April 30, 2008
Why Does Ahmadinejad Want Russian Troops In Iran?
The USS Abraham Lincoln, pictured above, is the second carrier to be deployed to the Gulf.
US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates says of the deployment:
"The second aircraft carrier to the Gulf should be seen as a "reminder" of US military power in the region".
Maybe Ahmadinejad and the mad mullah's are expecting a visit from someone and are getting a tad nervous. teh...
Why is the leadership in Tehran anxious to give Russia the right to land troops in Iran? The question is not fanciful. The Islamic Republic is conducting a devious campaign to prepare public opinion for that eventuality.The message is relayed through deliberately vague terms that diplomats understand immediately while the general public does not. The device is to revive two treaties that most students of Iranian history thought were dead and buried long ago.
The first is the 1921 Treaty that the government of Sayyed Ziauddin Tabatabai, soon after coming to power in a putsch, signed with Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik regime.
At the time the Bolsheviks had some troops in the Iranian province of Gilan on the Caspian Sea, supporting a rebellion led by a leftist mullah known as Mirza Kuchak Khan of the Jungle. At the same time, the British were using Iranian territory to ferry troops and materiel to anti-Bolshevik nationalist forces in Transcaucasia.
Under the treaty, Lenin agreed to cancel the debts Iran had accumulated towards the Tsarist Empire. He also undertook to withdraw his troops from Gilan. The treaty revised relations in the Caspian Sea, granting Iran greater rights of fishing and navigation. That amounted to a generous gesture towards Tabatabai’s new government that, still fragile, needed all the good news it could get in relations with the major powers.Nevertheless, as always when a weak nation makes a pact with a much larger neighbour, the treaty had a sting in its tail. It gave the Russians the right to land troops in Iran when and if troops of any other foreign power arrived in Iran. At the time it was Britain that Lenin had in mind. For his part, Tabatabai wanted to use the threat of Russian military intervention as a means of forcing the British to end their military presence in Iran.
However, in one of those twists of history, the treaty was never used for its original purpose. The British soon abandoned their anti-Bolshevik allies whom they found too weak to defeat Lenin’s new empire. Lenin, for his part, believing he could add Iran to his empire through ideological agitation rather than conquest, abandoned the Mullah of the Jungle and withdrew the Soviet troops.
In 1941, however, Soviet troops, this time under Stalin, invaded Iran.
The legal pretext was the 1921 treaty. Soviet propaganda claimed that the presence of a few German military experts and, possibly, spies, in Tehran amounted to a foreign hostile force on Iranian soil. Reza Shah, the Iranian monarch, had refused to kick the Germans out, possibly in the hope that Hitler would defeat Russia and Britain, Iran’s two principal enemies for 150 years.
Within days of the Soviet invasion, backed by a British invasion of Iranian territory from Iraq, Reza Shah was forced into exile.
The new Iranian government, under Prime Minister Muhammad-Ali Forughi, had to accept the legality of the invasion under the 1921 Treaty.
Nevertheless, both sides felt that a new treaty was needed to determine the status of Soviet troops in Iran. Negotiations were railroaded at top speed, with the British supporting the Soviets in the name of their alliance against Nazi Germany.
The Iranian side, weak and disorganised in a country under foreign occupation, protested. But, with Soviet and British guns pointed at its head, it ended up signing the 1941 Treaty.
The new treaty, recalling that of 1921,reaffirmed the right of the USSR to send troops to Iran if and when Moscow felt it was threatened by a third power’s presence in Iran.[emphasis mine] more...
Be sure to read the rest of this most informative article. I was unaware of this treaty and find it quite disturbing.
