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9/11, Iran, and Americans’ Knowledge of the U.S. Role in the World
WHAT SCHOLARS CHOOSE TO WRITE about the September 11 attacks cannot be considered outside the context of knowledge production and the formation the American consciousness of global politics and the nation’s role in the world. As I thought about these dimensions of the September tragedies, I observed an audience member commenting about such issues on Talkback Live on CNN. The speaker was disturbed by what she described as the hatred of America by many countries around the world. “Why do they hate us?” she asked.
All we have ever done is help people around the world. When there are tragedies, we are the first ones there. We mean nobody harm, we just want to live at peace with the rest of the world. None of this makes any sense to me. Why do people from other countries want to hurt the most generous and helpful nation on the face of the earth? We’re the most peaceful people anywhere. I don’t get it.
After a few class meetings with students following the attacks, I realized that such sentiments were not uncommon. In this context, I thought back to the opinions expressed by many Americans and by my students in the period following the Iranian hostage crisis. The sentiments of Americans at that time were very similar to the ones expressed so dearly by the woman on CNN. In response to such perspectives in the early 1980s, I was moved to write an essay raising questions about the historical relationships at work in Iran that motivated millions of Iranians to march through the streets of Teheran shouting, “Death to America.” The historical insights explaining Iranian anger toward the United States are still not known by many Americans 20 years later. In light of September 11, these events take on new import as they help Americans understand one example of larger patterns of U.S. relationships with Islamic countries. They provide insight into the reasons for hatreds strong enough to motivate the viciousness of the assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Such issues raise profound questions for scholars of education and knowledge production in the United States. When the level of discourse about September 11 is based on presidential and TV news proclamations that we were attacked because the terrorists “hate our freedom,” we understand the dimension of the problem facing us. As one White working-class man put it in a conversation with me in October 2001,
the Muslims hate us because we’re better than them and smarter than them. I’d like to kill every one of them—every man, woman, child, dog, cat, horse, and mule in Afghanistan. They are primitive people—and they don’t understand anything other than raw force. I say kill’em all.
When I asked him if he had ever thought about why many Muslims hate America so much, he told me that he didn’t know and didn’t care. Indeed, part of the reason many Muslims—and other peoples around the world—are so uncomfortable with the United States is for this very reason: We are so often ignorant of the problems they have with American actions in the world. If the United States was a nation secluded from the world, was not engaging in trade and commerce and political negotiations, such ignorance might be understandable. But, of course, we are not separated from the rest of the world. In fact, the United States is intimately involved on numerous levels with every other nation on earth—often in ways that do not serve the best interests of these other societies.
Returning to the Iranian hostage crisis and the Iranian revolution, I found in my research that few mainstream news magazines or TV network news programs at the time (1979-1981) ever provided a meaningful historical answer to the important question of why so many Iranians were so angry at the United States. It did not take Woodward and Bernstein to discern the post—World War II events that enraged the Iranian public. As newspapers and magazines from other parts of the world had reported on numerous occasions, and scholars of Iran both outside and inside the United States knew, the United States and Britain had staged a coup to overthrow the first democratically elected government of Iran. In 1951, Mohammed Mossadegh was elected prime minister of Iran. He immediately angered the West by initiating efforts to nationalize the primarily British-controlled oil industry. Whereas the United States in the past year and a half of the Truman administration was uncomfortable with the British plan for a coup, the Eisenhower administration eagerly supported it after the presidential inauguration of 1953. So concerned was the new administration with Mossadegh’s perceived closeness with leftist factions, it worked to expand the British goals.
Two weeks after Eisenhower’s inauguration, U.S. and British officials met to develop the specifics of the covert operation under the code name AJAX. The operation would rid Iran of its parliamentary government, arrest Prime Minister Mossadegh, and buttress the power of Reza Pahlavi, the shah of Iran. Though AJAX was a comedy of errors played out by inept CIA agents, it accomplished all of its goals. Even though the shah was a cowardly and weak figure, the United States and Britain provided him total support. They knew they could control him and use him both to protect their robbery of Iran’s oil and position Iran as a buffer between the Soviet Union and the Persian Gulf. With Mossadegh out of the picture, the shah allowed the U.S. military and CIA to build bases in the country to intimidate and gather intelligence on the U.S.S.R. Iranians loyal to the shah were employed by the CIA to pose as communist terrorists. In this role, they harassed Muslim clerics, even bombing their homes in an effort to turn the religious community against left-wing influences.
Of course, in these actions the seeds were planted for the anti-American Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979. If the coup and the terrorism against the Muslim clerics were not enough, Iranian life under the American-supported shah was characterized by poverty, government-sponsored terrorism against Iranian citizens, torture, and death squads. Thousands of Iranians who criticized the shah were killed under the justification of containing communist influences in the country. The official agency of state terror was called SAVAK—the shah’s not-so-secret secret police. Created by the Americans to protect the shah and trained by the CIA in effective torture techniques, SAVAK helped produce what Amnesty International labeled the worst human rights record in the world during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. So brutal was the force that in addition to their covert murders and tortures, they openly fired on thousands of protesting fundamentalist women, killing and wounding hundreds. No one should have been surprised when the fundamentalist revolution broke out in 1979 with the United States positioned as the target of its anger.
One feature of this tragedy that is so important for scholars of knowledge production and education involves the complicity of the American press in these activities. Reporters for U.S. wire services, newspapers, and news magazines were unquestioning participants in the CIA and other government agencies’ attempts to circulate “disinformation” and perpetrate cover-ups that would facilitate the coup and the subsequent support of the shah’s despotic monarchy. Reporters wrote stories about nonexistent communist plots in Iran. Critics of the shah were duplicitously labeled communist operatives. Newspapers such as The New York Times issued editorial warnings to other “underdeveloped countries” of the dangers faced by “fanatical leaders” similar to the “crazed” Mossadegh, if they attempted to withhold their natural resources from the United States. The shah was never criticized and was consistently referred to as a benevolent leader, a progressive reformer with great concern for his people, and a stylish politico who traveled gracefully with his beautiful wife in avant-garde international circles. Despite the overwhelming evidence of the brutality of his regime, the American press squashed stories reported in the Islamic world and beyond.
Having endured 26 years of American-financed horror, the Iranian people literally exploded in revolution at the end of the 1970s. Venting their anti-American feelings, crowds stormed the American embassy in Teheran, capturing 52 Americans. Holding them hostage for 444 days, the revolutionaries used the hostages to gain a forum for their grievances against the “Great Satan.” Even then, the mainstream American press and TV news operations suppressed the story. In the quarter century since the Iranian revolution, Islamic militants from a variety of Muslim nations and organizations have pointed to the American story in Iran as just one of many examples of American terrorism directed at Muslim people. The stories of American arrogance, they tell us, are seemingly endless, as each Muslim nation has its own horror story. But even after September 11 and the questions it has raised in the consciousness of the American public, these stories are not widely known. Indeed, efforts to broadcast them are often being punished on college campuses and other public venues. And Americans still do not know what generated all the anger.
Joe L. Kincheloe is a professor of urban education at the City University of New York Graduate Center and Brooklyn College.