The most pro-American Muslims in the Middle East

Boston Globe

3 days ago

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From another: 'What righteous rage would Americans feel if a Muslim nation overthrew our own elected government and supported a police state for decades?'
It's an allegation that critics have been making for years.
Barack Obama voiced it in a widely touted speech in Cairo early in his presidency. 'In the middle of the Cold War,' he declared, 'the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government.' Other prominent Democrats, including former presidential candidate
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But the historical record isn't nearly so cut-and-dried, as Peter Theroux, a longtime US intelligence officer,
'First, the CIA did not mount or execute a coup. Second, Mossadegh was not democratically elected. Third, the shah was not yet corrupt. Fourth, he was not brought back to power, because he had never left it.'
For those whose instinct is always to find fault with US policy, the narrative that the CIA ran roughshod over Iranian democracy to overthrow Mossadegh — who had incurred Western displeasure by nationalizing the country's oil industry — may be irresistible. But it rests on myths. As Ray Takeyh, a leading scholar of Iran and a former senior adviser in the Obama State Department,
Mossadegh's fall was driven mostly by deep domestic opposition from Shia clergy, middle class professionals, and the military, which resented the growing authoritarianism of the prime minister. When the shah, acting within his constitutional authority, dismissed Mossadegh, the prime minister reacted by arresting the man who brought him the news. It's true that the American and British governments assisted the anti-Mossadegh forces, but they didn't conjure them into existence. Mossadegh's downfall in 1953 was chiefly the result of his own mismanagement and the mobilization of powerful Iranian factions — not a nefarious CIA-engineered plot.
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But even if you disregard all that, even if you regard Mossadegh as a liberal Iranian hero undermined by Anglo-American perfidy, there is a much bigger problem with the 'But Mossadegh!' argument. It's illogical.
The goal of Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution of 1979 was to transform Iran into a nation governed by strict sharia law under a Supreme Leader — himself — and to impose a radical Islamist dictatorship throughout society. The new regime suppressed liberal nationalists, including many who had admired Mossadegh, and dismantled the country's remaining democratic institutions. Khomeini's theocracy didn't come to
vindicate
Mossadegh; it came to crush every liberal value he embraced.
Moreover, the new Islamic republic's hatred for America had nothing to do with 1953 and everything to do with its own revolutionary ideology. The mullahs who seized power saw American liberalism, secularism, and friendship toward Israel as a cultural and religious threat. That is why it encouraged throngs to chant 'Death to America!' and why it has repeatedly facilitated deadly attacks on Americans.
But the most compelling refutation of the claim that the Tehran government's implacable anti-Americanism is rooted in the 1953 ouster of Mossadegh is that Iranian grassroots public opinion is
If 1953 had sown the deep cultural resentment that leftist critics imagine, the Iranian street ought to be a hotbed of hatred for Americans. Instead, numerous indicators of public opinion within Iran, formal and informal, show the opposite: Ordinary Iranians admire American society and people, even if they sometimes resent US policy.
'A 2009 World Public Opinion poll found that 51 percent of Iranians hold a favorable opinion of Americans, a number consistent with other polls, meaning that Americans are more widely liked in Iran than anywhere else in the Middle East,'
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Two years later,
Iranians active on social media have made a point of expressing warmth toward Americans, especially in recent years. A notable example occurred in 2017, when protests against the travel ban imposed during the first Trump administration prompted Iranian users to launch an online
There is no shortage of anecdotal evidence — including videotaped scenes in which
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For more than 40 years, the Iranian government has denounced the United States as 'the Great Satan' and Israel as 'the little Satan' and vowed to '
The toppling of Mossadegh in 1953 may have been a significant chapter in modern Iranian history, but it has little do with how ordinary Iranians today regard the nation that its Islamist oppressors have been cursing for more than four decades. Like the people of Eastern Europe during the Cold War, the people of Iran see America —
If the current US-Israeli strikes on Iran succeed in destroying the mullahs' nuclear weapons infrastructure that will be a good thing. But it will be a
great
thing if the attacks pave the way to ending the evil regime that has ruled Iran since 1979, and at long last open the door to a brighter, freer, happier future for the long-suffering people of Iran.
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This is adapted from the current
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