Dear Mr. Shishir

Submitted by Debanjan Banerjee (India), Jan 16, 2012 at 00:12

Greetings Mr. Shishir.

Shishir: Mossadegh (he was an Iranian Soviet sympathizer,jeez man do your research)

Debanjan: I have done some research on Mossadegh and request you to read Steven Pinker's two books i.e. "Downfall" and "All the Shah's men" to understand the personality of Mossadegh. Mossadegh's only fault was that he wanted his poor people to get a fair share of revenue from Iranian oil , the same revenues which were stolen from them by the thugs from the Anglo-Iranian oil company (now known to posterity as British Petroleum).

On the question of whether Mossadegh was a Soviet Sympathizer I would like to give few examples to prove you are not only wrong but laughable.

1. When the British had embargoed the Iranians after the nationalization of their oil industry so that they were not able to sell Iranian oil to the World , thereby financially choking Iran (much of what the US is seemingly doing now) , what Mossadegh needed to do was just make a phone call to Comrade Stalin across the border telling him that he and the Muslim people in Iran needs Soviet protection and Soviet ships would be queuing up in the port areas around Abadan to purchase Iranian oil. The KGB would be busy rounding up the Western sympathizers who were trying to overthrow the Mossadegh regime and hanging them. In that way Mossadegh could easily have prevented his downfall. But you know what , he did nothing as he was a proud Iranian Muslim to lease the sovereignity of his proud Islamic nation to that of an Atheist Soviet Union.

2. Whenever Mossadegh wanted to stress upon something in the Iranain parliament , he would take out a copy of Quran from his pocket and swore upon it. Hardly the behavior of a Soviet sympathizer in the 1950-s right ?

3. In Mossadegh's tomb at the Ahmadabad village near Tehran , the inscription , a silk-screen print carries a quote from one of his speeches:"As I am an Iranian and a Muslim, I oppose anything that is against
Iran or Islam." Hardly characterisitics of a Soviet sympathizer , right ?

On the question of Mossadegh , I request you to again read the books I have prescribed and come back to me with your answers. Hopefully you will realize your mistakes.

Shishir : "What does wealth have to with creating a nation state?"

Debanjan : I request you to read Niall Ferguson's empire to understand what wealth means to the formation of empires or nation states. Have you not been following up the latest pollitical round-ups from UK or Italy ? Do you not know that Lega Norda in Italy and the SNP in Scotland want secession ? Now centuries after the creation of these imperial nation states why they are crubling apart ? The reason lies in the faliure of leaderships of these states to provide the one glue that stuck them together which was the economic prosperity thanks to their empires. Language-based nationalism did bring about the nation states in the West but empires with plenty of economic prosperity also helped to bring disparate peoples in the British Isles or elsewhere in Europe to come together under the guise of "nation-state". Without that glue , it is no wonder that these states are falling.

Same is true for the Arab world. The Arab seculars never managed to provide sufficient economic upliftment to the masses as a result their states are crumbling.

Regarding the creation of nation states in the Muslim World is concerned , the region of West Asia has not and will never be fertile soils for nation-states based upon ethnic and linguistic sameness. Think about this. During the rule of the Ottoman empire , Greeks , Armaneians , Maronites , Jews , Sunnis , Shites , Druzes , Alawites all lived togther as long as no one single nationality wanted to impsoe itself over the rest. In an area like the West Asia where disparat communities have been living together for centuries , if certainly one of them tries to impose its will and values over the rest (exactly as the ideologies like the Greek and Armaneian nationalisms , then in reply to these the Turkish nationalism and Kemalism , then the Zionism and Bathism , and then Kurdish nationalism and then Maronite nationalisms and Palestinian nationalisms all flared up , did), then surely a lot of conflicts will emerge as we can see in the region after the fall of the Ottoman empire.

We certainly do not need Western-style nationalist movements in the region be they secular or liberal. What the region desparately needs is an ideology which appeals beyond the identities of clan , tribe , language and family. For example , the four states in the Levant i,.e, Israel , Syria , Lebanon and Jordan (as well as the Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza) , to my mind are created from the Western-backed ideologies and henceforth none of them can be stable or prosperous in the long run. What we need today is a federation which dissolves these artificially manufactured nation states and brings the peoples from all these nations together under a singular identity i.e. children of Abraham.

I would like to call that state as "Abrahamia" where all the different peoples from different faiths i.e. Jews , Muslims , Christians can live and work together.

What do you think about that ?

Shishir : "America certainly didnt encourage Iraq to invade Iran."

Debanjan: You really need to brush up your history skills. I suggest reading Robert Fisk's magnum opus , "Conquest of the Middle East" to understand your follies. Buy that book and read the chapters regarding the prelude to the Iraq-Iran war. Was visits by Pentagone officials (including Donald Rumsfeld) to Saddam Hussain were not encouragements enough ? Was the Western supply of plenty of nerve and sarin gasses to the Iraqi tyrant which ultimately ended up killing a lot of innocent Kurds in Hallabja , were not encouragement enough ? Was providing Saddam with GPS info. about the positioning of Iranian troops in the ground , was not good enough encouragement ? Please tell me what considers as good enough encouragement then ?

Shishir : "The West had just tried to make lemonade out of lemons."

Debanjan : Ok so why the West is not opening the bank vaults of the toppled Arab tyrants where trillions of dollars are stashed which constitue the ill-gotten wealth that these tyrants amassed by robbing their own peoples.

You know what ? The West will gain a lot of sympathies from the people in the Muslim World , if it returns the ill-gotten money to the poor masses of these countries , the same money which these tyrants had amassed by stealing from their poor masses.

As long as the West does not do what I mention above , it would be considerd in the Muslim World as propping up these corrupt and tyrnannical regimes. Period.

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