that he doesn’t, which actually displays less intelligence than the first scenario, since the illiterate may be merely the victims of poor or non-existent education. That is meat for a future blog.
Rouhani’s remark might also have been aimed at Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. In a recent and supposedly diplomatic sit-down with Iran, the bellicose secretary said, “The modern-day U.S.-Iran relationship is now almost forty years old. It was born out of a revolution, with our Embassy under siege—and we were very badly treated.”
No, Rex, the relationship actually goes back 64 years to 1953, when the U.S. CIA joined with Great Britain to overthrow the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in favor of strengthening the monarchical rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The coup d’état led to the suppression of all political dissent as well as hundreds of arrests and even executions. Why would the United States, bastion of democracy, come down in favor of absolute and brutal monarchy? Maybe it had something to do with the fact that Iran wanted to retake control of its own oil reserves, and to that end, had asked to audit the British oil corporation books.
Of course, none of this was known to anyone but the highest echelons of government when Iran finally overthrew the Shah, and then stormed the U.S. Embassy, taking 52 diplomats hostage for 444 days. It was the act of a rogue state. One of the iron-clad laws of international relations is that diplomats are immune to the host nation’s laws–as is pointed out at least once in every TV crime series. So yes, we had good cause for resentment. I just didn’t realize at the time that so did Iran. It answered my bewildered question back during the hostage crisis: “Why do they hate us?”
It was because I now know about that bit of history that I was able to view Russia’s interference with the 2016 election as a bitter case of karma. We got a little back of what we so arrogantly dished out. Hell, we used to glory in it. Remember the highly entertaining TV show Mission: Impossible? Too many times the plot involved the agents pulling off some stunt to topple a pro-Communist government or to bring a pro-U.S politician to power.
Kind of like Putin putting a sycophantic but incompetent millionaire in charge of our own government. I get it. Karma. But it better not happen again.