Understanding history is a key to avoid repeating past mistakes, but this should not be confused with trying to pass on the blame for a current crisis for the sake of political expediency. The most obvious example today is the expanding chaos of Iraq and Syria and the international terror spawned by ISIS and others based in the region. Shouting over and over that “W Bush started it in 2003!” is entirely irrelevant to solving the existing crisis. (And I criticized W Bush quite a bit when he was president, it’s on the record.) You can’t put the pieces back where they were before 2003. There are lessons to be learned from it, yes, but those lessons are not how to deal with the regional civil wars, floods of refugees and global terrorist movement of 2016. Obama is the president now, not W Bush. Obama has 300 more days in office. If we look back, let’s look for useful lessons to apply today, not for blame game or a time machine.
Another historical item that has stirred interest in the comments and conversations below goes much further back. If you want to distract us from the brutal Iranian dictatorship and its sponsorship of terrorism, doing so by bringing up US intervention in 1953 is an unlikely method! I’m not defending that UK-US coup, but if you want to bring up US interference in Iran in that way, why not go back to 1946 when Harry Truman stood up for Iran vs Josef Stalin, who was trying to use post-WWII Soviet troops and Azerbaijani proxies to take Iranian oil fields. Had Truman not risked war with the USSR to protect Iran (a war that Stalin didn’t want, but Truman had no way to know that), Iran would have eventually received the typical Stalinist “cleansing” experience.
Lastly, comments from Iranians, mostly those abroad, of course, that they support Iranian “moderates” and “reformers” are giving me memories of the USSR. There was always talk about this faction in the Party or that group in the Politburo, liberals or reformers or whatever, but they all served the same system. All dictatorships work similarly, and don’t believe that change will be anything but superficial distraction until the regime starts to collapse. As long as the same person or people are really in charge, shuffling the names and faces on the ballots and in the news is all for show. Don’t fall for it.
