I wouldn't say the U.S. is obsessed with dominance. Rather, the U.S. foreign policy is characterized by the brutal and unprincipled service of U.S. business interests. The coup in Iran was motivated by lust for oil, and that's just one tiny example of many!
One interesting observation is when it fails, out comes the moralists and ethicist explaining the game plan is wrong. When its a success, as in we put up a guy who doesn't turn out to be a raving lunatic, silence descends on the moralists and ethicist camp. Therefore by definition all criticism of foreign policy will 100% be backed up by a subcollection of truthful, highly public, epic fail. This makes it look like a universal fail for all time, although the actual ratio of success to fail is not only non-discussed, its probably not possibly to calculate legally with non-classified sources.
This is why an apparently 100% epic fail is none the less stable and constant for multiple generations.
Its reminiscent of TV news coverage of airline operations. The only coverage is of crashes. Therefore all airliners crash all the time. Not so... Doesn't mean the few crashes are good, or the system is inherently good, or perfect, but it doesn't mean its ineffective.
"Success" would have been a dictatorship, just with a different guy in charge. I'm sorry, but the U.S. doesn't get a pass on that just because some democracies also suit their business interests. The coup in Iran was rotten by design.
Yes it was rotten by design but this turns into word games.
If you're convinced the current strong man is going to fall, then you push for the least rotten of the remaining set of strong men to take over. I'd argue thats pretty much what they did. Doing your best doesn't mean automatic success, it just means better than the other likely outcomes.
Yeah, I agree, I probably sound ridiculously apologist. But I'm not generally like that. The recent regime change in neighboring Iraq was just an idiotic decision, for example.
Yes the coup in Iran sucked in an absolute sense. Yes the outcome was awful in an absolute sense and remains awful for all involved. And the alternative course would have been ... and no fair promising balloons, unicorns, and santa claus, try to be realistic ... I'm saying all the realistic unmentioned alternatives would have been worse.
For example, US goes hard core isolationist. Well, thats all very well and good for us, but a disaster for the Iranian people, better have them alive and hating us than dead. How bout we let the Russians take over and create Afghanistan the 2nd, nothing could possibly go wrong there. Give it back to the Turks, uh, the ottoman empire fell awhile before the coup..
