The overthrow of Mossadegh by a CIA sponsored coup is recounted quite clearly and interestingly in a book that came out on the 50th anniversary of the events, "All The Shah's Men" by Kinzer. I just finished it.

Briefly, it was an era when England was still of the colonial frame of mind. To the leadership's point of view, the huge oil deposits had been discovered, developed, and run by English enterprise. The Persians were lucky to get anything at all and were ungrateful. The English were able to manipulate the Persian leaders so that they essentially served at English pleasure.

Mossadegh for his part was a brilliant and eccentric leader of his people, quite popular. He had the unfortunate disposition to be unwilling to compromise when powers much greater than his had their backs to the wall.

According to Kinzer, Truman and the US State Department were eager to arrange a compromise. They found the English colonialist and unsympathetic, and Mossadegh sympathetic but unrealistic. The next US administration, Eisenhower's, was at first of a similar opinion to Truman's, but the Churchill administration recast the threat as not economic, but political. They convinced the US that Iran would fall under Soviet influence.

The coup itself was a masterpiece of happenstance. The CIA organizer was a grandosn of President Theodore Roosevelt, and after it was over, he briefed the American President and the heads of CIA and State, the Dulles brothers. Supposedly he tried to emphasize that overthrowing regimes should not be a common policy, but the US derived the opposite lesson from this, and went merrily on its way to Guatemala.

Anyhow, it's an interesting book.

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Regarding how we'll never know what that part of the world would be like without Western interference, so what? We deal with the world as it is. That part of the world is at an earlier stage of development, and is being forced into modernity at a rate heretofore unknown. Islam is 600 years younger than Christianity, and Christianity has only recently evolved into accepting the secular/ religious wall of separation (and this is still being argued).

The point of including the poems of Davies and Donne was to emphasize how some very great writers reacted to the age of reason. Most of Europe was dragged kicking and screaming through that period and there was plenty of state on state and state within state violence, of a degree and savagery not yet duplicated by a long shot. In other words, Osama, bad as he is, is a piker compared to the Inquisition. Let's hope he stays that way.