I realise this is a serious breach of etiquette. But could we perhaps abandon good manners and contextualise Donald Trump’s attack on Iran? The intense western interest in the Middle East and west and central Asia, sustained for more than a century, and the endless attempts by foreign governments to shape and control these regions, are not random political tics. They are somewhat connected to certain fuel sources situated beneath the ground.

Trump’s war aims are typically incoherent: apparently incomprehensible even to himself. But Iran would not be treated as an “enemy of the west” were it not for what happened in 1953, when Winston Churchill’s government persuaded the CIA to launch a coup against the popular democratic government of Mohammad Mossadegh. The UK did so because Mossadegh sought to nationalise the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company: to stop a foreign power from stealing the nation’s wealth. The US, with UK support, tried twice to overthrow him, and succeeded on the second attempt, with the help of some opportunistic ayatollahs. It reinstated the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. In 1954, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company became British Petroleum, later BP.

Fury about the 1953 coup, combined with ever-more vicious repression under the shah’s dictatorship, triggered the revolution of 1979, which was captured by the ayatollahs, with horrible consequences for many Iranians. They would not be running the country were it not for our governments’ violent crushing of democracy for the sake of oil.

Take a step back from this history, and you see something else that should be obvious. The conflation of capitalism with “free markets” is one of the most successful lies in human history. The........

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