Every war of choice depends on public complicity.

Fifty-nine percent of Americans disapprove, but what can we do to stop this war? The justifications coming from the Trump administration are, by any honest accounting, muddled, contradictory, and changing by the day. There are so many unanswered questions, but a good place to start would be by asking did Iran become our enemy in the first place? Why did the United States help topple a democratic government in Iran some 70 years ago—and how did that decision create the conditions we’re seeing today?

When Iran Was a Democracy

To understand how Iran became an adversary, we can start by returning to the decision made by the United States and Britain to overthrow Iran’s Prime Minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh.

Mosaddegh was the sort of leader the US should have loved. He was anti-communist, at a time when containing the Soviet Union was the paramount US foreign policy aim. He pursued reforms that expanded the rights of women, and the political and economic conditions of the poor. He was widely respected internationally, and was named Time magazine’s Man of the Year in 1951.

Few Americans know this history. In Iran, though, it is remembered as the moment when the United States claimed the country’s petroleum wealth for itself and crushed a democratic government that sought to make life better for ordinary people.

His fatal crime in the eyes of Western powers, was nationalizing Iran’s oil production, which had been controlled by the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.

“With the oil revenues, we could meet our entire budget and combat poverty, disease, and backwardness among our people,” Mosaddegh said in a 1951 speech to the United Nations. “By the elimination of the power of the British company, we would also eliminate corruption and intrigue.”

For British and US leaders, a sovereign nation asserting control over its own resources, rather than bowing to a foreign corporation, was intolerable. Likewise, battling the corrupting influences of a foreign company.

The intelligence agencies of the two nations launched a campaign to destabilize the Mosaddegh government, with media disinformation, targeted bribery, harrassment, lies to religious and political leaders, and orchestrated riots.

Finally, on August 19, 1953, Mosaddegh was overthrown in a coup backed by the CIA and Britain’s MI6.

The Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was restored to power, and he appointed the CIA’s choice, General Fazlollah Zahedi, as prime minister.

The government outlawed Mosaddegh's National Front and arrested most of its leaders. The SAVAK secret police force, with funding and training from the US, conducted widespread repression. Over 130,000 were arrested, and thousands were tortured and executed. The Shah’s policies furthered the wealth and landownings of his own family and friends, while many farmers couldn't get access to land and were forced to migrate to cities and live in shanty towns.

Yet the US built warm relations with the new regime as US corporations gained control of 40% of the country’s oil fields along with access to much of the remaining output.

By the late 1970s, resentment toward the Shah’s authoritarian rule exploded into revolution. In 1979, the Shah was overthrown and the Islamic Republic was born. The new government defined itself partly in opposition to the United States—an enemy that many Iranians believed had stolen their democracy a generation earlier.

From that moment on, relations between Washington and Tehran were marked by mistrust, hostility, and periodic confrontation.

Few Americans know this history. In Iran, though, it is remembered as the moment when the United States claimed the country’s petroleum wealth for itself and crushed a democratic government that sought to make life better for ordinary people.

A Pattern of Military Interference

The overthrow of Mosaddegh was not an isolated episode. The United States has a long history of undermining governments that put their own citizens ahead of US economic interests.

In 1954, the CIA helped engineer the overthrow of Guatemala’s elected president, Jacobo Árbenz. His crime? Land reforms that would have given poor farmers opportunities for a livelihood while taking, and paying for, land unused by the United Fruit Company.

The result of the coup was a series of dictatorships. Political opponents, labor unions leaders, farmers, and human rights activists were imprisoned, “disappeared,” and executed. Wave after wave of genocidal massacres targeted Indigenous villagers. Land reform was reversed and poverty deepened.

We set up the next war when we fail to reckon with choices made in previous conflicts that created instability, oppression, abuses, poverty, and resentment.

Many Americans enjoy visiting this beautiful Central American country, but few know the role the US government played in impoverishing this small nation. Likewise, those calling for the deporting of Guatemalans rarely acknowledge the reasons these refugees are fleeing their communities.

Two decades later, the United States helped destabilize the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile, culminating in the US-supported military coup in 1973 led by Augusto........

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