CIA-led coup 65 years ago marked Iran-US relations

(AGI) Tehran, Aug. 18 - "Marg bar Amrika" (Death to the United States) is a slogan often echoed in Iranian marches celebrating the Islamic revolution. The slogan was repeated today, on the anniversary of the Ajax Operation, the coup d'etat against the Iranian government led by the CIA in 1953. It was precisely on August 18 that the American intelligence agency led Allen Dulles orchestrated a coup in Tehran that overturned the government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq who, by nationalising oil and forging an alliance with the clerics, had launched a peaceful democratic transition in Iran. He was replaced by Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The American intervention, the responsibility for which was only admitted by U.S. authorities in 1995, changed the fate of the then-called Persia. The documents published by the National Security Archive and reported in the book "Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran", edited by Mark J. Gasiorowski and Malcolm Byrne, show that it was the coup that damaged the United States' reputation in Iran. An excerpt from the book reads: "The fall of the Shah in 1979 recalled the United States' intervention in 1953, which brought to power the following and increasingly unpopular monarchy that, in its 25-year reign, epitomised the anti-American nature of the revolution in the minds of many Iranians." The Eisenhower Administration deemed the coup to be a success, a judgment that is no longer shared today, not even among American politicians. In 2000, the U.S. Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, affirmed that the United States' intervention in Iran's internal affairs brought the democratic process to a standstill. And this was not all: the coup is now thought to have contributed to the 1979 Islamic revolution that overthrew the pro-Western Shah and instated the Islamic Republic. Imam Khomeini called it "the revolution of the oppressed and of the deprived". In 2009, in his speech to Cairo's al-Azhar University, President Barack Obama talked about the United States' relations with Iran and mentioned the role played by the U.S. in the 1953 coup: "In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government". Despite the nuclear agreement, there are still obstacles in the effort to normalise relations between Iran and the United States. "We will never be friends of the United States," said the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Seyyed Ali' Khamenei, last July responding to the new sanctions approved by Washington. (AGI) . .