Richard Brookhiser's recent piece, 'A Template for Taming Iran' attempts to find historical pretext for dealing with the problem of Iran. Flexing his historical knowledge, the author goes some 200 years back to the Barbary War to find an appropriate approach to deal with our most current enemy. It is completely baffling to me however, that Mr. Brookhiser would bring up this little known war to set the context for present-day actions, but forget to mention the most important historical event in US-Iranian relations of the last century. That would be of course the 1954 CIA-engineered coup of democratically elected Iranian President Mohammed Mossadeq. I find this even more interesting because Mossadeq was the Time Magazine Man of the Year in 1951, a hope for the Middle East.
Even if Americans don’t remember this incident, Iranians certainly do. After the secular Mossadeq was overthrown after attempting to nationalize the country’s oil fields, the US supported Shah was reinstated, and the next decades brought upon the worst and most bloody years of his rule, including the creating of the dreaded secret police, the CIA-trained SAVAK. If this event is put into context, US claims of acting in the interest of the Iranian people and promoting ‘democracy’ would appear to be simply propaganda designed to fool the American public. I find it very sad that Americans are denied an appropriate historical context for the looming conflict with Iran, a country with history that reaches back thousands of years, and with a people whose memory is not as fleeting as Mr. Brookhiser’s seems to be.
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