VPT

What @USAmbUN isn’t telling you: The 1979 takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran was never an unprovoked act of aggression. It was a deliberate, preemptive move by revolutionary students who had watched the United States use that very same embassy as the operational headquarters for the 1953 coup that overthrew Iran’s democratically elected nationalist prime minister, Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh, and restored the Shah to power. Having just toppled the monarchy in their own revolution, those students were determined not to let history repeat itself. They feared, rightly in their view, that the embassy would once again become the nerve center for another American-orchestrated counter-revolution. The crisis was eventually resolved through the Algiers Accords of January 1981. In that binding agreement, the United States explicitly pledged not to interfere "directly or indirectly" in Iran’s internal or external affairs. Iran, in turn, released the hostages. That should have been the end of the matter. Instead, Washington proceeded to violate the spirit and letter of the agreement with a long, unbroken chain of revengeful measures. These included: - Actively supporting Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran in 1980 and turning a blind eye to his systematic use of chemical weapons against Iranian troops and civilians. - Shooting down Iran Air Flight 655 in 1988, a civilian airliner carrying 290 people, including dozens of children, killing everyone on board. - Imposing crippling economic sanctions that have been tightened and reimposed repeatedly for decades. - Covertly and overtly fomenting internal unrest and supporting opposition groups. - Unilaterally withdrawing from the 2015 nuclear agreement (JCPOA) in 2018, despite Iran’s full compliance as certified by the IAEA. - And, most recently, direct military strikes on Iranian territory. In every single one of these episodes, U.S. officials and their surrogates have reflexively invoked the 1979 embassy takeover as the original sin that supposedly justifies perpetual hostility. They treat the hostage crisis as an eternal blank check for aggression, while conveniently omitting the prior coup, the broken non-interference pledge, and the long list of American provocations that followed. The real question is no longer “What happened in 1979?” The real question is: How much longer will Washington continue to wave the embassy hostage crisis like a bloody flag to excuse every new act of hostility, sanctions, and military pressure against Iran?

@realstewpeters None of this is true. The largest oil tankers hold 2 million barrels with many as low as 84,000. So how did he get 50,000,000 barrels with two ships. Someone needs to explain to Boozy Pete, new math. That would be 25,000,000 barrel supertankers. They don't exist.