When Israel/Neocons Favored Iran
"Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. We have never been at war with Eurasia."
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/31541-focus-when-israelneocons-favored-iran
As part of Israel’s campaign to derail the agreement, Iran is portrayed as a reckless “rogue” regime with the madness dating back to 1979 when the Iranian revolution ousted the Shah of Iran and the U.S. Embassy in Tehran was overrun with scores of diplomatic personnel taken hostage and 52 of them held for 444 days.
But the lost history from that era included the fact that Israel’s Likud government of Menachem Begin moved quickly to reestablish secret ties with the “rogue” regime of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and became an important source for covert arms supplies to Iran after Iraq invaded Iran in September 1980.
It was not until the early 1990s – after the eight-year war with Iran-Iraq War was over and Iran’s budget for weapons purchases was depleted – when Israel began transforming Iran into its principal regional enemy. Similarly, American neoconservatives inside the Reagan administration sought to put U.S. policy in sync with Israel’s pro-Iranian tilt in 1981, but the neocons shifted – along with Israel – to transform Iran into a psychotic enemy during the 1990s.
I discovered documents at the Reagan presidential library in Simi Valley, California, revealing that on July 21, 1981, just six months after Iran freed 52 Americans hostages at the same moment as President Reagan was being sworn in on Jan. 20, 1981, senior Reagan administration officials secretly endorsed third-party weapons sales to Iran.
By that point, the Israeli arms pipeline to Iran already was functioning. Three days earlier, on July 18, an Argentine plane strayed off course and crashed (or was shot down) inside the Soviet Union exposing Israel’s secret arms shipments to Iran, which apparently had been going on for months.
After the plane went down, Assistant Secretary of State for the Middle East Nicholas Veliotes tried to get to the bottom of the mysterious weapons flight. “According to the [flight] documents,” Veliotes said later in an interview with PBS Frontline, “this was chartered by Israel and it was carrying American military equipment to Iran. …
