Frankendesign

"Americans are asking, 'Why do they hate us?'" President Bush stated in his nationally televised call to war. His answer was that "they hate our freedoms; our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other."

I’ve covered the Middle East for more than 20 years—traveling to Iran, Palestine, and Iraq to investigate, first-hand, the impact that U.S. actions have had on the people in the region. I came away with a totally different understanding than this myth of "freedoms" told by George Bush.

Most people I met, and this included people from many different political trends, didn’t hate "us"—they made a distinction between the U.S. government and people living in the U.S. But they did not view the United States as a place of “freedom.” To them, the United States was an arrogant, cold-blooded, and hegemonic power—which has wreaked havoc with lives of the people in this region.
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One of the most notorious actions by the U.S. government in the Middle East took place in Iran in 1953, when the CIA organized the coup that overthrew the Mossadeq government after Mossadeq nationalized British holdings in the huge oilfields of Iran. With Mossadeq out of the way, the U.S. put the Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, on the throne, and backed his regime as a gendarme in the region and a military outpost on the Soviet Union's southern flank.

Under the rule of Reza Shah, the U.S. intensified its economic and political domination in Iran. For 25 years, this Shah ruled as an absolute monarch, torturing, killing, and imprisoning his opponents-especially radical and revolutionary-minded students.

Iran was not the only target of U.S. intrigue. In 1949 the CIA backed a military coup which overthrew the elected government of Syria. It aided the Egyptian government in hunting down pro-Soviet Egyptian communists, and in 1963 supplied Iraq's Ba'ath party (soon to be headed by Saddam Hussein) with names of communists, who the Iraqi regime then imprisoned or murdered.
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From Consequences of Empire: Fifty years of U.S. war and intrigue in the Middle East, Larry Everest, Z magazine, November 2001