Earlier today at The Hayride, Nathan Koenig put forth the Tucker Carlson-Dave Smith argument about the 12-day war between Israel and Iran, and it’s an interesting look into what younger folks, who weren’t around for either the Cold War or the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, believe about the latter half of the last century.

Here’s the gist of it…

Here is a reality check about America’s longtime meddling in Iran. In 1953, the CIA led a coup against the elected, nationalist Prime Minister of Iran Mohammad Mosaddegh (in Operation Ajax). The United States then installed a pro-Western monarch named Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (a.k.a. “the Shah”). During the Shah’s reign, the CIA trained the Shah’s secret police (SAVAK)–which tortured political opponents. Twenty-six years later, the people of Iran rose up against this Western puppet in the 1979 Iranian revolution and then established an Islamist government free of Western influence.

Clearly, there is historical context as to why the current regime in Iran dislikes the United States government. However, the American war machine instead uses buzzwords and jingoistic rhetoric to make people hate a foreign country that most people can’t even find on a map.

What’s more, the proponents of America’s continued involvement in the Middle East and other places often call upon higher ideals like freedom and democracy to justify armed conflicts abroad. But despite what think-tanks and pundits may claim, the goal of American foreign policy has never been to “spread democracy.” Over the past 75 years, United States’ intelligence agencies have staged coups and rigged elections all across the world. Yet, our education system and media continue to push the false narrative that America’s foreign policy ambitions is based on spreading Western liberal values to the rest of the world.

Some of this is true – as far as it goes.

It isn’t true that we “installed” the Shah in 1953. He was already the Shah. He just took over the government; previously he was merely the head of state much like King Charles is in the UK.

And while the nonstop valedictions of Mossadegh have increased in volume as the younger generations have begun turning against the Deep State and the intelligence community (not unreasonably, I might add), there’s an element of context missing.

Which is that Mossadegh was deeply unpopular and almost certain to fall from power, and he attempted to prop himself up by nationalizing Iran’s oil fields – and in doing so busting a deal Iran had made with the British to develop them.

Britain was dependent on Iranian oil, and Britain was our ally, so we backed their play. But here’s the thing – Iran was dependent on British know-how in keeping the oil flowing. And they were dependent on the UK for the jobs and capital those oil fields were producing. Nationalizing those fields was a disastrous move and everyone knew it.

Mossadegh was threatening to align Iran with the Soviet Union, or, alternatively, there were Iranian communists who were agitating to depose that government and align Iran with the Soviet Union.

If you think the Middle East has been a mess since World War II, you can believe this – Iran going communist in 1953 would have made for a much, much worse reality.

We were in Iran and we helped the Shah take political power because the situation was untenable.

And it’s not valid to say “it’s none of our business.” We’d like to say things like that now, and it’s possible to say them. We can say them because we won the Cold War.

If you didn’t live through that time you don’t realize why we had to play the Great Game in Iran and elsewhere.

You have to play that game when others are playing it against you. I have no brief for the Wilson/Roosevelt/Bush internationalists who sought some crypto-fascist New World Order and acted on that stupid desire; this is not a defense of that view of American foreign policy.

But if you think those globalist bastards are a pain, let’s introduce you to Soviet communists, the most imperialist sons of bitches who ever walked the earth.

No sooner did Lenin take power in the USSR but the Bolsheviks immediately launched an expansionist program of world domination. They made a doctrine out of the necessity to stamp out free enterprise and expression in every corner of the globe, and they funded leftist agitators from Mongolia to Mexico.

And here, by the way. The Frankfurt School cultural Marxists? Soviet agents deployed by the KGB. We were taught to care about the culture of other countries by what the Soviets were trying, not all that unsuccessfully, to do to us.

And if there’s a more imperialist crew than the Soviets, it’s the Islamists.

You can’t find a more aggressive, grievance-filled ideology than fundamentalist Islam, and you can’t find a more aggressive, grievance-filled ideology than Twelver Shi’ism, which is the denomination of Islam that has been the state religion in Iran since Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini came to power in that country.

The Khomeinists might talk about what happened with Mossadegh as a source of their hatred for America. It’s bullshit. They call America the Great Satan because we’re the infidel power which stands in the way of an Islamic caliphate their messianic religion says will come.

They don’t give a damn about Mossadegh. In fact, these people were around in 1953 and if they’d been as strong as the communists were, they would have taken their shot at deposing him, too.

And of course they did take their shots at the Shah. He lived through numerous assassination attempts, from the Twelver nuts as well as the Soviet agents, which is why he built up the SAVAK and sicced them on his countrymen.

Was the Shah a good guy? Hell, no. Good guys don’t last five minutes in a country like Iran.

And comfortable kids in America for whom the worst political development was two terms of Barack Obama have absolutely no concept of that reality.

Nor do they have any concept of just how evil this Iranian regime is. The Iranian government floods Gaza with billions of dollars in oil money to keep the people living there under the boot of what’s essentially a pirate army which drafts their children to be kamikazes and terrorists, and keeps that intolerable situation going solely in order to recruit cannon fodder for conducting a forever war against Israel.

They’ve said time and again that at some point they’ll have a nuclear weapon and when they do they’re going to use it against Israel. One good-sized nuke dropped on Israel will effectively end that country, which is another way to say the Iranian regime is expressly genocidal.

Like I said, it’s not unreasonable to look at the FBI, the CIA and the Deep State in Washington, after what they’ve turned into, with a great deal of suspicion. Those agencies have largely gone rogue and you’d have no trouble convincing me that shutting them down and replacing them with something else is the only good move available. I get all that.

But it doesn’t then follow that things our government did in the middle of the Cold War, when we were trying to keep the whole world from going under the boot of international communism, puts America on the same moral plane as the Iranian mullahs. Just last night those sons of bitches killed three innocent Israelis by shooting one last missile, after a cease-fire they’d agreed to, into a civilian area in Beersheba.

I’ve written multiple times that it isn’t in our interest to try to depose that government. Iran needs a regime change that the people of Iran make happen. Not us. If we do it, it won’t be legitimate and the results won’t be what we want. And if no regime change comes and somehow that government in Tehran gives up their attempts to get nukes or to radicalize Arabs in Gaza, southern Lebanon, Yemen, the West Bank and who knows where else, then we can say this isn’t our problem anymore.

I’ll pray we get a result that good. A regime change to something which is actually friendly – interestingly enough, the people of Iran are actually the least religious in the Muslim world and survey after survey shows they’re actually more pro-American than Americans are, so if there’s a regime change it would very likely be something better than this for our purposes – would be better.

But what’s much more likely is that it’s a matter of time before the mullahs start more trouble – either with the Israelis, or with the Saudis, or in Iraq, or in Syria, or even by reinvesting in the international terrorism they were so adept at for decades.

So no. It’s not legitimate to make Iran out to be the good guys here and the USA or Israel the bad guys. That’s a crock, and I can’t allow it to stand unrefuted.