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Do you know the history of the U. S. conflict with Iran?

August 1953: the coup Washington denied for sixty years.

Seventy-three years ago today, tanks rolled through Tehran and a democracy died in service of an oil contract.

The story starts two years earlier, in 1951, when Mohammad Mosaddegh became Iran's prime minister and did something unforgivable to London: he nationalised Iran's oil.

For more than forty years, Britain had extracted Iranian crude through the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company while Iranians saw little of the profit. Mosaddegh wanted his country's resource back. Britain wanted it back more.

London tried the courts first, hauling Iran before the International Court of Justice. When that failed, Britain and Washington strangled Iran's oil exports with sanctions. When that failed too, they went for the government itself.

On 19 August 1953, the CIA and MI6 engineered a coup that toppled Mosaddegh and installed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as the West's man in Tehran. At least 300 Iranians died.

In exchange for the throne, the Shah reopened the oil taps for Britain, established ties with Israel, and served as Washington's Cold War outpost against Moscow. His secret police, SAVAK, built with CIA and MI6 training, became a byword for torture and disappearance.

Washington spent decades refusing to admit any of it. Then in 2013, sixty years on, the CIA finally declassified a document that ended the denial for good: "The military coup that overthrew Mosadeq and his National Front cabinet was carried out under CIA direction as an act of US foreign policy."

The price tag for erasing a democracy was cheap by imperial standards: roughly $20 million to run the operation, $6 million to prop up the new government, and a personal $1 million payment to install the coup's chosen prime minister. Bribes, paid crowds, orchestrated violence — the coup that would become the CIA's template for regime change worldwide.

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More than seven decades later, the pattern hasn't ended, only changed shape. The campaign to keep Iran subordinate continues, now waged openly through war rather than covert coup, with Washington,

Britain and Israel once again positioning themselves over a country that has spent a century refusing to accept that its resources and its politics belong to someone else.
Do you know the history of the U. S. conflict with Iran?
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