They had a democracy until we crushed it

Stephen Kinzer has an excellent post over at guardian.co.uk about the sordid history of US intervention in Iran. Kinzer describes the 1953 US overthrow of democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadeq. The US coup resulted in the re-installation of the despotic Shah Reza Pahlavi. The shah's tyranny--with the complete support of the US government--resulted in the 1979 revolution that brought the current tyrants to power.

The demonstrators in Iran who are protesting the possibly fraudulent results of the recent elections are carrying pictures of Mossadeq. Their message is that they want freedom without foreign intervention.

As Kinzer points out:

The US sowed the seeds of repression in Iran by deposing Mossadeq in 1953, and then helped bathe Iran in blood by giving Saddam Hussein generous military aid during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. Militants in Washington who now want the US to intervene on behalf of Iranian protesters either are unaware of this history or delude themselves into thinking that Iranians have forgotten it. Some of them, in fact, are the same people who were demanding just last year that the US bomb Iran – an act which would have killed many of the brave young protesters they now hold up as heroes.

America's moral authority in Iran is all but non-existent. To the idea that the US should jump into the Tehran fray and help bring democracy to Iran, many Iranians would roll their eyes and say: "We had a democracy here until you came in and crushed it!

For more information, see Wikipedia's biography of Mossadeq. A New York Times history of the C.I.A. in Iran is here.