Good points. I think that it's probably more complete to say that "Western nations (and Russia and China and India...) cast a long, but declining, shadow across the history of the Middle East." The collapse of the post-imperial order was probably inevitable and is a demonstration of exactly the fragility of Western regional influence.

And the purpose of this article seems to be to demonstrate that the Americans don't have any clue which side they are on.

The Iranian government has literally been chanting "Death to America" every week since 1979. Our relationship with Saudi is much, much more complex.

If the chanting bothers us, we shouldn't have deposed Mosaddegh.

The history of US-Iranian relations is more complex than this, and Mosaddegh was also a controversial figure in Iranian history.

Oh, complexity! I'll shut up now...

Fuck that. If anything had happened in Iran before Mosaddegh was overthrown by USA that would constitute a defensible justification for that action, I'm sure you would have told us already. Instead, here's some innuendo. Gosh that chanting is bad.

I appreciate your evidence-based response. I was providing shorthand, but you should familiarize yourself, for instance, on Mosaddegh's use of emergency powers after his reinstatement. If you would prefer to review this history in a less heuristically-based fashion, I can recommend The Persian Puzzle, which explores the full complexity of local politics in great detail, including Soviet participation in Iran as well. Among the other things that it includes is a great breakdown of how Khomeini manipulated the levers of influence to gather power in 1979, and how he was particularly anti-American in outlook even among those populations that were predisposed to look unfavorably on the U.S.

Also, implicit in your criticism, such as it is, is the notion that the chanting is representational of the Iranian population. It is not; most of the country has lived for long enough under the 'revolutionary' rule of the IRGC that they are actually more disposed towards the West than you might think.

Regardless, you asked why the U.S. was tilted towards Saudi in its conflict with Iran, and I was trying to provide a summary: that is an outgrowth of regional balance-of-power politics as much as anything else.

Thanks, but I try to limit my consumption of books written by CIA personnel to one or two a year. Let's stipulate that the Ayatollahs are just as bad as the Shah eventually was. By any objective measure, however, both of those are worse for the Iranian populace and for USA interests than Mosaddegh ever was. If "Mosaddegh's use of emergency powers" is at all relevant to the discussion, then your premise must be that USA should act as a sort of "World Police", responding to every imperfectly-capitalistic action of elected leaders anywhere. I reject that premise, and I find that history rejects it more as time goes on.

I wasn't the one who initially asked why USA traditionally favors Saudi over the Ayatollahs, but frankly your response to that query is an exercise in question-begging. They wouldn't chant "death to America" if that chant weren't rhetorically useful. It wouldn't be rhetorically useful if USA hadn't intervened to remove an elected Prime Minister.