[Demidog]

During the Shah's regime in Iran Iranians could wear whatever they wanted, go to beaches in bikinis and watched and listened to whatever entertainment they liked.

And our CIA helped the Shah dispatch his political enemies. And you left out an important part of the puzzle. The Shah was the leader we decided was proper for Iran. That is absolutely not an American value. An American value would be self-determination and sovereignty. So our involvement was difinitively anti-American in nature.

That was the regime we supported, to be replaced by the ayatollahs that banned all that and shot everyone with money or from the wrong party.

And I haven't said that the Islamic hardliners who came to power weren't creeps. But their rise to power was helped along because of our interventions.

In Saudi Arabia we have a military base because we have a treaty with the Saudi government, -- we didn't go to war with the Saudis to get that base. When Iraq invaded a weak neighboring country, we sided with the weak, and traditionally Arab, Kuwait.

Please, when Iraq was invading Iran we sided with Iraq. Explain how that represents American values. Fact is, it doesn't. It was a cynical show of support which eventually backfired when Iraq used weapons and training we provided during their war with Iran to invade Kuwait.

Our record in the Middle East, although reflecting for most part our self-interest, also reflects our values.

If you really believe that, then what you have to believe that the initiation of aggression and the support of totalitarianism is an American "value." You can't seperate the one or two things that we did that reflected American values from the things we did that did not reflect those values.

[annalex]

Again, from what's available in the political leadership of various countries, we by and large back the lesser of the several evils. So, we backed the Shah over Khomeini, and Iran was better off with the Shah, as any Iranian refugee here will tell you. Similarly, during Iran-Iraq war Iraq looked like a better one to support, given the Iran's sponsorship of Hezbollah and the hostage crisis.

In the context of the Cold War we supported totalitarian regimes that were on our side in that War. Since the whole Cold War was a war for the western ideals of freedom, tactical alliances with some unsavory characters were justified. The only way to have an active foreign policy in the Third World is to pick one S.O.B. over the other, since wise freedom-loving statesmen just don't exist out there. The proper question to ask is, why the Muslim culture so consistently produces dictatorial thugs as leaders.