Americans have developed a habit of thinking of Iran as though it were a nation of fanatics with a purely irrational hatred for the U.S. Many people's sense of Iran starts with the hostage crisis of 1979, as though nothing had happened earlier to provoke that incident.
Let's review the U.S's relations with the successor to the ancient Persia, relations which have been purely self-serving on the U.S.'s part since the 1950s. Early in that decade, Iran had a democratically elected leader of real stature, Mohammed Mossadegh, but the U.S. didn't like him because he wanted to nationalize the oil companies. In 1953 we had Mossadegh overthrown and propped up the Shah with the help of the murdering, torturing thugs in his secret police.
As the shah used Iran's unbelievably lucrative oil exports to live the high life with his family and cronies while doing nothing to build the country from the ground up, the secret police, SAVAK, operated a network of informers that terrorized the country. We supported SAVAK as its goons extorted "information" from the Shah's real or perceived enemies by, among other things, putting them on metal tables with heating elements—literally grilling human beings on tables that had to have charred skin and blood scoured off them between victims.
What do we suppose Iranians who remember those days think when we prate about democracy and about our hatred of torture? How might Iran have been different today if we hadn't meddled there in the '50s?
When Iranians finally rebelled and turned to the mullahs in 1979 as an alternative to the detested shahs, taking American embassy personnel hostage—an action that wasn't justified, but was likely prompted, by abuses we had supported—we broke off relations, leaving the injuries we had inflicted on Iran out of account. Going forward, it couldn't hurt to try a new infusion of truth in our volatile relations with this complicated country.
