On August 15, 1953, the US, together with Britain plotted and orchestrated a coup that installed a ruthless regime in Iran and played a major role in shaping the Iranian perceptions of America.
The coup, code-named Operation Ajax in the US and Operation Boot in Britain, reinstalled the stumbling Pahlavi dynasty and ensured brutal Pahlavi suppression of the Iranian people for almost 26 years. The final emancipation occurred in 1979 when millions of suppressed Iranian people entrusted Imam Khomeini with leading the first revolution in a true sense of the word in the modern history of Iran.
But even after the 1979 Islamic revolution, which eliminated US presence in Iran entirely, the White House continued its efforts to bring down the revolutionary government in Iran. They dispatched military troops to Iran, supported anti-revolutionary coup plotters and the Saddam Hussein regime, and imposed sanctions on Iran which continue to this day.
The US intervention in Iran is part of a broader trend in American foreign policy which is centered on toppling regimes that refuse to become allied to America. The United States has waged nearly 400 military interventions since its founding in 1776, according to new research published this month that studied available databases and other resources on the matter.
According to the study by the Military Intervention Project: A New Dataset on US Military Interventions, 1776–2019, half of those conflicts and other uses of force occurred between 1950 and 2019.
More than a quarter of them have taken place since the end of the Cold War. Out of the nearly 400 military interventions, 34 percent have been in Latin America and the Caribbean; 23 percent in East Asia and the Pacific region; 14 percent in West Asia and North Africa; and 13 percent in Europe and Central Asia.
John Bolton, the former national security adviser to the Trump administration, has recently boasted about plotting coups in other countries.
In a July interview with CNN, Bolton underlined it was wrong to describe Trump’s attempt to stay in power after the 2020 election as a coup. Bolton said former US President Donald Trump was not competent enough to pull off a “carefully planned coup d'etat.”
He added, “As somebody who has helped plan coups d'etat - not here but you know (in) other places - it takes a lot of work. And that's not what he (Trump) did.”
When asked to further elaborate on the coups he plotted, Bolton mentioned Venezuela. “It turned out not to be successful. Not that we had all that much to do with it but I saw what it took for an opposition to try and overturn an illegally elected president and they failed,” he continued.
“I feel like there's other stuff you're not telling me (beyond Venezuela),” the CNN anchor said, according to Reuters, prompting a reply from Bolton: “I'm sure there is.”
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kan'ani responded to Bolton’s remarks by saying that they were not surprising. “Bolton's boasting about his role in attempted coups around the world made no one surprised. Open secret - nefarious activities of a notorious gov.- made public. Good news: those policies, inc. ‘last resort’ threats, have failed & will continue to fail. The US has to change course,” Kan'ani said on Twitter.
Kan'ani denounced US intervention on Friday on the anniversary of the 1953 coup. He tweeted, “The US government holds a record in interventions, invasions, and coups against independent countries and governments. The 1953 coup against Iran’s democratically elected government was a flagrant example of this dark history. Will the US change its flawed and failed policy on Iran and respect the legitimate rights of the Iranian people?”
First published in Tehran Times
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