Dear Editor,
As a result of discussions held over the past few days with Guyanese professionals, and later with a young American, with ancestral ties to Guyana, they repeated the statement suggesting that the problem in the Middle East started 47 years ago, this is in to reference to the event in 1979 which put the present clerics leadership, led by the murdered Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, in office. This at best is a deception.
The Iran-US situation to be understood will require a knowledge of each country’s history going back hundreds of years, and of course the importance of control of Iran’s oil resources. US- Iran tension can be sourced to the history of the Middle East and North America.
I recall in August 1953, before the suspension of our Constitution in October 1953, agents of the US and UK orchestrated the removal of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and the installation of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. This changed the course of events for Iran’s eighty to ninety million people. These days the language is ‘regime change’.
Fast track, remember the September 1980 Iraq – Iran war, when Saddam Hussein was supported by the US CIA who supplied them with arms, etc. Later recall when Saddam Hussein, as far as the West was concerned, stepped out of line, he was hunted down, claiming that he had weapons of mass-destruction, which were never found. It’s interesting how history has a way of repeating itself.
I have been deliberately brief, but make a plea again to our present leadership to be careful, to be cautious, before pronouncing, and in one case I heard, pontificating in favour of one side of a war. And if President Ali is a practicing Muslim he may wish to ponder or comment on a military excursion started in the holy month of Ramadan.
A problem in Guyana is that many of our purported leaders neither lived through, nor read the significance of our past, and therefore like a rudderless ship, can be tossed around in a turbulent, troubling, new world order.
Perhaps editor, it’s a world of disorder, a world where money, military might, and control of the way we think are preeminent. Are we civilized, or should we accept that men have lost their reason and fled to brutish beast?