20th Annaversary of the fairytale of Big Lies

[Peter Lemkin]

[/url]
Street protests in Tehran in August 1953, promoted by the CIA, that preceded the coup ousting Mohammad Mossadegh. [Source: [url=https://www.npr.org/2019/01/31/690363402/how-the-cia-overthrew-irans-democracy-in-four-days]npr.org]
Led by the U.S. and aided by various Islamists in the decades after World War II, the West largely succeeded in undermining nationalist governments in the Middle East—Iran and Egypt most notably.
Fundamentalist Islam, Petrodollars, and the Evolution of the Deep State
Throughout the 1970s, the U.S. deepened its relationship with fundamentalist Islam. In 1972, the CIA-founded Asia Foundation began to fund Afghan Islamists at Kabul University, including a young Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. [24]
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in the 1980s. [Source: pri.org]
Interestingly, 1972 was also the year that the Center for Afghanistan Studies was founded at the University of Nebraska Omaha (UNO). Its website boasts that the Center’s “initial partnership with Kabul University would give UNO the experience necessary to establish many other collaborations around the world. At the time [of its founding], Afghanistan was a peaceful country. . . . [T]here was no war and the future looked bright. No one could foresee the history-making events that Afghans and Nebraskans would share.“[25]
Faculty at Center for Afghanistan Studies, University of Nebraska Omaha. [Source: unomaha.edu]
The Center helped shape that future, in part by creating textbooks for Afghan children. Beginning in the mid-1980s, the CIA cut-out USAID paid the Center $51 million to produce the books in Afghan languages. As described by historian Peter Kuznick,

Page after page was filled with militant Islamic teaching and violent images. Children learned to count using pictures of missiles, tanks, land mines, Kalashnikovs, and dead Soviet soldiers. [One passage] shows a soldier adorned with a bandolier and a Kalashnikov. Above him is a verse from the Koran. Below is a statement about the mujahideen, who, in obedience to Allah, willingly sacrifice their lives and fortunes to impose Sharia law on the government. Students learned to read by studying stories about jihad. When the Taliban seized Kabul in 1996, they continued using the same violent jihadist texts, simply removing the human images, which they considered blasphemous.[26]

Math problems for Afghan kids in USAID textbooks promoting jihad. [Source: supportdanielboyd.wordpress.com]
But let us return to the obscure early 1970’s. In 1973, Sardar Daoud overthrew the Afghan monarchy. Soon after, the U.S. began funding opposition figures in the country, including the radical Islamic Party. Beginning in September, the CIA, regional allies (Iran and Pakistan), and Islamist Afghan groups staged a series of raids and failed coups against Daoud. Subsequently, the U.S. State Department identified Muslim Brotherhood members as leaders of a failed rebellion in Afghanistan against Daoud. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of the Brotherhood members, fled to Pakistan where he was received by the ISI (Pakistani intelligence). In 1978 and 1979, U.S. state department memos acknowledged that the Muslim Brotherhood were beneficiaries of U.S. anti-communist ventures in Afghanistan.[27]
Sardar Daoud [Source: khaama.com]

Around this time, Zbigniew Brzezinski began pressing his “arc of crisis” strategy, asserting that the U.S. could dominate the Middle East by using political Islamism against leftist and nationalist movements.[28]

Visiting a Pakistani Army outpost in 1980, Brzezinski used the sights of a machine gun to look across the Afghan border. [Source: nytimes.com]
This led to President Carter’s fateful July 3, 1979, decision to authorize direct CIA funding of the Afghan mujahideen. As a result, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December.[29]

Meanwhile, economic and political events were bringing about major changes to the international monetary system and the American deep state.
When Vietnam War spending led to the end of the Bretton Woods gold-backed dollar, the U.S. was rescued from a difficult financial situation in large part by the “oil shocks”—unprecedented skyrocketing oil prices. The oil shocks were in all likelihood orchestrated by the U.S.
As Yanis Varoufakis summarizes:

[The notion] that the OPEC countries pushed the dollar price of oil sky high against the will of the United States … runs counter to logic and evidence. [How else to explain that America’s] closest allies, the Shah of Iran, President Suharto of Indonesia and the Venezuelan government, not only backed the increases but led the campaign to bring them about? [How do we explain the U.S.] scuttling of the Tehran negotiations between the oil companies and OPEC just before an agreement was reached that would have depressed prices? … Indeed, the Saudis have consistently claimed that Henry Kissinger, keener to manage the flow of petrodollars to America than to prevent the rise of energy prices, was encouraging them all the way to push the price of oil up by a factor of between two and four. So long as oil sales were denominated in dollars, the U.S. administration had no quarrel with the oil price increases.[30]

Richard Nixon with Henry Kissinger. [Source: forward.com]