Jeffrey Sachs

It had been invaded several times, but it was a democracy that didn't threaten anybody, didn't

want to threaten anybody, hadn't threatened anybody, hadn't invaded any place actually since the 1790s in a brawl over who controlled Basra.

So in other words, very esoteric things from the 1790s.

But since then, Iran had been bothered, but had not bothered anybody else.

And in 1953, the Iranian prime minister,

elected, respected Prime Minister Mossadegh, had the audacity to say the thing never to be said by this region, which is, I think the oil under our ground is Iranian, not British.

And when he uttered that thought that maybe Iran's oil belonged to Iran, immediately the British empire in the form of MI6 came to the new ascendant American empire in the guise of the CIA and said, we got to overthrow this guy, which of course they did successfully.

They

made what today we would call a color revolution.

They stirred up protests in the streets, they stirred up unrest, and Mossadegh was chased from power.

And the United States installed what the Persian Empire would have called a satrapy, meaning that Iran became a kind of province of the American Empire under ultimately CIA rule.

And we put the Shah of Iran as the face of that empire and the

police organization, SAVAK, as the enforcers of that empire.

That lasted 26 years.

In 1979, as the Shah of Iran was dying of cancer, the people

led a revolution, an uprising, and threw out Savak and the CIA and the Shah.

And that's when Iran had its Islamic revolution and put in the government that is government until today.

The United States hated that.

When you're an empire as we are, when you have protectorates, when you have places where you have your military, and in the case of Iran, when your major oil companies have investments there that suddenly are lost because what was stolen from Iran is now taken back by Iran.

That led to a reputational question.