Mark Dankof's America

Dilip Hiro ("The Iranian Labyrinth" and "Blood of the Earth"), joins Mark Dankof's America Tuesday, June 26,2007, on the Republic Broadcasting Network.  Listen live from 7-10 am Central time in the United States via Internet hookup through the Republic Broadcasting Network web site, or after the fact through the online archives of the Network, based outside Austin, Texas.  Access the Republic Broadcasting Network by clicking here.

Tom Englehardt's TomDispatch.com has Dilip Hiro's latest article on the subject to be covered with Mark Dankof by Mr. Hiro tomorrow.   See "Nuclear Weapons Programs Are About Regime Survival:  The Iranian Bomb in a MAD World" by clicking here.

The Alliance of Giuliani and the “Christian” Right:  Has the War on Terror Merged With War on the Unborn?  

by Mark Dankof for the American Free Press  

My good friend, Dr. Paul Gottfried of Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, goes a long way toward explaining the real agenda of the American “Christian” Right in his latest effort for The American Conservative, entitled The Giuliani-Driven Christians. 

Dr. Gottfried notes that Quinnipiac polls indicate Giuliani’s present status as the most popular Presidential candidate among Protestant evangelicals, and that Hizzoner’s present lead in the polls in key swing states, especially Florida, is directly attributable to “white Evangelical voters.” The Washington Post has chimed in, reporting in February that Giuliani is “surging among white Evangelicals.” 

The implications of this burgeoning phenomenon are as striking as they are demonically draconian.  Hizzoner, after all, is a leading advocate of abortion-on-demand, even as he chides Islamic societies in Fox News-sponsored Presidential debates for attitudes and policies allegedly detrimental to the rights and dignity of women.  And aside from the Big Apple Mayor’s publicized liabilities in personal life and conduct, it seems incredible to the point of the outrageously satirical to contemplate Giuliani’s adulation by the likes of Religious Right mogul Cal Thomas, given Hizzoner’s strident support of the militant homosexual rights constituency.  That support, symbolically expressed by Rudy’s past personal appearance in Costume Drag in New York for a Gay Pride parade, suggests that all things are now possible in the increasingly comfortable alliance of the “Christian” Right with the globalist, Rockefeller wing of the Republican Party.  What is next, a Giuliani campaign appearance at a National Prayer Breakfast in Babylon-By-The-Potomac with Pat Robertson, John Hagee, Billy Graham, Al Goldstein, and Barney Frank? 

In the case of abortion, Republican hypocrisy is nothing new.  

It was, after all, Dutch Reagan who appointed pro-choice Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court after making the pro-life position a staple of the Republican campaign diet in 1980.  It was George Herbert Walker Bush who brought David Souter into America’s judicial mix during the former’s one term of office.  And neither Republican Chief Executive, nor a series of Republican Congresses after 1994, ended Federal tax subsidies for Planned Parenthood and the American abortion industry. 

And what has escaped public notice and media scrutiny in more recent times is the hard reality that the April 18^th, 2007 Supreme Court decision in Gonzales versus Carhart, which upheld the Congressional ban on “partial-birth abortion,” will not in and of itself prevent one late-term, partial birth abortion.  As explained by Paul Likoudis in the April 26^th edition of The Wanderer, the decision actually upholds the infamous 1973 Roe versus Wade decision, as did the bill itself passed by Congress.  Gonzales only says that the federal government and the states may pass legislation declaring restrictions on this particular technique; that such restrictions are not unconstitutional.  Likoudis goes on to explain that according to Justice Anthony Kennedy, abortions of late-term babies can continue up to the moment of birth, even utilizing the partial-birth abortion technique, as long as the child is killed in utero.  The [Congressional] Act’s definition of partial-birth abortion requires the fetus “to be delivered, until, in the case of a head-first presentation, the entire fetal head is outside the body of the mother, or, in the case of breech presentation, any part of the fetal trunk past the naval is outside the body of the mother.  The Attorney General [Gonzales] concedes, and we agree, that if an abortion procedure does not involve the delivery of a living fetus to one of these anatomical ‘landmarks’ where, depending on the presentation, either the fetal head of the fetal trunk past the naval is outside the body of the mother, the prohibitions of the Act do not apply.” 

Put another way, fetal poisoning and dismemberment are fine, as long as they take place within the confines of the womb itself. 

Placed in this judicial and cultural context, the “Christian” Republican Right has achieved virtually nothing in the wake of 34 years of post-Roe political activism.  The much vaunted Cultural War may in fact, be over.  The Left has won.  A post-Christian America is now the order of the day. 

And if this is the final verdict of history, it should not escape attention that a Rudy Giuliani Presidential candidacy, the geometric location for the latest intersection of the alliance of the American “Christian” Right with the much heralded Jewish and Israeli lobby in the United States, epitomizes the victory of the latter in America’s cultural wars if the issue of the sanctity of unborn life in the land is the definitive yardstick for measuring the conflict’s ultimate outcome.  Alexandria J. Wall, staff writer for J, The Jewish News Weekly of Northern California, and Matthew E. Berger of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, chronicle mainstream American Jewish support for the pro-choice position in an April 30, 2004 article for J entitled “Locals Join Thousands At D. C. Pro-Choice Rally.”  Major representatives of key Jewish activist organizations were front and center at the event:  Hadassah, The National Council of Jewish Women, and representatives of Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist Judaism stood proudly in the glare of media coverage.  This 2004 rally stands as a microcosm of the larger truth before and since that time:  Jewish media, political, logistical, and financial support for the abortion industry is the lifeblood of the movement of mass death for the pre-born.  No serious research on the subject can deny the patently obvious.  This is truly a Holocaust most of American Jewry can truly unite behind. 

So how do “evangelical” Protestants justify a larger political alliance with Giuliani, the Jewish power elite, and the system of the Beast Hizzoner clearly represents?  Dr. Gottfried unveils the tale of the tape:   

“But it must be stressed that the issue that has come to trump all other evangelical concerns is fighting the war on terror [reviewer’s emphasis]. Cal Thomas has extolled his fellow evangelicals to recognize the big picture: ‘Character is seen as less important than who can face the multiple challenges facing the nation’—specifically, the struggle against international terror. From the evangelical perspective, this confrontation with terror is so intertwined with other issues that it serves as a kind of shorthand. Israel, Zionism, and the glorification of American democracy as a world model are all at least implicit in the evangelical conception of the struggle against terror [reviewer’s emphasis]—one that Giuliani is imagined to be able to lead better than any other presidential contender. During a visit to New York by a Saudi Arabian prince soon after 9/11, Giuliani took the occasion to speak out against the visitor’s attempt to link the lack of goodwill for the U.S. among Arabs to American indifference to the Palestinian cause. His tirade was directed against those who suggest ‘moral equivalency between liberal democracies, like Israel and the United States’ and their current enemies. This broadside has continued to come up on evangelical websites pushing Giuliani’s candidacy.

“Another related factor here, which the New York Times underscored in an April 30 feature story, is that evangelicals have moved away from divisive issues like abortion to stress an apparently less controversial ‘human rights’ agenda. The movement’s leaders have worked overtime to sway the White House to pursue democratization worldwide, and publications like Christian Century have moved away from the Moral Majority kind of politics characteristic of evangelicals in the past to affirming the need for exporting American political practices [reviewer’s emphasis]. Significantly, the ‘Letter of Support for Democracy’ that was sent to President Bush on Feb. 25, 2003, calling for regime change in Iraq, was signed by World Evangelical Alliance dignitaries as well as prominent neoconservatives. This exhortation was fully consistent with the stated political views of the National Alliance of Evangelicals and the World Alliance of Evangelicals [reviewer’s emphasis]. Despite the erosion of support among evangelicals for the Iraq War from its onetime high of almost 80 percent, it is, according to polls, still well over 50 percent.”

Is this really the state of institutional evangelicalism in America?  If the burgeoning evangelical Protestant support for the Presidential candidacy of Rudolph Giuliani reported by Quinnipiac and the Washington Post is factual, the derivative implications are beyond calculation.  One can only conclude that the “Christian” Right has become a driving force in what real Christianity and Constitutionally minded Americans have correctly concluded is clinically evil.  This overt evidence of the demonic in history has manifested itself in the United States with an incessant vengeance.  It includes the drive toward globalization and World Government, the destruction of the manufacturing sector of the American economy, the elimination of the working middle class, an un-Constitutional war in Iraq that has killed 650,000 civilians (on top of 500,000 deaths of Iraqi children under age 5 through economic sanctions), the militant pursuit of cultural degeneracy embodied in the deaths of 45 million pre-born since 1973, the placing of an imprimatur on George Bush’s suspension of habeas corpus, and the support of Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian land and genocidal methodologies directed at its voiceless victims. 

This is the antithesis of the New Testament proclamations of Jesus Christ.  The “Christian” Right has perverted the meaning of God’s covenants, confused the Kingdom of God with the secular realms of Domitian and Bush, advocated the utilization of violence against the defenseless, sided with spiritual wickedness in high places vis a vis the dispossessed and the disenfranchised, lobbied for a preemptive nuclear strike against thousands of innocent Iranian civilians, and falsely defined the modern Zionist State of Israel as the Israel of God. 

The result is an evil synthesis of the War on Terror with the War on the Unborn and the Constitution of the United States. 

The antidote for this cancerous brew is the uniting in common cause against the system of the Beast, held in place by multinational corporations, Zionism, and the organized international Jewish lobby.  The victims of the Beast, including the Palestinians, the American working middle class, and the unborn, are natural allies.  They must seek their solutions in divinely inspired guidance and intercessory prayer, accompanied by a willingness to sacrifice their own lives for the vulnerable and powerless in their respective lands and communities.

And Biblically oriented Christians, who possess the Holy Spirit of God, must jettison 501 C (3) Christianity, the false prophets of the American Religious Right, and their veiled financial supporters in central banking and on Wall Street who bring the world ever closer to apocalyptic disaster.

And for first measures?  Dump Giuliani, along with Bush, McCain, Romney, Clinton, Obama, Edwards, and the other spokespersons for the Beast at The Weekly Standard and Fox News.  Give Cal Thomas and John Hagee the permanent boot as well.             

And a second notion comes to mind:  It is now time for another Barmen Declaration.

Mark Dankof is a guest contributor to the American Free Press, and the past Constitution Party candidate for the United States Senate in Delaware (2000). A Lutheran pastor in San Antonio, he is the host of Mark Dankof's America heard live on the Republic Broadcasting Network, Monday through Friday, 7-10 am Central. In addition to writing for the paleo-conservative BATR News on the World Wide Web, his columns are posted at http://www.MarkDankof.com and the Al Bawaba/Middle East Gateway site in Amman, Jordan at http://blogs.albawaba.com/kramfoknad

Giuliani, Ron Paul, and Operation Ajax:  Or Is It Operation Blowback? 

Book Review:  The CIA in Iran:  The 1953 Coup and the Origins of the U. S.-Iran Divide

Edited by Christopher J. Petherick

American Free Press Books

ISBN:  0-9785733-2-3153 pages, $20 

by Mark Dankof for the American Free Press  

Rudy Giuliani’s now infamous exchange with Ron Paul in the Fox-sponsored Republican Presidential debate revealed the former’s inadvertent—or willful—ignorance of the obvious connection between American foreign policy and insidious “blowback,” both in the Middle East and elsewhere. 

My recent radio guest on the Republic Broadcasting Network, Dr. Jerome Corsi of both Human Events and WorldNetDaily, displayed a similar discomfort with acknowledging the connection between actions of the United States Government around the world, and predictable acts of retaliation and retribution on the part of past recipients of these American military and covert intelligence operations.  Dr. Corsi rightly pointed out that the latter phenomenon is not justified by the former.  But neither did Ron Paul indicate such, either in the Fox Presidential debates or in any other forum in which the Texas Congressman has participated over the course of many years. 

Giuliani and Corsi may well profit by perusing the Chalmers Johnson trilogy on the American Empire, the three volumes known respectively as The Sorrows of Empire, Blowback, and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic.  And as for the specifics of the unfolding tragedy in the Middle East, surely the fury of the insurgency against American occupation in Iraq must of necessity be inextricably linked to at least two (2) obvious phenomena:  the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children under the age of five as a result of the economic sanctions against Saddam’s regime in the last 15 years, and the civilian casualties inflicted on that nation since the American military attack of March of 2003.  According to the British Lancet medical journal, those numbers have reached 650,000.  MIT and Johns Hopkins University researchers concur with this apocalyptic estimate.  So did Chalmers Johnson when I posited the question to him on Mark Dankof’s America.  What say Giuliani and Corsi about these latest manifestations of the foreign policy of the United States? 

And then there is Iran.  It is not an accident that Ron Paul pointed to the 1953 coup directed against the Mossadeq regime in Iran by the American CIA and the British MI6 in his televised exchange with Giuliani, as proof positive evidence of a clear connection between cause and effect in the link between American interventionism abroad and subsequent blowback of the most virulent strain.  The plot would be forever known as Operation Ajax. 

When it comes to providing the ironclad documentation of the specifics of Ajax and its implementation, there is no book available that surpasses the excellence of the American Free Press’s The CIA in Iran: The 1953 Coup and the Origins of the U. S.-Iran Divide.  Read in tandem with Stephen Kinzer’s All the Shah’s Men:  An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror (John Wiley and Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey, 2003, 258 pp.), the AFP’s offering underscores the tragedy that has enshrouded American-Iranian relations in the half century since the launching of Ajax by Kermit Roosevelt, the head of the CIA’s Near Eastern Division, at the behest of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and CIA Director Allen Dulles.   

The CIA in Iran: The 1953 Coup and the Origins of the U. S.-Iran Divide, is essentially the publishing of a once-secret planning document of the Central Intelligence Agency, penned by Dr. Donald N. Wilber, one of the principal organizers of Operation Ajax.  Originally published by Clandestine Service as Historical Paper Number 208 (October 1969) with the title Overthrow of Premier Mossadeq of Iran:  November 1952-August 1953, it provides the reader with irrefutable evidence of the dark methodologies implemented by the London-Washington alliance that led to the demise of a democratically elected government in Tehran.  The reverberations have echoed in the chambers of world history ever since. 

The motives of the members of the alliance are clear.  In the case of Britain, her imperial designs and activities in Iran must be seen against the backdrop of the D’Arcy oil concession, the creation of the Anglo-Persian [Iranian] Oil Company, and the infamous 1919 Anglo-Persian Agreement which effectively reduced Iran to the status of a British protectorate.  The rise of nationalist Mossadeq in the context of the anti-colonialist movement of the developing world after World War II, had to be undermined by London to maintain British petroleum hegemony in Khuzestan Province.  In the case of the United States, the desire to check Soviet designs in Persia, already expressed in the confrontation between Truman and Stalin over Azerbaijan, resulted in the decision to cast Mossadeq overboard--by falsely portraying the latter, not as a nationalist, but a demagogue of port-Pink hue with dangerous leanings toward Soviet Communism and the expansion of the latter’s sphere of influence in the region. 

It is precisely in the area of the massive, covert propaganda campaign against Mossadeq that the character of the CIA-MI6 operation in Iran in 1953 may be fairly evaluated.  Wilber’s manuscrept, which contains many of the planning documents generated by American and British intelligence planners at the time, demonstrates the extent to which the ill-fated Iranian Prime Minister was the victim of a well financed and executed agitation-propaganda effort aimed at generating mass hysteria and suspicion among targeted Iranian constituencies, augmented by hired provocateurs assigned to provoke and exacerbate street incidents.  This, in turn, was supplemented by the selection of General Fazollah Zahedi to take control of the military and the government in conjunction with funding provided for this expressed purpose by both Washington and London. 

The appendices in the Wilber report, repristinated in The CIA in Iran: The 1953 Coup and the Origins of the U. S.-Iran Divide, are the irrefutable proof of what happened.  A cursory look at two of its documents, entitled Initial Operation Plan for Ajax as Cabled from Nicosia To Headquarters 1 June 1953 and London Draft of the Ajax Operational Plan, cinch the deal.   

A sampling of the contents of these documents as they pertain to Mohammed Mossadeq is most revealing.  In the case of Initial Operation Plan for Ajax, the CIA decided upon two false charges against the Prime Minister as the basis for creating “popular dissatisfaction” with the Mossadeq government.  The first was the “anti-religious” tag, made to stick by associating the Prime Minister in the public mind with the Soviet Union.  The second was the phony allegation that Mossadeq was totally mismanaging the economy

. . . .  the CIA would give widest publicity to all fabricated documents [reviewer’s emphasis] proving secret agreement between Mossadeq and Tudeh [Communist Party of Iran].  . . .  Just prior to movement, CIA would give widest publicity to the evidence of illegally issued paper money.  CIA might have capability to print masses excellent imitation currency [reviewer’s emphasis, page 97].   

The London Draft is even more specific (pages 111 and 112): 

. . .  The material designed to discredit Mossadeq will hammer the following themes:  Mossadeq favors the Tudeh Party and the USSR (This will be supported by black documents.)  Mossadeq is an enemy of Islam since he associates with the Tudeh and advances their aims.  Mossadeq is deliberately destroying the morale of the Army and its ability to maintain order.  Mossadeq is deliberately fostering the growth of regional separatist movements through his removal of Army control over tribal areas.  One of the aims of the removal of control by the Army is to make it easier for the Soviets to take over the Northern Provinces.  Mossadeq is deliberately leading the country into economic collapse.  Mossadeq has been corrupted by power to such an extent that no trace is left of the fine man of earlier years, and he now has all the repressive instincts of a dictator.  Consistent with these themes will be the persistent slant that Mossadeq has been the unwitting victim of his unscrupulous, personally ambitious advisors [reviewer’s emphasis throughout]. 

And what were the results of the successful coup against Mossadeq and the restoration of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi to his Peacock Throne?  Dilip Hiro, in The Iranian Labyrinth (preface, page xli) gives the short-term verdict: 

Following the 1953 coup, the Shah, advised by Washington, retained the nationalization law but reduced the National Iranian Oil Company to a paper organization.  It leased the rights to, and management of, Iranian petroleum for the next twenty-five years to a consortium of Western oil giants.  Over the next two decades, this Western consortium exported twenty-four billion barrels of crude at the paltry price of $1.80 a barrel.  No CIA-driven coup since then has proved so lucrative to Western economies. 

In the end, though, this bonanza ended so dramatically—with the Shah’s ignominious departure from Tehran ostensibly for “holiday” in January 1979—that it had a traumatic impact on Western economies, with the oil price spiraling to $31 a barrel. 

Furthermore, from being an integral part of the Iran-Israel-Saudi Arabia triad on which Washington’s anti-Soviet strategy in the Middle East rested, the emergent Islamic Republic of Iran not only expelled the American influence from its own territory but also attacked the pro-American Gulf monarchies and inspired Muslims throughout the region to challenge the hegemony of the U. S. 

We come full circle to the Fox Republican Presidential Sweepstakes Debate once more.  Does American foreign policy in Iran represent “blowback,” Mr. Giuliani?  Is there a connection between the coup of 1953 in that country and the Islamic Republic of Iran’s revolutionary victory in 1978-1979?  Does the Republican Party—and the American Empire—really support Mr. Bush’s apparently planned utilization of tactical nuclear weapons against Ahmadinejad’s Iran (Presidential National Security Directive 35 in support of CONPLAN 8022), as the United States employs preemptive military force as the surrogate--not of British Petroleum as in 1953--but as the janissary force of Zionist Israel in the Middle East? 

Buy, read, and contemplate The CIA in Iran:  The 1953 Coup and the Origins of the U. S.-Iran Divide.  Give it to your family members and friends.  Demand answers to the questions it begs.  Your life—and those of your loved ones—may well hang in the balance.

Mark Dankof is a guest contributor to the American Free Press, and the past Constitution Party candidate for the United States Senate in Delaware (2000). A Lutheran pastor in San Antonio, he is the host of Mark Dankof's America heard live on the Republic Broadcasting Network, Monday through Friday, 7-10 am Central. In addition to writing for the paleo-conservative BATR News on the World Wide Web, his columns are posted at http://www.MarkDankof.com and the Al Bawaba/Middle East Gateway site in Amman, Jordan at http://blogs.albawaba.com/kramfoknad. 

In the 1970s, Pastor Dankof’s father served as a director of logistics for the Shah of Iran’s Imperial Iranian Air Force.  His 1976 diary from Tehran is located at his web site under the title, “A Summer of a Thousand Nights:  From Tehran to Susa."

Dr. Kaveh Farrokh, author of the new "Shadows in the Desert: Ancient Persia at War," will be on Mark Dankof's America on the Republic Broadcasting Network tomorrow (Wednesday, May 30th). It is the definitive work in its field, and is replete with wonderful maps and pictures. Dr. Farrokh's appearance covers the last two hours of the broadcast, which will be archived at the Republic Broadcasting Network site for later listeners.

For Biblical students, "Shadows in the Desert" has a tremendous section on the Persia of the 6th century B. C. and the ancient Achaemenid Empire period so important to the Old Testament, including Isaiah, Daniel, Esther, Ezra, and Nehemiah. Farrokh's research subsequently covers the Parthian and Sassanian Empires, the Islamic conquest of Iran and its aftermath.

BATR Review of "Shadows in the Desert: Ancient Persia at War" available by clicking here.

Osprey Publishing's biography of Kaveh Farrokh available by clicking here.

Republic Broadcasting Network's site available by clicking here.