Francisco Gil-White Talks to Rabbi Tovia Singer

About Iranian-American relations, among other things, on Arutz Sheva-Israel National Radio:

Immediately after the Ayatollah [Khomeini] came to power, one of the first things he did was to absorb SAVAK. Now SAVAK was the late Shah’s security service. It was a mammoth security service -- the biggest in the world after the Soviet Union’s. Now, that’s saying a lot because the Soviet Union was an enormous totalitarian state, and Iran was this tiny little fifth rate power. So to say that SAVAK was the second biggest security service in the world gives you a taste for just how repressive the Shah of Iran -- the great US ally -- was. And SAVAK was created by the CIA. And it was essentially run by the CIA -- SAVAK had very close ties to the CIA throughout the Shah’s reign. And Iran behaved as a feudal property of the US throughout the Shah’s reign. So the fact that the Ayatollah Khomeini, who had been complaining about SAVAK when he was in the opposition, and railing against SAVAK, and promising to disband it and so on and so forth... Well, when he took power he absorbed it wholesale. SAVAK became SAVAMA, the new Iranian security service. That’s point one.

Point two is that the Ayatollah Khomeini, immediately after consolidating his power, provoked a war with Iraq. Now, the Ayatollah Khomeini could not afford to provoke a war with Iraq unless he knew that the US was gonna provide him with weapons. Why? Because the Iranian Revolution depleted the Iranian arsenal -- so he was without guns, in other words. And the Iranian arsenal was entirely, or almost entirely US-made. So unless the Ayatollah Khomeini knew in advance that, if he went to war with Iraq, then the US would provide him with weapons and spare parts, he couldn’t afford to provoke a war with Iraq. And yet that is immediately what he did!

Well, what happened? The US sent billions of dollars in US armament every year of the Iran-Iraq War to Iran. When this was discovered, in the mid 80’s, it was called the Iran-gate scandal, or the Iran-Contra scandal -- and despite the scandal, the arms shipments went on! Now, when caught red-handed, the Reagan administration said the reason for those arms shipments was that -- this is so funny -- that the reason for the arms shipments was that Hezbollah, a tiny terrorist group in Lebanon, a third country, had taken a handful of American citizens hostage, and because the Iranians had some influence on Hezbollah, they wanted the Iranians to beg the Hezbollah to release that handful of US citizens. And that was the supposed reason that billions of US dollars in armaments went to the Iranians every year for the duration of the Iran-Iraq War. Now, this absurd explanation could not be true even in principle because the arms shipments to Iran -- as we now know, thanks to a congressional investigation that was done years later -- that the arms shipments began in 1981. The first hostage in Lebanon was taken in 1982. So obviously the policy of sending billions of dollars in armament to Iran every year couldn’t have anything to do with those hostages. And in fact the arms shipments continued after the last hostage was released.

In addition to this there’s also the fact that the Iran-Iraq war, towards the end, went badly for Iran. So Iran asked for a cease-fire in 1988. Now, immediately after that cease fire, Zalmay Khalilzad, a protégé of Zbigniew Brzezinski who was Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor and the man who invented the policy of creating Islamist terrorism in Afghanistan by sponsoring the mujahideen (whom Osama bin-Laden, by the way, was training for the CIA)... This Zalmay Khalizad, a direct ideological descendant of Zbigniew Brzezinski, complained out loud (I believe it was in the Washington Post... I forget which newspaper now...) but he complained out loud that the outcome of the Iran-Iraq War was very bad because Iran was very weak, and that the US should have a policy to strengthen Iran and contain Iraq. What happened immediately afterwards? The Gulf War of 1991 that destroyed Iraq and left Iran as the big regional power. This war was launched while Zalmay Khalilzad was a policy planner at the Pentagon. Now Zalmay Khalizad, obviously, is the viceroy of the United States in Iraq. He has been responsible for crafting US policy in that area ever since.

In addition... The last point I would mention is -- as Jared Israel of Emperor’s Clothes has documented -- that the Iranians helped the US in the latest US invasion of Iraq. So, ...

Oh, and I forgot one point. During the civil wars in Yugoslavia, the Pentagon teamed up with the Iranians -- this is also documented on Emperor’s Clothes -- to send tens of thousands of mujahideen soldiers (these are the same soldiers that Brzezinski had created staring in 1979, and then throughout the 80’s)... to send tens of thousands of mujahideen to Bosnia to fight for Alija Izetbegovic, and to go on killing rampages against Serbs. That importation of mujahideen soldiers was coordinated between the Iranian government and the Pentagon.

So, if you look at the entire history of US-Iranian relations, yes, on the surface they exchange lots of insults, but the facts of US foreign policy do not reveal an anti-Iranian policy. On the contrary. And in fact, I have an article on www.hirhome.com where I predict that the US will not attack Iran, as a lot of people think it will. And I explain why: I give the whole history of the US/Iran relationship to support my case.