CIA flop shows Iran dilemma
Socialist Press1978 1978-11-29Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 2 →
Read from the scan by machine and not corrected: expect misread words, and now and then a caption or a line from a neighbouring story. For anything you quote, read the scan.
Scan page 2
Forced for the moment writhe in to impotent fury and unable as yet to help a great friend in his hour of need, President Carter has turned to vent his frustration on those advisers who misled his administration on the state of iran.
The CIA was apparently still claiming that the Shah's dictatorship • was firmly secure even while the mass demonstrations broke out across the country in August Such reports may have resulted from simple incompetence, independent political motivation or the two factors combined..
Not smiling now-Carter But Carter's complaint to Brzezinski, the • State Department and the CIA (that he is 'dissatisfied with the quality of political intelligence') shows cleary enough the dilemma of imperialism. • Anxious to preserve their dominance over Iran at almost any cost, the imperialists have no desire to find that they have placed all their bets on a loser.
Advance warning
Perhaps the CIA was able to cleat its name a little by giving advance warning on the scale of Saturday's demonstration in Frankfurt against the Shah's dictatorship.
Some 10,000 Iranians Turks and Germans marched to the US consulate in Frankfurt to protest against the full blooded support for the Shah given by American imperialism.
As sections of the march moved to attack the building, 500 riot police were sent in to smash up the demonstration and over 200 protestors were injured.
In Iran itself, the new military government has carried on the full tradition of even more brutal attacks against continuing mass demonstrations in all the major cities.
While General Azhari was describing the strike in the oil-fields as a 'crime against the nation' , his troops outside parliament were sent in by the lorry-load, armed with machine guns and backed up by nine Chieftain tanks, to control' a demonstration by 200 youth in the bazaar.
Limited In protest at recent killings the bourgeois nationalist leaders of the National Front and the Ayatollah Khomeini called for a limited general strike on 26 November.
But the development of the struggle points with increasing urgency to the necessity for the formation of armed workers defence squads to protect strikes and demonstrations against the military.
Such a policy and the necessary socialist and democratic demands to mobilise the masses in the fight for a workers and peasants government in Iran can only be fought for through the construction of a Trotskyist leadership in annneition to the haurronio misleaders.