Slacktivist has a link to, and some salient commentary on the astonishing speech by House Minority leader John Boehner, in which he argued that the current ‘war on terror’ began with the US Embassy hostage taking in Iran in 1979. It’s a fairly obvious part of the ongoing propaganda build up that seems increasingly directed towards military action by the USA against Iran.
But one thing Boehner opens himself up to is an immediate counterpoint that if we’re going to trace the conflict back to 1979, perhaps we could go one step further and look back to 1953 when the United States and the United Kingdom acted to stop the spread of democracy around the world with Operation Ajax.
I’m not sure I want to engage ideologues like Boehner in that sort of tit-for-tat debate. The entire premise of their approach is fundamentally flawed. But since the US media and the public consciousness have forgotten any vague awareness it once had of events in Iran back in the early 50s, it is worth bringing up the fact that the hostage crisis didn’t emerge from a vacuum any more than the World Trade Center attacks and Iraq War.
Tags: John Boehner, Operation Ajax, War On Terror, Mohammed Mosadegh, The Other Ajax