US learning nothing from past mistakes: Analyst
Press TV has conducted an interview with Kevin Barrett, editor of Veterans Today, to discuss the remarks made by Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, saying Iran will continue to distance itself from the United States.
Here is a rough transcription of the interview:
Press TV: What do you make of this warning, so to speak, being issued by the Leader of Iran’s Islamic Revolution to maintain this distance between Iranian officials as well as those of the US?
Barrett: I think it is absolutely justified and appropriate. The US is indeed an arrogant power and the history of US relations with Iran demonstrates that. The overthrow of prime minister Mosaddeq in 1953 was an act of extreme arrogance. It was one of the early CIA coups that set the stage for the dozens of regime changes and overthrows of legitimate governments that have followed and of course that is what also set the stage for the 1979 Islamic Revolution which led to Iran becoming an independent country, a fully independent country with a certain animosity towards the United States for very, very good reasons.
And rather than learn from their mistakes, the American side has persisted in its arrogance continuing to try to destroy the Islamic Revolution in Iran and continuing to overthrow governments around the world. It seems that it learned absolutely nothing from the blowback it suffered in 1979 after it overthrew prime minister Mosaddeq. So clearly if anybody in the world is in a good position to see the persistent folly of American arrogance, it is the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Press TV: So this obviously stems from this historic distrust of the US when it comes to its dealings with Iran as you just pointed, but also that even at a time when we are at the post-JCPOA era, it does not necessarily mean normalization of ties?
Barrett: Well that is right because the problem is that the US is still ruled by people who view normalization as a normal state of American imperial hegemony. A uni-polar world. For them normal does not mean equals, even being the first among equals and many parts of the world would settle for the United States being of course among equals. But unfortunately we still have this ideology of American exceptionalism that infects the minds of the leadership here in the United States.
These people really believe that for some reason America is the necessary nation and that to them means that the United States has to maintain 100,000 military bases all over the world, occupying all these countries and even a presidential candidate like Trump who is in hot water with the neoconservatives and the hardliners because he is a little bit skeptical about NATO and about American imperial occupation of the globe. Even he arrogantly says that his solution is to make the occupied countries pay for their occupations.
So it seems that this imperial hubris and arrogance is pretty much a fixed non-negotiable quality here in the United States. But before I leave off, I have to say that with regards to the US Middle East policy, we have to note that the leader of the arrogant countries may not be the United States anymore. It may be the state of Israel which has been occupying the United States since it overthrew American policy and instituted Israeli policy on September 11, 2001.
