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It is the coup Iranians remember but few in America or Britain know anything about. In August 1953, agents supported by the American and British governments used the Iranian army and paid street mobs to overthrow the prime minister Mohammed Mossadeq.
It was a critical moment for Iran and its relations with the West. The coup, devised by MI6, showed that a liberal nationalist leader like Mossadeq (right) was too gentle to survive against local opponents backed by Washington or London. The American and British intervention in Iran, precipitated by Iran's nationalisation of the oil industry, has echoed down the decades ever since. Half a century later it explains the xenophobia of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, now confronting much of the rest of the world over Iran's nuclear ambitions. Since the coup half a century ago,
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Britain and America helped to shape the Iran that so hates the West, argues patrick cockburn
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Iranian leaders expect neither to receive nor give much quarter in confrontation with their enemies.
Mossadeq, born in 1882, was a cultured, well-educated and principled aristocrat, opposed to British imperial influence and in favour of the nationalisation of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC). Notoriously insensitive to the rise of Iranian nationalism, the company, 51 per cent owned by the British government, paid little for Iranian oil and was averse to employing Iranians. Drinking fountains in its offices had notices attached forbidding Iranians to drink from them.
One of the reasons why this generally estimable man has been so swiftly forgotten in the West is that he was so successfully demonised by the Western media at the time. James A Bill, the American historian of Iran, believes: "Mossadeq was a 
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