Abbas Amanat

There's a long story to that.

And it eventually resulted in a successful coup that removed Mossadegh from power.

They were afraid of the fact that of the Soviet Union and during the Cold War, that was their concern.

Because they were afraid of the fact

if Iran, or at least this is part of the, I'm simplifying a very complex picture, but the Americans basically were thinking that if Iran is going to be lost to Soviet influence, then eventually basically all the oil resources in the Persian Gulf are going to be threatened.

And this would basically is the national security of the United States and all of the Western allies, European allies.

So in a sense, this was the long arm of the CIA to try to

try to make sure that that's not going to happen.

And then of course they were persuaded by the British.

British were the old hand, which were in Iran since the beginning of the 19th century.

They always had relations with Iran and so forth.

So they gradually replaced

And of course, I don't want to give them this kind of a satanic view that Americans was a bad influence because they had also some very good influences in Iraq.

But this particular episode somehow shed a dark light

on the American presence and was used and abused time and again, particularly the revolution in 1979, which was this great Satan idea that Khomeini created, basically was based on the fact is 1953, you were responsible for the downfall of a national government in Iran, which as a matter of fact, he had no respect for it.

Khomeini had no respect for

the secular national liberals, including Mohammad Mosaddegh.

But he was using it as a rhetorical tool for his own purposes.

But what happened is that after 1953, we see again the rise of authoritarian Mohammad Reza Shah's power.

That's the Shah that we know as Shah.