- If you want to understand the past 70 years
of often disastrous US foreign policy
and military intervention,
look to the 1953 CIA and MI6-backed coup in Iran
that removed democratically elected Prime Minister,
Mohammad Mossadegh and brought back to power the Shah,
an authoritarian dictator
friendly to US and British interests.
The British and Americans didn't anticipate
that their interference would ultimately set the stage
for an Islamic revolution led by the Ayatollah Khomeini,
which began the repressive theocracy
that rules Iran to this day.
I'm standing
in front of a filing cabinet
of a drawer full of documents
the essentially changed
the fate of my country.
In the new documentary, "Coup 53,"
director Taghi Amirani argues that this covert operation
became the template for American interventionism
all over the world.
And like so many future conflicts in the Middle East,
it began with the desire among Western powers
to protect their oil interests.
Elected in 1951, Mossadegh had made good on his promises
to nationalize the industry.
- And this didn't go down well with the British
who were obviously standing to lose
a very lucrative resource.
They've joined forces between CIA and MI6
and staged a military coup to overthrow Mossadegh
and put the Shah back in power, who was much more amenable
in doing an oil deal with the Western powers.
On paper, it was a huge success.
It was quick, it was cheap.
No American lives were lost
and it got the results pretty quickly.
And they thought, well, we no longer need
to put boots on the ground.
We don't need to get into wars.
Don't forget at the time America was fighting
a hot war in Korea,
even considering dropping a nuclear bomb.
So this was a trouble free, easy way of changing leaders
you didn't like.
- It didn't turn out to be so trouble-free.
In 1979, student protestors stormed the US embassy in Tehran
and held 52 hostages for a year and a half
precipitating one of the tensest diplomatic showdowns
of the past 50 years.
Why do Iranians-
- I don't condone it,
why do Iranians shout, "Death to America"?
"Death to America," didn't just come out of nowhere.
There's a very good analysis
of why even the hostages were taken.
I don't condone taking hostages, let's be clear,
but the reason those students raided the American embassy
was because of this.
The '53 coup in Iran
It became the playbook for future coups.
And in fact, the next year in '54,
they went to Guatemala and overthrew Jacobo Arbenz,
and of course, Allende in '73 in Chile.
In Chile, it was copper, in Iran it was oil.
- One of the few US leaders
who understood the idea of blow back was Ron Paul,
who underscored the longterm damage of the 1953 coup
in his famous back and forth with Rudy Giuliani in 2007
during the Republican presidential debate.
- When we went into Iran in 1953 and installed the Shah,
yes, there was blow back.
- Another is Senator Bernie Sanders.
- What would Iran look like today
if their democratic government had not been overthrown.
- With less than two months
before the presidential election,
Donald Trump, who just last year said
he was not seeking regime change in Iran is rattling sabers.
Citing on specified intelligence reports,
the president has threatened that any attack by Iran
in any form against the United States
will be met with an attack on Iran
that will be a thousand times greater in magnitude.
- American presidents really are the product
of the military industrial complex
and whoever calls the shots in those things.
The more American foreign policy machine
ratchets up the rhetoric and talks war and regime change.
And the more they do that,
the more it backfires back in Iran.
Extremists love extremists.
In a way they're made for each other.
The more they crank it up, the other side will crank it up.