Oh yes. Ironically, it’s one of the US-pushed coups that brought us the mullah-regime in Iran. Iran had the first democratically elected government in the region, and of course the US (and the Brits) had nothing better to do (in the name of cheap access to Iran’s oil) than to topple it — and reinstall the Shah and its brutal dictatorship. It is quite conceivable that a democratic Iran (in 1951!) would have had a strong democratic influence in the region, and that the whole story around Islamic fundamentalism would have taken a different turn, especially in Iran.

It always feels so very strange to me that most people in the US don’t seem to have a clue why the US isn’t generally considered a harbinger of democracy in certain parts of the world. There is much to learn from the history of US-American democracy, but the US foreign policy isn’t in the same category.